Pre-conceptions

 In pre-covid days, when it was still allowed, I invited a co-worker and her son to visit us for lunch. A couple of things she said struck me. "Your husband isn't at all what I expected" and "Am I how you expected me to be?"

I didn't know how to answer the second comment (the first was her problem). I don't tend to form pre-conceived ideas of what people should be. I meet them and my opinion is formed by who they are, how they behave, their attitudes and conversation.

 Isn't this how it should be?

See each person as an individual. Beneath colour, nationality, gender, culture, we are all human.

If you read secular classical literature from centuries ago, across time and culture basic human nature hasn't changed.

If you live in the developing world (Papua New Guinea, Africa) where technological developments often haven't reached the wider population, human nature is the same.

If you read the Bible from the Old Testament written centuries ago to the New (only a couple of thousand years old) human nature is the same and the reason for that is explained.

It's the height of arrogance to judge people because of their geography, era, race or culture and be blind to who they are as individuals, complete with good and bad characteristics.

See each person for who he or she is. Pray that you'll see them as God does, with compassion, as a unique individual loved by him, with more potential than most ever realise, more blindness than many seek to have cured and, if they choose, the right to become adopted as a child of God.