By: Kevin Cauley
It is impossible to know everything about another person. Each faces life from their own set of personal experiences, making everyone unique. Adults have enough experiences in common to facilitate basic communication. This is a start, but to have the kind of interactions that God wants us to have, we must get outside of our own limited experiences and look at things from the perspective of another. This is not easy because one is no longer just facing what one knows about himself, but what one does not know about another. The temptation is always there to retreat into one’s own experiences, but this does not develop the relationship. It only serves to self-justify by creating our image of other people (2 Corinthians 10:12). The single greatest obstacle that we face in our relationships is the image that we construct of other people.
Most of the time, we interact with that image instead of with the actual person. Why do we do this? It is easier. That image is a product of our creation. It is what we see of ourselves in someone else. We know it very well. After all, we made it. But this is a selfish move because we are just interacting with an image of our creation, not the other person. This is a failure to engage authentically. It creates shallow and impersonal relationships that have no real substance.
God calls us, however, to interact with the actual person (Matthew 7:12, 22:39). This is real work because we must suppress our desires to relate only to what we know. We must reach out and learn about the other person by seeing them as unique and different. Then we can see them as they are, not as we want them to be.