Proverbs 18:2
“Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions.” (NIV)

Today’s Thought
I forget how old I was but we were obviously doing a unit in public school about drugs. You know, what a bad choice they are and how they mess up your brain.

So you can only guess my horror when that night I heard my dad come in from outside, go into the downstairs bathroom, and sniff something.

‘What?’ I thought, ‘My own father?! How could it be! That’s so unlike him!’

So, freshly injected from my classroom stand-up-to-drugs curriculum, I went downstairs to find out what was going on. As I descended the stairs my dad came out of the bathroom.

“Hi Matthew, what’s going on?”

“Um, nothing. But I heard some sniffing.”

“Oh yes,” he replied. “That was me with this nasal spray. See?” He then showed me a familiar bottle I had seen on TV a thousand times.

“Okay, gotta head back outside to finish my work. See you at supper.”

With an embarrassed gulp I headed back up the stairs wondering how I could’ve made such a ridiculous mistake.

Truth is, our days our peppered with assumptions. And a lot of them are more serious than nasal spray.

We make assumptions about how easy we think someone has it. And we make assumptions about why someone said something to us. Or we make assumptions about someone’s reason for acting in a certain way.

And because of our assumptions we assume the worse and think we have people all figured out. But in reality, 9 out of 10 times we simply don’t know the bigger picture.

When you always make assumptions about other people, you’re not revealing the worst in them—but in you.

So today, don’t always assume the worst about someone else. There’s probably more going on than meets the eye. They have it harder than you think and probably struggle with the right words to say just as much as you.

Proverbs 18:2 says, “Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions.”

But that’s not you.

Today, believe the best—not because you’re gullible, but because you wisely know that there’s more to life—and more to the lives of the people around you—than what meets the eye.

By Matthew Ruttan