High Beams
When we would drive Lyndsay’s old car around at night, other drivers always thought our high beams were on. Maybe the lights were set wrong and looked a little brighter than they should have. So every once in a while we’d get the “courtesy flash” from other drivers, which really means “Hey, idiot, your brights are on!” But, of course, they weren’t.
And whenever I was “undeservedly flashed” I would get angry. Sometimes I’d flash back, as if to say, “You think those were bright?” It became so annoying to me that I would drive around at night with my hand on the lever, ready to flash back at someone. I had this desire to prove to people that I wasn’t the idiot driving around with my brights on in their faces. They had no idea what was happening in this car. They didn’t know what they were talking about.
That’s how I feel right now - even though that car’s gone.
And it’s not about driving anymore. It’s about people who either think they know, or don’t care to try to understand, what is really going on at Calvin Crest, or at their church, or in others’ lives. Regardless, they form an opinion about people or a place that is based on incomplete or irrelevant evidence.
This Sunday my friend Izzy spoke to his students about this idea of getting to know someone’s life before making a judgment call about them. We do it backwards all the time. And a lot of the time people get hurt. We make a remark about the way camp is running, or about our church services, when we don’t understand what kinds of pressures are surrounding those environments. We form opinions about others’ personalities when we are not intimately familiar with their stories. And people get hurt. People get discouraged. Words matter. Opinions - be they mislead - still matter, because words matter.