Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Walking in Another Person's Flip Flops

OK, I'll be the first to admit that doing a blog post that consists of quotes from a book (again) is probably the lazy persons way of doing things, and there might be some small truth to this, but it really is more than that. As I mentioned in my last post, I've been reading John Fischer's book, "12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee" and it has some really good things to say about us people who claim Christ as our Lord and Savior but have a way of falling way short of being the kind of witness that truly attracts others to Christ. So, as I read through the chapters, I'll be sharing some quotes from each chapter/step of recovery. If you don't get the book for yourself, hopefully some of the quotes I post will at least get you thinking.

Step 2: We have come to believe that our means of obtaining greatness is to everyone lower than ourselves in our mind.
"We need to learn to see ourselves through other people's eyes to see ourselves as we really are."
"It's virtually impossible to get another view of yourself by yourself. Just like we need at least two mirrors to see the angles most other people see of us, we need other people to tell us who we really are."
"Recovering Pharisees need to have people around them to tell them the truth - to hold up the mirrors."
"It would be wise to look at the groups we travel in and see how honest they really are. Do we have our own prejudices and secrets? Ate we honest with one another, or do we protect one another's weaknesses and sins? Do our groups foster an accurate portrayal of ourselves as we really are, or do they bolster a kind of corporate lie or propaganda?"
"We need friends who tell us the truth - other shoes in which we can stand."
"Standing in someone else's shoes changes our view of ourselves, but it also drastically changes our view of others when we see their situation from their point of view. If we truly see from someone else's perspective, we might at least be able to understand why they do what they do instead of issuing a knee-jerk judgment of what we do not understand."
"Empathy is a marvelous antidote for the tendency to judge others, and personal pain is the pathway to empathy. It's worth the pain to become more human - to identify with people - to join the human race." 
"To empathize with someone you don't even like is a sign that you have accepted and faced your own problems and therefore can understand how other people can be trapped by their own difficulties in life, even if they are difficulties outside your experience." 
"As a Pharisee, there is no doubt that the need to judge other people is at the level of an addiction. It is intimately tied to our sense of identity and is the means by which we feel good about ourselves. We judge without thinking, and it's a habit we can't get along without."
How well do we do when it comes to putting ourselves into another person's shoes? How quick are we to write somebody off or to pass judgment without giving any consideration to what their circumstances might be, how they might interpret a situation different than our interpretation, or how they might have misunderstood our intentions/words/attitudes? How open are we to the possibility that our situation or our interpretation or our intentions, words, or attitudes could be, if not wrong, certainly impact our perspective and opinion?

May God give us the sensitivity, the caution, the compassion, and his grace, to place ourselves in the flip flops of the person we are judging, and give them the benefit of the doubt.

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