You do not have to be scrolling through social media very long before you find a video teaser that promises, “… and what happens next will blow your mind!”
I fell for that hook one too many times, I guess. Now if I see any variation of that promise, I DO NOT click. In fact, I’m tempted to leave a comment that reads, “… actually what happens next will make you feel like you’ve been hoodwinked! Trust me, it’s probably not that funny!”
Maybe I am entertained enough by the ways I surprise myself with what happens next.
Generally, I would describe myself as an honest person, a person who values authenticity and transparency. But last week, I made a public mistake, and what happened next blew my mind. For a week before Father’s Day, I had been posting pictures of fathers paired with Bible verses that remind us that God is a perfect Father to us. On June 6, I posted a picture of my brother and his son, coupled with this verse from the New Living Translation: “Your own ears will hear Me. Right behind you, a voice will say, ‘This is the way you should go.'” I had changed the third-person pronoun to first-person, so that we could remember that God is revealing Himself all through the Bible.
Later that VERY day, I was scrolling through Twitter and came across where Zondervan tweeted the same verse for the day, but from the New International Version. The SAME verse on the SAME day. There are about 31,000 verses in the Bible, and I do not know how to figure out statistics for these kinds of things, but I presume that the chance that someone would post the same verse on the same day (and that I would actually SEE it, when I check Twitter infrequently) is slim.
Immediately, I noticed that they had cited the verse as Isaiah 30:21. I had cited it as Isaiah 30:20.
Defensive thought #1: “No way! Zondervan made a mistake! I got to be the one to catch it! How fun! I should let them know!” The English teacher in me never sleeps. She knows when to be seen and not heard, and she turns off her grammar radar around friends, but when it comes to television and signage, she looks for an error like a cheerleader looks for a reason to hurkey. It doesn’t take much, and I jump. In this case, I was willing to jump to the idea that a major publisher was mistaken before I– an inexperienced nobody– was mistaken.
I looked up the verse in the NIV and saw that Zondervan was correct.
Defensive thought #2: “Oh, I bet the New Living Translation got it wrong! I must have copied down their mistake.” Do you see what I did there? I blamed an entire translation of the Bible instead of myself.
I looked up the verse in every translation before I admitted that I was the one who was mistaken.
Moving on to Dismissive thoughts … “Well, I might have made a mistake on this, but at least it was a TINY mistake. I was only one verse off AND I had made the reference very small on the photo. I bet nobody even noticed.”
Can this really be the way my mind is wired?! Did I really just argue my own case before I even examined the facts? Did I really just point an impossible finger at two other suspects before I considered my own fallibility … even for a second? And after I found out I had made a mistake, did I really sweep it under the I’ll-bet-nobody-noticed rug that swiftly?
I guess the dismissive thought is human nature, but the defensive thoughts concern me. I saw a pin on Pinterest that fits: “We are very good lawyers for our own mistakes and very good judges for the mistakes of others.”
People throw around the word “judge” these days, and it has come to have a bad connotation. But, truly, it shouldn’t. “Judge” is a neutral word. People are hyper-sensitive to being judged, though, and people everywhere defend themselves against judgment as if it is the worst thing that could happen to you. When did we lose all of our self-confidence? If we are secure in ourselves, then who cares if someone judges us?
I don’t think I can change the fact that I am judging myself and others in some way, all of the time. We are all doing it, and if we say we are not guilty of judging, then we are guilty of not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It may be unrealistic for me to stop judging completely, but I do want to act as a “lawyer” for other people more often than I do. Maybe the mistake itself— my own or someone else’s– is not as important as what happens next. It is the response to the mistake that makes the difference.
I’m hoping that drawing attention to my own mistake by blogging about it will remind me to be as good at defending others as I am at defending myself.