Dangerous Assumptions

By Audrey Stallsmith

Since men from the electric company have been installing new poles on our dead-end road, we’ve had to make adjustments in when we attempt to leave the farm. During their lunch hour or after quitting time usually is best. Otherwise, we get stuck waiting until they are done with whatever pole they are installing at that moment and can move their equipment to let us through.

One Friday, however, we saw no sign of the men working and assumed they had gone home for an early weekend, leaving their big trucks in the field on the farm where they had been parking them. So, I was able to get out easily to take a friend where she needed to go.

On my way home I was thinking of other things, as is common with us absent-minded writers, and our road branches off from the main one on a curve. So, it is impossible to see it until you are right on top of it. Therefore, I had blithely begun my swing into the end of our cul-de-sac before I saw that there was a big electric company truck waiting smack dab in the middle of it!

Usually, my reaction times aren’t fast. But that time I managed to swerve partway out onto the main road again. Then I frantically tried to cram my big car into the impossibly small space where our road flares out before meeting the other one. Even when parked on one side, the large electric company trucks usually take up more than half of our narrow road. And this guy wasn’t on his side but in the middle.

What happened next is a bit blank to me. But I’m assuming he must wisely have started pulling out as soon as he saw me coming. And we somehow managed to squeak past each other.

By the time I looked in my rearview mirror, he already was gone, but there appeared to be another car stopped somewhat askew on the main road. I deduced that somebody must have had to brake very suddenly to avoid the big truck too and probably was roundly cursing both of us.

We deserved it since the electric company guy and I apparently had made the same unsafe assumption—that we weren’t going to meet anybody else on that seldom traveled dead-end road. So, he thought it was okay to wait in the middle of it while I didn’t slow down enough to take a good look before turning into it.

It got me to thinking about other unfounded assumptions we often make that have the potential to damage our lives. For example, we think we can read other people’s minds and tell whether or not they like us or don’t like us. And we may spend the rest of our life resenting someone whose expression or tone of voice once seemed to indicate the latter. Actually, that person may just have been having a bad day or was preoccupied with other things.

In fact, if there’s one thing I’ve learned since my bashful school days, it is that worry about what people are thinking is a waste of time because most people aren’t thinking about us at all. And it’s a bit egotistical to believe that they are!

An even more dangerous assumption we may make is about how God perceives us. He is one of the few who, as the Bible points out, “is always thinking about you and watching everything that concerns you” (I Peter 5:7 LB). And some people assume He is like an overcritical father who jumps on every mistake we make in an effort to prove that we never were any good.

The Old Testament prophets may sometimes be guilty of giving that impression. Skeptics often complain that they make God sound angry and spiteful, like a petty tyrant who can’t stand anybody opposing him. We tend to say of such a person “He thinks he’s God.”

But God, of course, really is God. And there is a big difference between a man who hates and lashes out at his opponents because they threaten his shaky ego and the Father King who becomes frustrated with the humans He created and loves because they refuse to love Him in return.

God has such power that He doesn’t need our praise to support His ego. But He knows that we need to worship something because that it what we were made for. And, if we choose to turn away from Him and worship something inferior, we are headed for disaster when that something inevitably lets us down.

Those of us who live in democracies tend to see veneration of and obedience to a king as a bad thing. And we do well to be wary of it since there are few humans who can remain good when they face no opposition. In fact, as became apparent throughout history, many a king couldn’t even hold the love of his own sons who were eager to kill their father to grab all the power for themselves.

But God, we need to remember, is not corrupted by power as humans tend to be. After all, if there is one thing the New Testament parables make clear, it is that He actually is the type of Father who forgives our sins and slip-ups, pays our debts, and loves us anyway. We need to keep that firmly in mind when reading those Old Testament books which sometimes make Him sound like another “Person” entirely!