Tolerance

I was at a committee meeting at church last night and the woman who led the devotion time spoke about tolerance. How we don’t seem very tolerant of each other these days.  Everyone seems to be complaining about everyone else.  The elderly complain about their kids or people their kid’s age that they don’t keep their houses neat enough or they work too hard or aren’t raising their kid’s right.  The people in their middle ages complain about people in their teens and twenties because they seem unfocused or, as Clint Eastwood put it in a quote I read today…”teenage twits”.

The point of the devotions was that we need to be more tolerant.  We need to be a little more understanding of people and not just jump to conclusions.  If someone is driving too slowly in front of us, maybe they are lost and don’t know where they are going.  If someone is driving too fast, maybe they are trying to get someone to the hospital.  We need to have some understanding and patience and…. tolerance.

I have been thinking a lot about this today.  Mostly in how I treat other people.  Yes, I assume that when someone is driving slowly in front of me, they are doing it just to irritate me. Just because I had one person deliberately drive slowly on a two-lane road and then, when I went to pass him, he sped up so I couldn’t pass him.  Then we reached a curve in the road and I had to fall behind him again.  He then slowed down and I could seem him laughing in his rear view mirror.  But, just because that guy was a major jerk, doesn’t mean that every slow driver is a major jerk, or even a minor jerk.  I shouldn’t judge everyone based on one idiot.

The same is true with people who are holding me up in the check out line in the store.  I always try to pick the line with the least number of people, as I’m sure most people do.  Everyone once in a while, there will be an elderly woman in front of me who has her groceries all bagged but she is taking forever to put her checkbook away (because she can’t use a debit or credit card…she has to write a check) and I am waiting to run my card because they are already scanning my stuff and bagging my groceries.  So I impatiently wait, thinking bad thoughts.  But maybe the reason she is taking her time is she had her wallet stolen and she is very cautious about putting things away so it doesn’t happen again.  That is understandable.  I shouldn’t just assume that she is addled and not paying attention to the world around her.

This is one of those things I really want to work on.  A real growing experience. I want to learn to not jump to conclusions. I want to learn to treat people, in my mind, with kindness and respect.  I always do treat people that way but if they could read my mind, they would think I was really rude.  I need to learn to assume the best about people and not assume they were put on this earth to get in my way and slow me down.  To be more tolerant.  That is a new thing to add to my list of self-improvement goals.