LOOK DEEPER (credit to Denis Scott)

“Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment”. John 7:24 NIV

 A military parade was proceeding down a Main Street watched, as one would expect, by a huge patriotic crowd. When the flag of the Country went by, everyone stood to attention and saluted the flag in the appropriate manner. Well, everyone except one frail young man who stood motionless on the kerb.
A beefy, red-faced man standing behind him was so incensed that he pushed the young man into the gutter violently. ‘Damn it!’ he cried. ‘What do you mean by not saluting our flag?’ When the silent young man turned everyone nearby saw that he wore on his chest a Combat Medal decoration… and that he had no arms!

 It is so easy for us to rush to judgment isn’t it? Long before we know the facts that cause people to behave in certain ways of which society disapproves, we tend to make up our own minds and formulate opinions about them which soon harden into our own version of the truth. But when it happens to us we feel hurt and aggrieved.

Years ago, Alfred Hitchcock directed a most moving film about an attractive and capable woman who stole things. On the surface, she was a thief. But the things she stole were always given to her mother as gifts because she so desperately wanted her mother’s love and approval which all her life had been denied her.
When she was a child she had unintentionally killed a man who was violently assaulting, beating and raping her mother. The legal authorities held the mother responsible and the mother had been sentenced to a term in jail. The woman, as a child, was sent to a children’s detention centre and had a miserable time of it. Her mother was incapable of forgiving her daughter, who grew into adulthood; a much damaged and emotionally deprived person.

Some people’s wounds and torments are all on the inside, invisible to all except those who take the trouble to care. It would be so easy for society to condemn that woman as a thief. But is that what she really was? Without excusing her breaking of the law, I don’t think so.

We need to know more, to look deeper. And when we do, we might find that far from being wicked, she was only a wounded soldier, without arms.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him ~ SB