Seeing the good/God in others
I’ve always enjoyed being different, being myself, even if that made other people look at me strangely. As a teen it was wearing lots of dark makeup, dread-locks and whatever dark, somewhat sexy outfit I could come up with. Actually, I’m still mostly that person. ha. My mom never gave me a hard time about it and while it made my dad uncomfortable that just made it more fun for me. One particular relative always made her distaste for my style abundantly clear and her attitude towards me reflected what she thought. “Good Christian girls would never wear so much black or so much makeup”. Whenever we left her house I always told my mom “she doesn’t like me”. And mom always reassured me that simply wasn’t true, until as it turned out, it was. I’ve been saved since I was four years old and I can’t tell you how much it bothered me in my teenage years to be told I was always “too whatever, to be a Christian.” More than that, I could see the thoughts in their expression. My tattoos, my love of Halloween and all things creepy, the fact that I like tight dresses and tall boots... “that girl can’t possibly love Jesus as much as me.” So I learned from a young age to use my appearance to weed out the fake people and only hang out with the people who saw the good in me. A lot were Christian, a lot were Pagan. And funny enough it was usually the Pagans who didn’t judge my looks OR question my faith! I can count on one hand the number of churches I’ve been comfortable in but I am SO thankful for those few. I love the people that can look at me and see my spirit, the people that look at me with more than their eyes. The people that see the good/ God that is in everyone! The other day at a library book event, a sweet little old man came up to me. He reminded me of one of my favorite relatives (who happens to be a preacher) and he noticed the tattoo on my arm of the verse from 2 Timothy 1:7. He loved it and bought my book “Three Witches in a Small Town”, paying me more than the asking price. He ended up coming back to the table to chat and shared some of his stories of faith and thanked me for being a light in his day. He was wonderful and was definitely a blessing for me. Afterwards others walked by and a couple of them made snide remarks about the things I choose to write or what they assume it is I write. And all I could do was shake my head, not that I care if they read my books, but because they were judging a book by its cover in more than one way. Do your best to be kind to everyone, always, I promise they will notice.
