So often we look around us at other people and judge a person on the way they look. This is coming from a teenager so i'm gonna put it in a teenage scenario i'm sure you've all related to at some point in your life. You're at school or work or where ever there's people you see often and you see a good-looking guy/girl, you're obviously attracted to them and the more often you see them the more you like them. But you don't really know them and your friends tell you they're not very nice. Then finally you get to know them and you realize they really aren't nice and then you've got to work on getting over them.
That saying 'don't judge a book by its cover' is not only true for books but all aspects of life. A more accurate way of saying it would be 'don't judge.' But we all struggle with that whether we want to admit it or not. What if we took that and applied it to that scenario i gave? How would our lives change if, although we notice the looks, we didn't put everything on them, and instead we watched how a person acted, noticed how they interacted with others and got to know the person on the inside. It seems to me that that would save us from a lot of heart ache although i realize thats not the cause of it a lot of the time, but then again a lot of the time it is.
I was on a walk earlier, thinking some things over, and i saw a rock lying in the middle of the road and bent down to look at it. On the top it was perfectly smooth and kinda pretty, which is why it caught my eye, but the bottom was jagged and muddy. And it made me think of the way we see others. We see only the surface level, we draw attention to the beauty and sometimes order our lives in a way that best enhances it. But if we would look underneath, at a deeper level we'd see that there's mud and rough edges. We'd see that our ideal person/fantasy is just that, a fantasy, a mask, a lie.
A lot of the time it's difficult not to make assumptions about someone from the way they look, but I pray for the day when we see someone with a pure and innocent heart and a passion for God and think "they're beautiful!" even if they may not be the most attractive person in the world. I challenge you all to look at those around you at a less wordly, and more Godly level.
"The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance but the LORD looks and the heart." 1Samuel 16:7
Lets try a little harder to look at the heart. Pray about it. Catch yourself in the action and change your way of thinking. And little by little we will start to look more like Christ and less like the ppl of this world
