Missed Perceptions

I was driving home from church today with Brent & Ellie in the car. We were exiting from the freeway and I was trying to make the light which had turned yellow. A guy had unexpectedly turned in front of me and so it appeared (to the guy who could not see that I was trying to make the light) that I was trying to tailgate him, or that I was really ticked that he cut in front of me (when in fact I was only trying to make the yellow light) and so with that assumption in his mind, he started breaking right in front of me and flipping me off - over and over, and then through the sunroof thinking, perhaps, that I didn't see the 12 other flips he gave me.

Now, I was a bit p.o.'ed because the kids were in the car and I had done nothing wrong. So, Brent and I just started laughing so hard we couldn't stop. We presumed (possibly incorrectly as well) that his dad must have criticized his football playing when he was a kid and now it made him insecure. Then Brent said "you didn't even do anything wrong."

This got me thinking about all the times I've assumed bad things about people in my life - things that are totally untrue - people talking about me, people don't want to be friends with me anymore, people are only nice to me if I do stuff for them...all of this negative self-talk crap. I realize that for most of you, this kind of stuff ends at high school, but there are some of us that still carry around lame insecurities.

It is crap...it's the devil's most pervasive tool used to ensure that followers of Christ feel really bad about ourselves. I do not want any part of it anymore.

I know people like me - my family and friends love me no matter what and that makes it easy for me to get flipped off, and laugh with my favorite red-headed boy all the way home to watch the Seahawks. Life is really o.k. if we remember that perception is only what we make of it.