Don't Assume...

"The pride of your heart has deceived you,
   you who live in the clefts of the rocks
   and make your home on the heights,
you who say to yourself,    ‘Who can bring me down to the ground?" - Obadiah 1:3 (NIV)


I remember hearing the story of a woman who was traveling and had some time to kill before her flight.  She went to one of the airport cafes and bought a small package of cookies before sitting down to read.  Suddenly, she became aware of a rustling noise.  Peeking over from behind her book, she was flabbergasted to discover a neatly dressed man helping himself to her cookies!  Not wanting to make a scene, but most definitely a point, she leaned over and took a cookie herself and the man simply looked at her and smiled.


A minute or two passed by and she heard more rustling. The man was helping himself to another cookie!  This time, she deliberately snatched a cookie but still held her tongue, and he continued to smile unassumingly.  Then, as if to add insult to injury, the man broke the remaining cookie in two, pushed half across to her, ate the other half, and left.  Positively fuming, the woman got up and heard her flight was announced so she went to begin boarding.  She opened her purse to get her plane ticket, and to her utter shock, there was her pack of unopened cookies.


It is so easy to make assumptions about what is happening around us.  And when we are too quick to assume, we are also pretty quick to make fools of ourselves.  Let's actively choose to see people through God's eyes.  He always knows what's going on!  I recently heard a pastor say that God's "Plan A" is humility, and His "Plan B" is humiliation.  I thought that was so great!  The minute we start to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, God has a way of knocking us off our high horse.  And because He is a gracious and merciful God - slow to anger and abounding in love, it is not in the malicious human way we think of, it's in His compassionate and correcting way - His Spirit gently guiding and working within us.


However, in order to avoid suffering too much vast humiliation through out our lives, let's do ourselves a favor and walk in humility.  It is only by His grace that we are what we are :)  


"But whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me...not I, but God who was working through me by his grace." - 1 Corinthians 15:10 (NLT)