Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do this?
In the book Crucial Conversations, I came across this lovely suggestion: when you are aggravated, hurt, saddened, etc. by someone else's words or actions, ask the above question. Why would they do ____, assuming reasonableness, rationality, and decency on their part?
We often jump to deep conclusions. She is just plain aggravating, he wants to hurt me, they purposefully left me out.
As I try to consider my feelings more and more in response to certain situations, I find it harder and harder to believe the likely true thing about a person. I find myself believing the feeling, rather than what I should expect of that person's intentions. It's harder and harder to assume the best.
The loveliest thing is, we can always assume the best of God. He is perfectly reasonable, rational, and decent.
There is perfect relational freedom- or maybe trust, rather- in that.
I've been considering how many conflicts can be boiled down to wrong assumptions, wrong expectations, and decisions that we make based on misunderstandings.
In the Bible, we have a vast compilation of stories about, reflections on, and words from God himself that can help us trust him.
I don't want it to sound like I'm saying you can just read your way into trust. I think we need the Holy Spirit to fill us with rest in who He is and reveal Himself to us.
Sometimes it's hard to trust Him- I'll admit in the name of transparency. (I think sometimes we think to be a Christian is to never doubt. No way, Hosea.)
We are permitted doubt but we must not choose doubt as a philosophy of life.
Sometimes the struggle to trust Him is very real. I can think back to a few times I really wrestled with God... and I have had a fairly easy life.
But when I struggle to trust someone's intentions, I look almost subconsciously to other occasions when that person proved to be reasonable, rational, and decent, in order to assume the best of the present situation.
Repeated offenses add complications, and we shouldn't trust some people. Of course we can't always assume the best of everyone.
But we can of God.
Sometimes our idea of God needs to change. Sometimes that takes starting from a place of assuming the best about him, and then seeing the implications.
For example, if he is good and loving, then sacrificing Jesus on the cross cannot be just one way to be saved out of many. If he is loving, and there are other ways, He would have taken the cup away when Jesus asked (Matt. 22).
We may be wrestling to understand His ways, but we have an infinite number of testimonies to his faithfulness, and not one to unfaithfulness. And He won't change. He just won't.
Though I don't mean to say we will always understand Him in the same way.
I hope I am humble to allow him to reshape my perspective. Humble to offer that I do not always- if often- understand, submitting my confusion to the truth that he is always good and I can always assume the best of him.
My idea of God is not a divine idea...He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence.
C.S. Lewis
