Presumptions

First I must say that there are no pictures today as I'm having problems with uploading them from My Pictures for some reason unknown to me!

Yesterday I went to my sister's house to spend a couple of hours together, as we do most weeks. I got the bus as usual in Stiby Road, showed the driver my bus pass and was about to tell him my destination when he handed me my ticket. The ticket printed out said that I was going from Stiby Road to the town centre. Actually I was going beyond that as far again on the other side of the town. But as most people getting on the bus at my stop go into town, the driver had presumed (wrongly) that I was going where most other people were going.

As my son and I share a house, we have on occasions received correspondence that is for both of us and addressed to Mr and Mrs Andradez. The sender presumed (wrongly) that we are husband and wife instead of mother and son. I can understand that usually a male and female of the same surname living in the same house would be a couple. I began to think how often I presume things about people that I don't actually know very well. It is easy to see someone and know a little about them and start building a picture about them that can sometimes be quite wrong, sometimes even offensive or hurtful. The tendency is to put people into categories, into boxes and treat them as a particular kind of person instead of an individual that might or might not be doing or thinking as most others in that situation might.

We presume certain things about Christianity too. Some think that going to a church building regularly is somehow a safe passage to Heaven. Yet Jesus says that not everyone who says 'Lord, Lord' will enter Heaven. So going through the motions, making the right noises and conforming to what the majority think is right is not in itself the key to the Kingdom. Some would say that if we follow God's leading and obey His voice then we are safe, that somehow we are protected in some sort of bubble, that it is some sort of insurance policy against mishaps and problems.  Again Jesus never promised that to His followers. In fact the Bible says that God makes the rain to fall equally on the bad and the good.  His promise is to guide us through difficulties not necessarily to avoid them altogether.  My friend Diane wrote in her blog about this. You can read what she says here under the post entitled 'Victory confused with Happiness'. 

So we need to take care not to presume that things are or will turn out a certain way. Follow God's leading - YES. Obey His voice -YES. But expect the unexpected, know that we can have troubles and dark days and uncertainties and times of being misunderstood. You may have made plans but don't presume that things will always turn out the way you thought they would. It's called life in the real world!