Last week in God Squad one of the topics we were dealing with was snap judgements that we make about people and how accurate, useful or destructive they are. Today on the train as I was heading into Harvard, the guy sitting across from me was reading a fairly thick book with a black cover and he was moving his lips and moving his fingers around to different parts, like he was trying to figure out something, like an equation. He also happened to be Indian and so I jumped to the conclusion that he was a grad student at Harvard and he was reading a physics book.
As we kept going he shifted and lifted the book up and it turned out to be a Bible, which totally blew my first impression and brought up a whole new set of ideas about him. It also happened to be the NIV which tends to be the "conservative" translation, so now I also had to weigh thoughts about conservatives who would be reading their Bible in public.
We make snap judgements all the time. I think it's impossible not to, but we have to be aware of them as well so that we can get past them in order to see everyone as a child of God.
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