Mountains and Molehills

Please forgive the cliché but have you ever noticed how easily we make mountains out of molehills?  It is so easy to see what those around us do as something intentional, aimed at us, meant to cause harm.  Reality is, though, a lot of what we perceive as targeted toward us is really just unintentional oversight.  Sometimes, this is something that still requires intervention as the lack of attention to detail is something that needs to be trained into the "offending" party.  Sometimes, the misstep is the result of bigger things going on that we as the offended party cannot see.  Sometimes it is purely an accident.

In any event, our responsibility is not to determine what the other person's intentions were or were not.  Our responsibility is two-fold.  One, we are to forgive.  When someone has wronged us, we need to forgive them and move on.  This is ever so difficult sometimes, but it is still necessary.  It tends to be a lengthy topic, one I am not going to tackle tonight.  Suffice it to say, forgiveness is far more than we tend to think it is.

Our second responsibility, at least as I see it, is that we need to learn to not be victims.

Sometimes we truly are victimized, but that's not what I mean here.  What I am talking about is living in such a way as to think so poorly of other people's intentions that whatever they do we see not only as wrong but we see it as a wrong committed with the intention of causing us harm.  Some people really are like that.  Again, that's not my point.  The more I interact with other people, the more I see that they really do have good intentions, just a tremendous lack of understanding of how to see their intentions through to reality.

I am no better at this.  I discover on a daily basis something I do, think, or say that sets a negative tone despite my best intentions to the contrary.  It's only through my relationship with God that any of that can change.  He does His great work in my heart to bring about a more intentional way of life.  Investing a little time and energy into every thought, action, and word doesn't mean you won't still fall flat sometimes, but it does mean that when you fall, it is easier to get back up.