Sometimes it’s difficult to understand where a person is coming from until you understand more about them. Since we often don’t have, or make, the time to forge such connections, we remain in the dark as to why someone reacts in particular ways.
It’s very easy to coast with the group opinion that substitutes for personal experience. I’m ashamed to think of the times I’ve been embarrassed because I allowed that cheap opinion to spare me the duty of getting to know someone or something for myself. So, having been injected with the virus of “she’s so stuck up” or “he’s really arrogant”, I was in full fever when I met the individuals outside the gossip setting, only to find that they were good people who had decided to follow their own lights without checking in with the crowd to see if it was alright.
I was once introduced to the husband of a woman my wife and I had met through church. His name was Irving. Before I met Irving, I heard from the church crowd about his arrogance and refusal to have anything to do with church. So I was prepared to judge him before I met him. But after meeting Irving, I was ashamed of myself. After spending some time with him, I understood why Irving was the way he was.
Irving was a Viet Nam veteran. Not the kind who’d simply been in the service and so counted as a veteran. He’d seen action. He’d seen death close up in some very nasty ways. He’d seen far too many harsh realities the average person never will. So I didn’t find him arrogant. He just didn’t have time for people who were into gossip and game playing. Neither did he dislike church. But he did dislike Christians who had all the easy spiritual answers they’d gotten, not so much by investing their own lives as by listening to too much Kenneth Copeland. And I saw that he was surrounded by those types. People who couldn’t deal with a man who’d been tried by fire the way he had been.
Irving was a very caring man. It just wasn’t the mushy, hand-holding kind others thought he should show. The foolishness and pettiness that the average person easily indulges in had been burned out of him by war. He was straightforward in his speech and honest about his views. I found him very refreshing. He was also the guy who taught me how to tie a necktie correctly, freeing me from the clip-on. Irving could tell you more in two sentences then the magpies around him could in thirty minutes of regurgitating church talk. Irving helped me get some things clear in my mind, though he didn’t know it. I grew to like him a lot. In the end, I found him to be the lone pillar of reality in his environment.
So before all that, if asked about Irving, I’d have related that some say he’s arrogant, some say hard-headed, some say ungodly, some say…whatever. And, like an idiot, I might have agreed though I didn’t know him; telling Christ by my actions that I took the crowd’s opinion more seriously than His admonition to judge righteous judgment (Jn. 7:24).
There will always be a bewildering variety of opinions about different people and subjects. If you put them in perspective, it’s like sucking on a jawbreaker. It takes a while to get it down to a manageable size but once you get it to the core, you can break it into a few pieces.
And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am? They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again. – (Luke 9 18-19).
The crowd has always been unstable and unfit to formulate a sound judgment; only to pass one like diarrhea. They can be counted on to cloud the issue and, being always dependent on what someone else says, throw tantrums when they aren’t confirmed.
And as they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air… (Acts 22:23)
The final question will always be inescapable and unavoidable.
But who do YOU say that I am? – (Luke 9:20)
In the end, we have to come to our own conclusions as if each of us were alone on the earth. In an election year, such as now, we see the crowd opinion cultivated as if it were a rare plant instead of the weed it is. And as soon as the election is over it will be forgotten like a weed. In delusion, we sometimes think to lose our individuality in the mass like an off key singer in a large choir.
But if the hairs on our heads are numbered, how much more are our secret opinions? This being so, should not our opinions at least be truly ours?
Does anybody have the courage to have a CONSIDERED opinion anymore?
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