Reflections

A couple moves into a new neighborhood. The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the wife looks out the kitchen window and sees her neighbor hanging her wash out on the clothes line. “That laundry isn’t very clean”, she says. “Either she doesn't know how to wash correctly or she needs to buy better laundry detergent.”

Her husband is sitting there but doesn’t say anything. The same kinds of comments continue over the course of the next few weeks. Every time the lady next door hangs her laundry out, the man’s wife has something to say about how it isn’t clean enough. Then one morning, the man and his wife are sitting at the breakfast table and she suddenly observes, “Well, would you look at that! She has finally learned how to wash clothes. I wonder who taught her.” To this the husband simply responds, “Actually, I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”

You may have heard this story before. It’s one I came across somewhere a while back and held onto because it teaches a valuable lesson. What is that lesson? What we say about people probably says more about us than it does about them. It’s true. So often, our opinions about others reveal more about our own understandings (or misunderstandings) of life than they do about anything or anyone else.

Mart DeHaan of RBC Ministries writing in his blog (Aug 27/09) said it like this - “We see things not only as they are, but as we are.”

Ourselves are revealed more in our words than we might realize. As you look at the world and the people around you in it, what you think of as a window could quite well be more of a mirror!

We really need to remember this before we open our mouths to speak don’t we.

“Remember, every time you open your mouth to talk, your mind walks out and parades up and down the words.” Edwin H. Stuart