A couple of those “Tions” to shun, which I believe our adversary employs quite vigorously to throw us of course, are: classifications and speculations.

Today, we’ll discuss classifications. Or we might say categorizing. We can easily become entrenched in categorizing people, can’t we? When you take some time to critically think about this though, it’s rather ridiculous. We human beings are exquisitely complex creations. It hit me a couple of months ago how no one can possibly know 98.7% of the thoughts that go through my mind in the course of a single day, nor would you likely want to as they are so darn weird and awkward many of them. And it’s simply impossible to know any significant percentage of the memories and experiences I’ve accumulated in my forty-seven years and eight months.

I’ve always thought our culture conditions us to be judgmental and categorizing. With social media more than ever. Hey, here’s one sentence about one thing this person did/said, now start judging their entire life, GO! And we’re led to believe we can do this because we classify and categorize people so much that it then seems easy to know everything we need to know about them, right? I mean, we see somebody driving an old pickup truck with one bumper sticker and suddenly think we know half their life story.

Now there’s something in the meditation world called “Beginner’s Mind”. Have you heard of this? It’s quite lovely. It’s the idea of purposefully encountering everything and everyone you meet each day as if for the first time, because in reality, you are. For example, I saw my friend Jon on Labor Day. A week and a half later he stopped by my house. He was not the same person he was on Labor Day because he had experiences, learning, growth, and change since then. So I truly was encountering him as he was on that day for the very first time.

It is so good to be lovingly curious about who the person is in front of you right now. Think of the great gift this kind of presence can be for someone. Bringing no judgement of their past and no prediction for their future with you, only loving attentiveness to who they are right now this moment. This is most difficult of course with those closest to you, who you’ve known the longest, especially family. This is why we pray–for help doing that which we cannot do on our own. It also takes training, typically in the form of meditative prayer, which I believe God is more than happy to honor. I believe Jesus loves to heal and reverse our subconscious sinful tendencies, but first asks that we grant Him access.

One other thought my friend Jon brought up at the end of our walk: “What if I treated myself this way??”

Good question.

One of the greatest gifts we can give or receive as human beings is listening without judgment.