Our internet connection is back, but I think I'm going to continue to blog from my phone from time to time, not only because it maintains the excuse to write short blog posts, but also because it allows me to blog wherever I am and whenever I want. Whenever I have a blogworthy thought, I can blog about it. I don't have to wait until I get home tonight my computer (by which time, I will probably have forgotten the blogworthy thought). I can blog about whatever I feel like blogging about while it's still fresh in my mind.
Case in point: My brother just told me that I'm probably as good a person as I think everyone else is. For context, I know a lot of good people who don't think they're all that good. My mom is constantly doing good things for the benefit of others, yet she usually disagrees with me when I tell her how good I think she is. And just a few days ago, my brother had us pull over to help someone who seemed to have crashed. It turned out that they didn't need our help, but we would never have known that if my brother hasn't said that we should pull over and check. My brother is a good person, and as we made our way back to the car, I told him that.
He returned the compliment this morning when I got out of bed at around 6:30 to take out the trash, despite the rain. It was a good act, technically, but I only had to take out the trash this morning because I had forgotten to take it out yesterday. The facts that it was early and that it was raining lightly were irrelevant. Besides, my brother probably doesn't know a few other things about me that make me not such a good person. Though I suppose I don't know everything there is to know about him, either.
Our judgments of ourselves and others stem from what little we know about ourselves and others. All we know about what we know about others is based on what we see of them I'd based on what we see of them. If we see then do good, we might conclude that they are good people, partly because we don't see whatever evil they may hide. We know ourselves a little better, since we know both the good and the bad that we do, yet we may not know all the context. For example, if we make bad decisions in the face of difficult circumstances and strong temptations, that's fairly understandable. We're only human. But if our bad decisions come as a result of only mildly taxing circumstances and weak temptations, then we certainly have room for improvement. The trouble is that we can be rather poor judges of how challenging our temptations and circumstances are.
Only God knows exactly how good people are and how difficult their challenges are, so He is the only being who can properly judge anyone. We might judge others as being good and ourselves as being not as good, but we are missing several pieces of important context. We can't judge people properly because we don't know them or their circumstances perfectly. Only God does. So, while we may justly point out the good and bad things that people do, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to judge anyone as being good or bad people, because (if for no other reason) we don't perfectly understand the context of the circumstances under which those people do those good or bad things.
Taking out the trash doesn't make me a good person, and having bad habits doesn't necessarily make me a bad person. Only God can judge what sort of people people are.
No comments:
Post a Comment