September 13, 2022 – Ps 82, Pr 11, Song 7

The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him.
Proverbs 11:1 NIV

When I read this, I thought that when we make assumptions about another person’s thoughts or actions without so much as a conversation with them, we are weighing them on a dishonest scale.  I don’t want to do this but I know that I do at times. I think I know the person because of past experiences, and I allow those past experiences to interpret a person’s words or actions. But when I do that, I am not giving that person the opportunity to show a change or share their perspective or motivation. I am assuming something upon them and until you pursue the truth of the situation you cannot know that your scale is using accurate weights. A friend shared a poem with me recently, Renascence by Edna St Vincent Millay. I have been looking at it a stanza at a time and writing down my thoughts. This reminds me of the first stanza.

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

I had a few different thoughts on this and one was that our perspective is always limited. We can only see what we look at. We can be in the exact same place and just turn around and see something vastly different. I was talking to Dave about this poem and he brought out this thought in conversation. So if 2 people are looking at each other their perspectives are going to be different. The best thing we can do is to try to see things from the other persons perspective. Instead of facing down the other person turn around and look at what they see.

So, the other day I did that but not till after a day of being annoyed about something. So much so I had to walk away from the situation. Mind you not once did I talk to the person and even attempt to let them know I was upset except by exasperated speech and body language. So later I was journaling about my day and I came to realize that all the things I was thinking about this situation were based on past experiences and my own perspective. So I contacted that person and asked what their perspective of the day was. It turned out I was sort of right in how I was seeing things. They also felt that their actions were just as frustrating. But it also turned out that their motivation or reason for their actions were completely different than what I was judging them by. If I had turned around to see their perspective, I would have understood why they were acting the way they were acting and I could have helped them. We both could have avoided a lot of frustration and deepened our relationship instead of wasting a day in the life of our relationship.

You may be sort of right and sort of wrong, but you have no way of knowing unless you make sure. And even a little wrong makes your scale dishonest. So look for the perspective and motivations of the other person. Go to them directly. Get truth, get confirmation, get that scale properly calibrated. Because when we pursue truth and confirmation of a situation we will find favor with the Lord.