Here’s a question for you to consider… Have you ever walked into a room at the tail end of a joke? When everyone is laughing, but you? And you wondered what the joke was? Or maybe it’s worse than that.. You hear two people talking and you can make out bits and pieces of the conversation, but as you approach they suddenly begin whispering. Ever wonder if they were talking about you? We all have had those thoughts at times and unless we ask them to repeat the joke or ask what or whom they were talking about, our minds tend to fill in the blanks. We make up the rest of the story. The parts we didn’t hear. We become our own fiction writers.
I admit it.. I am a big Hallmark movie fan. Currently my husband and I have been binge watching Hallmark movies. We watched all the fall themed movies and now we are watching the Christmas Hallmark movies. Yikes! Why so early with the Christmas movies Hallmark? It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet. Well, anyway, we all know the basic story line. Guy and Gal are dating for several years. They are happy, maybe a little complacent, when the girl is asked to travel out of town for work. (Guy can also be substituted here). When she travels from her hometown and her guy, she suddenly falls for the handsome stranger in the course of 1.5 days. Handsome stranger falls in love and somehow in the 1.5 days of their acknowledgement of each other he buys a ring and thinks about asking her to marry him, or go out on a date or something. Meanwhile guy in hometown shows up just as handsome stranger is going to propose and declare his love for the gal. But… the guy from hometown suddenly decides HE will propose to our gal. The handsome stranger is waiting just far enough away to see the hometown guy drop a knee, BUT what he doesn’t see as he hurries away is our gal’s decline. And a misunderstanding follows, which allows for ALL those commercials during the last fifteen minutes of the movie- Hey Hallmark needs to pay for the movies somehow, besides selling cards! Anyway, once the misunderstanding is corrected our happy new couples lives happily ever after- lights fade- roll credits.
So is life like that? Well as I described before kind of. Recently, I overheard my husband in the other room. I thought he was talking to me- I mean we are the only two in the house. But in reality he was speaking out-loud about another matter. I created a fictional conversation in my mind, that included me. Needless to say I had misunderstood. After I had stewed for a day, we finally realized what he was saying hadn’t been for me, but for something else. But it had ruined a good day. The Bible says we are to guard our heart for “Everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23, NIV). Luke 6: 45 confirms the important connection between the heart and words when he writes, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks ( ESV). Ouch, we have all been there, we say something we shouldn’t. And sometimes we are overheard. We also shouldn’t jump to conclusions. It causes confusion and even hurt feelings. Good communication is important in friendships and relationships. It can be the difference in moving forward or holding on to misunderstandings and grudges. The next time you over hear a conversation and are unsure if they were talking about- stick with non-fiction- ask them to clarify their conversations. Now back to the binge watching- God Bless Nancy
Moving Forward 