Mistaken Impression
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.
Proverbs 3:5-6
How do you feel about first impressions? Do you think they are accurate? I usually find that my first impression is fairly accurate although I often take a circuitous route to get back to it. When someone is introduced to me I get an immediate feel for him/her. Then I am given someone else’s opinion and/or I see their actions. Often I waver from my original reaction only to find after a time that I was right in the first place. Maybe that is because in those first few minutes I wasn’t seeing with my eyes but with my spirit, receiving rather than perceiving.
Information comes to us through many venues. We hear stories, we see one isolated act or we catch one bad or one very good day. At that point we believe that we have knowledge of a person we may in fact not have. We do the same thing with God.
As one piece of information about a person can change our opinion of them one piece of Scripture can form our perception of God. It saddens me when I meet people who learned in childhood one facet of God that shapes their understanding of Him in a negative way. They put God in a box marked Do Not Touch and they leave him there. They do not explore all the many words written about Him, about Jesus and about the Holy Spirit. There is a danger then, of not seeing God as a driving force, of not seeing Jesus as loving Savior and of not seeing the Holy Spirit as wonderful counselor because we’ve already named them something else.
The other side of the coin has people viewing God as sweetness and light. God has been good to them and they have been taught that He is good. Then one day they mess up and God allows them to walk through the consequences of their actions. Suddenly God is not sweet and kind but harsh and demanding. They wander away sad to have been proven wrong.
Neither the harsh judging God nor the sweet giving God is the whole God. God is a complex being; one we will never understand this side of heaven. He is unchanging but our view changes and so we misunderstand who God truly is. Just as seeing another human being in only one circumstance, one light is not a true representation, neither can we pigeonhole God.
Get to know as much as you can about God. Invite Him into all of your life and truly begin to experience Him, then from there form impressions of other people and situations. It is a much better, much broader view.
Proverbs 3:5-6
How do you feel about first impressions? Do you think they are accurate? I usually find that my first impression is fairly accurate although I often take a circuitous route to get back to it. When someone is introduced to me I get an immediate feel for him/her. Then I am given someone else’s opinion and/or I see their actions. Often I waver from my original reaction only to find after a time that I was right in the first place. Maybe that is because in those first few minutes I wasn’t seeing with my eyes but with my spirit, receiving rather than perceiving.
Information comes to us through many venues. We hear stories, we see one isolated act or we catch one bad or one very good day. At that point we believe that we have knowledge of a person we may in fact not have. We do the same thing with God.
As one piece of information about a person can change our opinion of them one piece of Scripture can form our perception of God. It saddens me when I meet people who learned in childhood one facet of God that shapes their understanding of Him in a negative way. They put God in a box marked Do Not Touch and they leave him there. They do not explore all the many words written about Him, about Jesus and about the Holy Spirit. There is a danger then, of not seeing God as a driving force, of not seeing Jesus as loving Savior and of not seeing the Holy Spirit as wonderful counselor because we’ve already named them something else.
The other side of the coin has people viewing God as sweetness and light. God has been good to them and they have been taught that He is good. Then one day they mess up and God allows them to walk through the consequences of their actions. Suddenly God is not sweet and kind but harsh and demanding. They wander away sad to have been proven wrong.
Neither the harsh judging God nor the sweet giving God is the whole God. God is a complex being; one we will never understand this side of heaven. He is unchanging but our view changes and so we misunderstand who God truly is. Just as seeing another human being in only one circumstance, one light is not a true representation, neither can we pigeonhole God.
Get to know as much as you can about God. Invite Him into all of your life and truly begin to experience Him, then from there form impressions of other people and situations. It is a much better, much broader view.
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