I have been thinking a lot about acceptance this week, over the last 12 months my perspective has been challenged about just how much judgment there is in this world. I have heard people say of the drunks we work with "f**k them it's their own fault"
I been shocked by own reactions I try hard to hide them but I do sometimes think: How could you do that? How could you live like that? How could you say that?
I have other moments of judgment that comes from my thoughts on the way people raise their kids, how they spend their money, and the choices they make in relationships, etc.
Who am I to Judge?
Read a great quote in Frank Skinners autobiography,(actually this was written in my first ever blog post) he is in a small catholic church in Japan standing behind a large hairy Japanese transvestite dressed in a school girls outfit! He just thinking how wrong, strange and weird it is that someone like this should be in a church service he writes:
"Then the hairy transvestite spoke. I stood, mouth slightly open, as a middle aged man in a schoolgirl uniform offered, in a voice deeper than mine, this prayer to God: 'Lord, send messengers of tenderness to the dead-end streets, the furnished or unfurnished rooms of the lonely, and the attics of the abandoned in our cities. And so we pray. My 'Lord your Kingdom come' was said with a tightening throat. I imagined him lonely in his furnished or unfurnished room, a figure of fun to most people, but embraced by this small Catholic community happy to encourage his active participation in the Mass, regardless of his bizarre appearance. I felt humbled and slightly ashamed. I suppose I had dismissed him as a freak, but he was, it seemed to me now, a brave and very honest man.
Japan is 8 hours ahead of Britain, so when you're next out, living it up, at 11 on a Saturday night, remember that in a catholic church in Osaka, there's a middle-aged man in a schoolgirl uniform and wig, listening attentively to the word of God, and offering up his prayers for the lonely and abandoned.
2 comments:
Great post Brian! It's so easy to judge and get angry about people and about things not being the way we think they should be, or want them to be. I'm facing that with my own kids--and here we expected to be the parents who did things the right way. Yet, they still go astray... and have addictions, and sow wild oats, and do things we forbid them to. Sometimes this world is a sad place to be.
yeh so true, who am I to judge.. I had recently hard time understanding a choice a friend had made for their children - a little while later as I was chatting with this friend I understood that she was actually doing it out of love, what she thought was best for her child. and there were factors I did not know about. I learned something there! Talk about walking a mile in someone's shoes. Who am I to judge! God certainly gave me insight and understanding in that incident, and realised I made some hasty assumptions.
Love it when God teaches me that way.
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