Tag: judgement

  • The Harvest Is Abundant: Encountering God’s Laborers in Unexpected Places

    The Harvest Is Abundant: Encountering God’s Laborers in Unexpected Places

    Distant person walking through a fall foliage-lined path
    Photo by Masood Aslami on Pexels

    I went out for a jog recently on a beautiful early autumn afternoon. I have jogged this route often enough that I know what to expect on every street and what lies around each corner. But on this particular sunny afternoon towards the end of my run, on a sleepy side street by the beach, I encountered someone I had never seen before. 

    When I first caught sight of him, he was still a ways off, walking straight towards me down the street. He appeared to be a middle-aged man who looked rather disheveled. He had long scraggly hair and dirty old clothes. He was dressed for the middle of winter – even though it was barely fall. It looked like he was carrying something very heavy; the closer we got, I noticed it was a large black trash bag that he had slung over his shoulder. I also noticed that he was staring straight at me. Then, all of a sudden, he dropped his bag on the street and just stood there, watching me jog closer and closer. 

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    Warning bells went off in my head – lessons learned as a child of “Stranger danger! Stranger danger!” – and I hustled across the street to pass him at the maximum possible distance. I tried to avoid eye contact as I drew parallel to him. As I approached, he didn’t whistle at me, shout obscenities, or do any of the other things my mind caused me to fear he might do. 

    Instead, he simply started clapping. “You go girl!” he said with a smile as I finally passed by. “You can do it! You’re almost there!” I recovered from my shock in time to turn around and see him once again shoulder his heavy bag. “Thank you!” I shouted back in his direction. He turned and waved. 

    My jog felt unusually easy after this chance encounter, like it was all downhill with the wind at my back. And I couldn’t stop smiling. I think it’s because I wasn’t at all expecting God to use this particular moment and this particular person to teach me a lesson. If the mysterious stranger I had encountered was homeless, then I should have been the one helping him. Yet there he was, cheering me on with a smile, and quietly teaching me an invaluable lesson about how my fears can prevent me from recognizing others as children of God and connecting with them in a meaningful way.

    As I reflected on the beautiful fall day, combined with the joy of an unexpected connection, I called to mind Matthew 9:37-38, when Jesus says to his disciples, “The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” Jesus’s observation about the scarcity of laborers is the last thing he says to his closest followers before commissioning them as Apostles in Matthew 10, thereby giving them the power to share in his saving mission. Today, the work of the harvest continues, a sacred duty passed on from the Apostles down to us. 

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    Laborers in God’s harvest are as needed as ever. I can’t help but believe that the stranger I encountered on that autumn afternoon jog had been sent out by God, a laborer in God’s harvest. This man reminded me that it’s the little things we do every day that tend to have the biggest impact in building God’s Kingdom. 

    Saint Teresa of Calcutta told us, “There are many people who can do big things, but there are very few people who will do the small things.” During my jog that day, I didn’t do the small things; instead, I assumed the worst about a fellow human being and tried my best to avoid him. Fortunately, he didn’t let this stop him. He took the time to stop, look me in the eye, and extend joy and encouragement to someone who must have looked like she could use it. He did the small things. Isn’t this at the heart of what we are called to do as Christ’s disciples? Isn’t this the everyday work of a laborer in God’s harvest? 

    Now, on my runs, walks, or hikes, I try to make eye contact with everyone I meet, smile, and extend a greeting, even if it’s just a word or two. Following the stranger’s example, when I see someone approaching in the distance, particularly someone in need of help, I try to ask myself what I can do – however small – to offer help and hope. St. Therese of Lisieux encouraged us to “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” 

    My encounter with the stranger has taught me that to labor in God’s harvest means to choose others, to make connections, to reach out across whatever may separate us. To be a laborer is to invite and welcome others to share in God’s harvest. It is a labor of love, and it starts with the seemingly small things: smiles, greetings, kind words, and offers of help.

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    During this fall season, as I find myself admiring homes, schools, stores, and workplaces wonderfully decorated in harvest themes – as I join in secular harvest-time rituals like visiting apple orchards, pumpkin patches, and parish harvest fairs – my encounter with the stranger continues to lead me to see God’s harvest with new eyes. I find myself noticing and reflecting on the work being done all around us to make the harvest ever more abundant. 

    I have committed myself to the practice of slowing down and really seeing the people around me: the young boy who happily handed three dandelions he had just picked to an elderly woman walking past him on the sidewalk, the teenagers in Massachusetts who raised thousands of dollars for hurricane victims in Florida, the mom with very little free time who offers to chair a big fundraiser at her children’s school… I have discovered that I am surrounded by people who are doing the small things with love, who are visible signs of the abundance of God’s blessings in our world. 

    Sometimes God’s laborers might not look the way we expect them to. They might work at times and in places we wouldn’t expect to see them. Nonetheless, they are there, along with the Master of the Harvest, quietly and humbly going about the mission, joyfully beckoning us, too, to join in the work.

  • Choosing Compassion Over Criticism: Why I’m Giving Up Judging Others for Lent

    Choosing Compassion Over Criticism: Why I’m Giving Up Judging Others for Lent

    A hand pointing at the sky
    Photo by Maayan Nemanov on UnSplash

    At a 4:00 p.m. Saturday Mass in Overland Park, Kansas, during the preparation of gifts, I sat on the stiff, dark wooden church pew and reflected on Lent. Earlier that week, a student taking my Christian Ethics course asked what I had given up for the season. It was a routine question, but it felt more genuine since we had been discussing moral virtues, vices, and spirituality that day. I told the class that I had not decided. The students were surprised. I acknowledged that, in the past, I had given up yelling at my children (now teenagers!) with mixed results. 

    What came to me during Mass was the thought that I could give up judging other people as the Gospel of Matthew teaches. “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matthew 7:1-2). As the thought arose, I sensed that God began to laugh. Indeed, when I told my ethics students that I had given up judging others, they howled and one student commented, “Professor Hughes, c’mon, you can’t be serious!”

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    Yes, I get it. We evaluate other people’s actions and their character constantly: for an unkind word, indifference to our needs, suffering behind a slow car or being passed by a fast one, or, worse yet, feeling our good work or integrity is overlooked or forgotten. Our judgments frequently pair with hurt, anger, resentment – pain. Psychology tells us that we tend to attribute more to personal character than to situations and that we know much less about complex situations, actions, and motives than we suppose. I cannot count how many times I’ve made snap judgments about certain students on the first day of class. I might focus on a weird facial expression, a slouched body posture, a face hidden under a hoodie, or a single negative comment and sortput them squarely into a “worthy” or “unworthy” bucket. 

    During Lent, I became more attuned to the frequency and quality of my judgments. I habitually sorted actions and persons into different categories — innocent, guilty, deserving, undeserving — so that Jesus’ injunction seemed on a commonsense level to be impossible. Surely, he didn’t mean it! On my daily commute, at times I find myself attributing malicious motives against me by my fellow commuters behind the careless driving or impatient honks without knowing anything about their lives, worries, pressures, etc. And it really makes no sense. But I, along with many of us, can habituate taking offense and then passing harsh judgments too easily and quickly.

    Or perhaps Jesus just meant not consigning another person to hell. It is, in fact, easy to think this. But from my Lenten experience and reflection on Matthew, I don’t believe condemnation is the main issue. What’s happening is a more subtle and pervasive way of seeing and assessing others that becomes a blindness to love. So what does this biblical teaching mean?

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    Matthew’s and other biblical references to “judging” seldom mean “do not condemn.” Luke uses a different word for “judge” (krino) and for “condemn” (katadikazete), distinguishing two different acts. Matthew (and Mark) add to the prohibition on judging the caution about how the way we measure others should be the way we measure ourselves. So, condemnation is only one of many responses covered in the ways we judge — not the only way. It seems that the meaning concerns more common interactions and judgments we make. From my own experience this past Lent, this distinction rang true. 

    That Lent, I learned that Jesus does not mean ignoring injustice or becoming desensitized to evil and wrongdoing. What I found in self-monitoring my judgment of others — especially behind the wheel — was that when I judged and quickly sorted another person into a negative category, I became less connected to that person, more cut off, more isolated from them and from my own tendency to act likewise. Indeed, one of the key meanings of the Greek term krino aside from “judge,” is “to separate.” If I wanted to see harshness, strictness, looking out to be offended by this look, that remark, his comment or her gesture, I would find them. I saw and judged the other as such. And in so doing, I separated myself from my neighbor and ignored my own harshness, strictness, and ways that I might offend others. 

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    I was not at all aware that the measuring stick I used would be similarly used on me. And that is the tough part. It requires serious self-reflection, knowledge of one’s sinfulness, needing God’s help, mercy, and being constantly on the lookout for goodness to get “judging” right. It requires a type of ego death, one that means a better seeing of another person in all their complexity rather than a fixation on a snapshot in time or a fault, hurt, or offense. A patient gazing and understanding of the other with, what Richard Rohr calls “soft eyes,” rather than an emotional reaction and quick sorting into some form of inferiority. 

    Judging others makes it very hard indeed to see Christ’s goodness, kindness, mercy, and love being poured out upon my neighbor and myself every second. Judging can quickly and subtly lend itself to emphasizing what is wrong with the person, the driver, the lack, the negative in a situation. It means seeing the person or group behind such acts as unable to be fully defined and described and named by them as who they are in God. That Lenten lesson is still a work in progress for me. I suspect we all need to practice slowing down, waiting, and letting the goodness of the other reveal itself to us. For that, we’ll need to ask God for help: help to slow my assessments, find more patience, and remember that everyone is an image of incomprehensible love. And finally, I need to trust that, as always, our loving God will deliver and help me to see more lovingly and less critically.