Yesterday, the three older kids and I were running around town doing errands. Which parking lot we were in at the time this story took place, I don’t remember. But I’ll always remember the lesson I learned there.
As we all exited the van and I counted heads to make sure everybody had gotten out, I heard Kenny say, “Mom, look!” I followed his pointing finger and saw three birds hopping on the ground. All three had dull, blackish/brownish feathers and small, beady black eyes. “Cute birdies!” Kenny exclaimed.
Cute birdies? I thought. They’re ugly.
Then came the unforgettable lesson, a sentence that burned in my heart. We do the same thing to people sometimes.
We usually don’t do it consciously. But we’ve all judged a person after just a brief glimpse. We’ve made character and attitude assumptions and judged the person’s actions based on information from a snapshot taken at one fleeting moment in time. We’ve dismissed people with a roll of our eyes, or simply overlooked people, for any of far too many reasons.
It doesn’t matter all that much when we look at birds and think they’re ugly. But it matters a lot when we look at people and dismiss them as nothing special.
Our Lord Jesus never treated people as anything less than a marvelous creation of God. Sure, sometimes He became righteously angry at them, but He never acted as if they were beneath His notice, or not worth His time. We ought to treat people the same way He did because we want to be like Him.
But there’s another important reason we should follow His lead in our actions and attitudes toward our fellow human beings: Jesus said that whatever we do to “one of the least of these”, we do to Him. In other words, dismissing someone else as “nothing much” means dismissing Him as “nothing much”. We would never say that to His face, but we say it to His creations all the time. Maybe those words never come out of our mouths, but our actions show them to be true. And Jesus, Who sees inside our heart, knows what we are thinking.
Kenny looked at the birds and saw marvelous, cute, energetic creations of God. I wonder why I didn’t see them that way, too. After all, I’m the adult. I’m the one who’s supposed to know better. I’m pretty sure I know which one of us delighted God’s heart.
May we never look at our fellow human beings in the same way I looked at those birds—as undesirable and nothing special. May we learn to judge the worth of each person based on his or her Creator, instead of on any inadequacies we might perceive. After all, “they” shall know us by our love. Based on the level of our love for others, what would “they” know us to be?
Luke 6:45—The good [woman] brings good things out of the good stored up in [her] heart, and the evil [woman] brings evil things out of the evil stored up in [her] heart. For out of the overflow of [her] heart [her] mouth speaks.