We all have reasons for doing the things we do.  For better or worse, there is always a reason.  The trick to sailing through interpersonal problems is to stay focused on yourself and the choices you have and are making, while refraining from judging others.  But how do we do this?

Jesus said “Judge not, that ye be not judged”.  We know we’re not supposed to judge others, but do you ever find it hard not to??

Especially when other people’s choices directly affect us!  How can we just ignore the things that others do instead of come to a conclusion about how we feel about them?

For example, if I find out that someone has lied to me, how am I supposed to NOT put my guard up in case they do it again?

First off, protecting yourself from others’ harm is not judgement of them. 

If someone were to steal something from me, the natural consequence of their action would be that I’m not going to let them around my personal belongings unsupervised, which is completely fine and legit. 

Aaaaaaaaand, I might also have a tendency to think some negative thoughts about them….. which is where I would be crossing the line into judging them.

See, when we go so far as to think that we know a person enough to judge their actions as good or bad, we are taking a seat that is not ours to take. 

We don’t know why anyone does the things they do, just the same as no one fully knows OUR stories and reasonings for the choices we make.

Even if you judge someone as “good” –you don’t actually KNOW their heart, and whether they have good intentions, or if they’re only doing “good things” to try to distract others from seeing a different side of them.  (Not that I think it’s a problem to judge in a positive way like that, just making a point that we really don’t know enough to judge either way!)

Remember how the scripture continues in Matthew… “don’t tell someone to take the mote out of their eye, when you yourself have a beam in yours”?  (I’m pretty sure that’s the exact phrase, haha).

I have to tell you a funny story.

A while ago, I received a couple text messages from Verizon, informing me that we’d gone over on our allotted data, and had been billed accordingly for more GB.

This was not the first time it had happened, and I (ever so kindly) asked my husband to not use the internet when he’s not on wifi.  He replied that he hadn’t been using much data recently, and agreed to be even more careful.

At which point, for some reason I checked my internet connection and saw to my horror that my wifi was turned OFF!  I had been using data for the past few days around the house, while thinking I was on our wifi!

***Beam removed from my own eye***

***Let Tyler keep his mote***

It’s one thing when we actually get proof that we’re in the wrong, but how often do we not have a clue because we’re unwilling to look at our own faults?  How many times do we jump to the conclusion that someone else needs to change, without ever looking at ourselves from their perspective?

I think we would be appalled to find out how often we are wrong.

One of my favorite poems illustrates this perfectly!

The Cookie Thief

By Valerie Cox

A woman was waiting at an airport one night, with several long hours before her flight.

She hunted for a book in the airport shops, bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop.

She was engrossed in her book but happened to see, that the man sitting beside her, as bold as could be. . .

grabbed a cookie or two from the bag in between, which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene.

So she munched the cookies and watched the clock, as the gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock.

She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by, thinking, “If I wasn’t so nice, I would blacken his eye.”

With each cookie she took, he took one too, when only one was left, she wondered what he’d do.

With a smile on his face, and a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half.

He offered her half, as he ate the other, she snatched it from him and thought “Oh, brother”.

This guy has some nerve and he’s also rude, why he didn’t even show any gratitude!

She had never known when she had been so galled, and sighed with relief when her flight was called.

She gathered her belongings and headed to the gate, refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate.

She boarded the plane, and sank in her seat, then she sought her book, which was almost complete.

As she reached in her baggage, she gasped with surprise, there was her bag of cookies, in front of her eyes!

If mine are here, she moaned in despair, the others were his, and he tried to share!

Too late to apologize, she realized with grief, that she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief.

Oh how I love that poem!  It is so genius!

And sadly, it demonstrates a regular occurrence of real life.  It’s a fact that there are always two sides of any story.  And too often, we forget to take a look at the other person’s point of view.

What would it look like if instead of automatically assuming that someone else is wrong –we questioned ourselves first?

Not to pin a rose on me, haha, but I’ve actually gotten really good at assuming I could be wrong.  This came not from being a Christlike person, but from being proven wrong countless times!

See, I used to have a memory of steel.  I could remember exact details of most anything.  And when my chiropractor asked if I’d been doing the stretches he instructed me to do, I stated that he never told me to do any.  Confused, he got a piece of paper hoping that would jog my memory, but nope!  I had never seen that paper in my life.

Even though he was SURE he had sent me home with the paper, I figured that he sees hundreds of patients and must get confused sometimes.  He simply forgot to give it to me.

I came home with my new piece of paper and went to place it in a nice pile of clutter, only to find an EXACT MATCH!! 

What??!!!!

“There is NO WAY!!” I thought.

This was the first of many more times that my memory would be proven wrong.  And now, when I think I remember something as solid as stone, while others are remembering differently, I simply admit that they very well could be right!

I have a long way to go in regards to applying the same principle to other people’s actions though.

What should we do when others do things that “make” us feel bad, sad, or angry?  (I use quotation marks because no one can make us feel anything).

We don’t know why some people do the things they do, and we can certainly tell ourselves any kind of story we want to about it just like I did when I was young.

When I was about 13 years old, I had a friend ditch out on me and our friendship was lost.  Then at age 39, I found the journal where I wrote about it, and with years of maturity under my belt and a parent’s perspective on the matter, I astonishingly realized that it was actually I who abandoned her.

See, she called me up one morning to see if I could play, in which I asked my dad and he said I had to do some jobs first.  I told my friend that I would speed clean and be to her house as fast as I could.

I held to my word and was knocking on her door within 10 minutes or so, but she was gone!  (Right here, I felt like she purposely left me high and dry.)  Before I tell you another little detail, which I did know at the time, I just have to speak my peace about how I viewed the situation while I’ve still got you on my side, haha.

In my mind, I thought that she should have told me on the phone that she would be leaving soon –ya know… the point when I told her I would hurry and get my chores done and come over!  I worked harder and faster than I ever had in my life, and to find out that it was for nothing was so disappointing and I couldn’t understand why she would skip out on me like that.  I went home and told no one, so I didn’t get any advanced help to process my thoughts.

I was left with that story in my head which led me to feel tricked, ditched, and hurt.

 *     *     *

So, the detail that meant nothing to me at the time, but changed everything years later is that her brother told me she was at her soccer game!

Now, seeing this through a mother’s point of view, I can totally see her being bored on a Saturday morning, calling me up (without asking her mom if she could even play, or realizing she had a game), getting off the phone, and then her mom was like “hey, go get your soccer stuff on, it’s time to go to your game!”

I can see now that she was just a kid, and was not plotting to ditch me!

Our friendship fell apart after that, and I can only imagine HER side of the story…

Suddenly out of nowhere, her friend is bugged at her –which then led to her to feel and act weird too –and before we knew it, we weren’t really hanging out anymore.

I was the cookie thief!!

I was only focused on what SHE did, and instead of asking questions and telling her how I felt, I just gave her the cold shoulder when I saw her driving home later that day.

Is there anything popping up in your mind where you can now see that you may have been in the wrong when you thought the other person was?

Maybe you haven’t experienced anything this dramatic, but have you ever blamed someone for losing your keys that you know you left on the counter, and then ended up finding them in your coat pocket?

Often times, we are so sure of ourselves and we believe that we are in the right, and (without doing any research on the matter) I feel confident to say that “more often than not”, there is a beam in our eye that needs checking.

When you point your finger at someone, there are three more pointing back at yourself.

Even if your toddler breaks your mother-in-law’s drinking glass, instead of blaming him, you could note to yourself that you didn’t remove it from his grasp earlier, so you share the responsibility.  That may or may not be a true scenario, wink wink.

Or if you’re being pulled behind a speed boat on a tube with your son, and a shirt flies off the boat and into the water, and you think you can send your son over to grab it but your husband says he wants to just drive past and snag it; so you don’t tell your son to swim for it, but when the boat drives past it, your daughter couldn’t reach it and it ends up getting sucked up into the jet and you have to take the boat out of the water and work for 30 minutes to remove the rash guard that now looks like it was attacked by a shark –you might have a tendency to blame your husband for not letting you just send your son to swim 3 meters to fetch it, but in reality, you were the one who chose to go against your strong thoughts and desire, so you are ultimately the only one you can blame for the whole ordeal…… Hypothetically speaking!  Lol!

There are different ways we can “judge” others.  There’s the “blaming, or pointing a finger” sort of judgement, and then the “thinking they are a bad person” type of conviction.

When you get the urge to judge someone’s character, the questions you can ask yourself are:

• What am I making this mean for THEM?
• What am I making this mean for ME?

If you are focused on them, then you are “unrightfully judging”.  Because you don’t know all the details of their life that led to them to do what they did. 

And I’m willing to bet that if you DID know every detail of their past, you would actually have compassion and understanding for them and possibly give them a hug instead of a cold shoulder.

If you are making their actions mean something about THEM, that is your first hint to rearrange your thoughts.

If you are focused on yourself, then you are not necessarily judging anyone, you’re just making a choice of how you want to move forward.

For example, if you want to create a boundary with someone, go for it.  If you feel disappointed or angry because of what they did, then feel your emotions.  Whatever you do, just make it about you.

You can create a healthy boundary without “judging” someone.

Instead of thinking that somebody is a “bad person”, just tell yourself “I don’t like the choices they make”, “it doesn’t work for me to be around them”, or “I don’t understand them”.

I think you will feel much better about yourself, because it leaves room in your heart to still love them -which in turn allows you to love yourself.

However things play out for you, understand that this is going to be a work in progress!  Sometimes you’ll be great at taming your thoughts, and other times you might find yourself blaming others or thinking negatively about them.

That’s ok.

You don’t have to be perfect at it right now, or ever.

But if you keep trying, you’ll get better and better as time goes on.

Something that might also help you as you practice, is to remember that you are equal to every person on this earth.  You are not better than anyone, and your ways of doing things are not better either –they’re just different. 

To say that one way or another is better is just an opinion.  Some people prefer what’s “most efficient”, while others prefer the “scenic route!”

Well, that’s it!  Thank you for being here as I speak my thoughts!  It really helps me to better myself when I take the time to write all my thoughts out.

Do you have any thoughts or insights on life that you would like to share with others?

I would love to allow you to use this platform to do so!  Shoot me an email, and I will post your message!  Or if you don’t want to write it all out, you can send me the main idea or a personal story and I can write up the post while giving you credit!  Sounds like a great deal to me!  Haha.

Have a wonderful week!

Kayleen

SDG

It’s easier to see the faults in others when we don’t fully love ourselves.  Read “3 Steps to Fully Loving Yourself” to get started a wonderful transformation!

Self-care also plays a big role in loving yourself.  Check out 27 Simple Ways to Rejuvenate Yourself.