Seeing the whole picture

 In a previous house we lived in we were having cavity wall insulation put in, there were two men doing the job and I had made them both a cup of coffee. They finished the drink and left the cups on the step outside the French doors.  In the meantime my husband was questioning one of the workmen on an issue to do with why a certain area of the cavity wall was not being treated. The man gave my husband an explanation and then carried on his work.  My husband did not quite understand what the man had said and so questioned him further.  The man said 'You don't believe me do you?' and proceeded to explain more fully why the particular area of the wall was not being treated.  Finally, when my husband had more information, and could see the whole picture, he was satisfied that the man was right in what he was saying.  Until he had all the information my husband had been making a judgment with the small amount of knowledge that he had on the subject.  Lack of understanding had caused suspicion.

Soon after, something else happened which reaffirmed this train of thought.  I had brought the coffee cups in from the doorstep to wash them.  I noticed that there was a crack around the base of one of the cups.  'Throw it out' said my husband.  'There's another one of those mugs that has a crack in it in the cupboard.'  I said, 'I'll throw that one out too.'  This I endeavoured to do.

As I threw the two cups into the kitchen bin I suddenly had a thought in my mind. What if one of the men wanted to throw something into the bin and spotted the two cups there, they could think that I had thrown the two cups that they had used into the bin simply because they had drunk from them, for all the mugs were the same. What an awful atmosphere that would create!

One part of my mind was telling me not to be so absurd, but the other part was pointing out the fact that my husband's limited knowledge had caused him to be suspicious about the reason the workmen were not insulating one particular area of the house, and that the same situation could happen with the mugs when they had not heard our conversation regarding them. So I decided that the easiest way of avoiding misunderstanding was to put the cups inside a carrier bag inside the kitchen bin.  I had been made aware of how easy it is to misjudge a situation by what we see and think we know, when we do not see the whole picture.

It is God alone Who sees all, and these kind of trials are given us so that we might learn to be patient and not to judge by the small amount we think we know by what we see.