Judgment
Those of you who know me have probably heard me speak on my favorite topic, "Cooperative Diversity". The older I get, the more I love diversity, or at least I think I do. In my last blog I told you about traveling across America by car, a 6,000 mile adventure into experiencing diversity at it's zenith. On this journey we were able to stay in various communities experiencing the joy of getting to know and yet not being known. I don't mean this in a disparaging way but it was like a traveling experience to the zoo. At every stop whether in a restaurant, a hotel lobby, a white water rafting ride or on top of a mountain, there it was, DIVERSITY!!! It is such a strange thing, this diversity. Of course, diversity is only diversity to me. To the diverse I'm considering, it is their normal. To them, I'm the diverse. That is where the pain comes in. Which of us is the weaker? It reminds me of when my Dad would take me to the zoo. He would laugh and say, "today we are going to visit your cousins". Then he would take me, always, to the monkey cages. We loved to watch the monkeys. I can remember in one of my contemplative moments I thought, "who's in the zoo and who's watching whom?"(Actually, I thought, "who's watching who".)
Diversity by it's very nature speaks only of difference but says nothing about judgment. It is my own feeling of rightness that starts the wheels turning toward making a judgment. Yet, we have all been guilty of judging based on the display of mere diversity. Webster defines "to judge" as to consider a case and pass sentence. Jesus said that Father God was so against this kind of judgment that our judging would set into motion a reversal of the judgment process so that we would receive back upon our lives judgment in the same measure that we sent it out. I'm working hard on removing judgment from my daily life. It requires great love to do this. Only the love of God that was first given freely to us can lead us out of the darkness of the prideful actions of judging others. In truth, our judgment could be right as we take stock of another's diversity. It could also be as wrong as the Pharisee's view of Jesus in his own diversity.