When you see someone’s bad behavior, do your eyes ever pop out of your head or your jaw hit the floor? Do you ever just gape in astonished awe due to being shocked that they could do such a thing?
Though I have seen a lot, I find I can still be shocked by peoples’ bad behavior. But maybe I shouldn’t be. Or at least, maybe I need to learn to accept people for who they are, instead of judging them so harshly. Near the end of the book Christy, these paragraphs grabbed my attention because I have found that I have needed to learn these exact same things about accepting others:
“I saw for the first time that we have to accept people the way they are and not be shocked about anything. In my idealism, that had been hard for me. I had not understood Miss Alice’s acceptance of the mountain people and had often been frustrated, sometimes even infuriated, by her unwillingness to push harder for changes.
“I now understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are.
“I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were – or how hard we have tried. But Miss Alice had helped me to see that the Power who lovingly rules over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we boast about our little intellects and insist that He does not exist.”
Oh the love of God. He isn’t shocked by my bad behavior. Jesus said that He already knew what was within a man! While not being shocked by my sin, He still hates my sin. And yet, He still loves me. How can I be so idealistic and hard on others, refusing to accept them and love them because of their bad behavior – especially when I am so loved even though I so often display unlovable behaviors and attitudes?
The truth is that people without Christ cannot expect to live as if they have embraced His teachings. It is an unreasonable expectation for us who follow Christ to expect people who do not know Jesus to embrace His teachings. So instead of us getting angry at the people who don’t yet know Christ for not embracing our same beliefs, let us be people of compassion and show them the benefits and joy of knowing Christ and His abundant life. That will be more beneficial to them than our anger and refusal to offer friendship.
It is time for me to be accepting and loving of everyone around me. Even if I don’t agree with their behaviors or attitudes, I can still love them and care for them, hoping to love them to a relationship with Christ and a life transformation.
— brian rushing