Every time Amazon delivers something to my door, I receive a text message asking me to “rate my experience.” The text reads, “Your package with Pampers Baby Dry Diapers has been delivered by the carrier. Rate it right here at amazon.com/box.”
Really? Rate my experience? Let’s see… hmmm… I ordered the diapers, and then they arrived. Great job, everyone.
We live in a world that constantly prompts us to judge. Rate your experience, size up your competition, weigh her beauty, gauge his sincerity. Look. Evaluate. Assess. Judge.
These activities have a legitimate place in our lives. We weigh options for their risks and benefits. We attempt to choose right from wrong. We listen for truth and goodness in an effort to protect ourselves from deception. We teach our children discernment.
But judging can take up too much space in our minds and can become a perpetual habit. Once judgment becomes habit, I am prone to criticalness. I don’t want to be known for a critical spirit. I want to be about welcome, hospitality, and spiritual formation; I want to be about other-oriented-ness and active service. I want to develop a disposition that says, “This is enough. You are enough. I am enough. Relax, and rest,” rather than a personality that is always rating myself and others and concluding, “More, better, faster, higher. You could really do better next time.”
This vision of myself is not yet reality. I’m a driver. I run fast and hard, and I seek continual improvement. I need God’s words in my ear each and every moment reminding me as he reminded Jesus, “You are my beloved, precious in my eyes.” It is counter-cultural to allow myself, my circumstances and others to be enough – to cease striving and to rest in gratitude and joy. More and more, I want to live each day with less of an Amazon “rate me” philosophy and more of a Scriptural conviction: “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”
Susie Grade 