To Judge or Not to Judge

This past weekend I went to Morton to stay with Tanya because Lamar was out of town.  We had a really relaxing weekend, hanging out with the kids and doing a bit of shopping.  We went to BW3's for dinner on Saturday which we both love, and then got a movie and went back to their house.

Lamar came back on Saturday night so we'd planned to go to church the next morning.  But it was storming and everyone was tired so we opted out.  Lamar eventually decided he wanted to go to Cracker Barrel for breakfast but there was a pretty big wait, so we went to Steak N Shake. 

The waitress came to our table almost immediately and she was pretty attentive.  When she walked away to get our drinks, Tanya mentioned that she had some coupons (shocking I know) and so we started looking through them to see what we could find.  When the waitress came back we were still going through them and that's when the change happened.  After that, she wasn't very attentive and barely came back to the table to check up on us.

As we were leaving Lamar made the point that once she saw the coupons, she pretty much made a snap judgment about us!  Never mind that most people are doing what they can to cut costs these days but we felt like the minute she saw those, she pegged us as people who couldn't afford to eat out and had no money.

I was thinking about that on Sunday afternoon when I was driving home.  I'm really not unlike that waitress.  I make snap judgments all the time about people and about 75% of the time, I'm way off.  I realized how upset I was when I realized what the waitress was thinking about me and was really convicted about how I must make people feel.  And now I'm going to be totally honest and tell you that judgement is the one thing I've struggled with my entire life.  It's gotten better over the years but it's always there in the back of my mind.  I hate that about myself but its also made me work really hard to overcome it.

As I've been thinking about that, I was reminded of the post my sister wrote about allowing negative thoughts to come in and how they can take over our thought processes.  I realized that I allow that to happen way to often which then makes me even more judgmental...kind of a vicious cycle.  Anyway, I'm not sure that I've come to any resolution about this except to say that because I'm aware of it, I now am hopeful that I will begin to see a change.  Who knew Steak N Shake could be so deep?