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Spoon Perspective



We ordered a shrimp egg roll as an appetizer, and it was sitting in the middle of the table. I took the spoon wrapped up in my napkin so I could drizzle the sauce on my egg roll--because no one likes someone who double dips! I set the spoon on my appetizer plate and ate the egg roll. My husband reached across the table and took my spoon off my plate to drizzle sauce on his egg roll. I smiled at him and looked at him sideways. I thought to myself, "Why would he use my spoon when he has his own?" For a second, I thought maybe he just really wanted to use my spoon. I touched his napkin, in which was wrapped a spoon and fork. "You have your own spoon, you know," I teased. Embarrassment and laughter flushed across his face. He covered his face and laughed, "I thought that spoon came with the egg rolls!" I shook my head no, and I smiled at this precious man. "I was wondering why you would take the spoon yourself and not share it," he finally said after we both had a good laugh.

This hilarious lunchtime mishap made me think about perspective, though. How often do we only see a limited perspective and make judgements about other people based on our limited perspective? In this silly illustration, neither of us were upset, but let's take it a step further--like we often do in other similar situations when we don't understand why someone did what they did. From his perspective, I had taken the shared spoon. He didn't understand why I would be so selfish. I mean, we are supposedly sharing the appetizer, yet I had taken the sole spoon. How dare I? Do you see where this kind of thinking could give the enemy a foothold to get into our lives? Into our relationships? The thoughts, "How dare she?" "How could she?" "She's so selfish!" "She always does stuff like this!" all come creeping in.

In our case at lunch, I communicated to him a different perspective, and it ended in a lot of laughter. Many times, however, our assumptions and judgements of other people's behavior does not end so light-heartedly.

The Bible tells us to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). That means when a thought comes into our head, we are to take it to Christ--compare it to the Truth. What does the Bible say? We ask God to give us His perspective on the situation. Many times, there is something we are not seeing. If God can show us that we indeed have our own spoon sitting right in front of us, then we won't make wrong assumptions about the other person's intent. We are freed to assume the best in other people.


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