Standard Baring

A few years ago I had the misfortune of overhearing a girl coming down after a night of drinks to console herself for being dumped. It was not some one I knew personally, but she was friends with several people who were renting the house where I was currently playing lan games. I tried to tune her out, but that was not possible with her and her friends sitting right behind where my computer was set up. In order to mask the tension of knowing that she was vulnerable right then, they all spoke excessively loud and laughed altogether to hard at bad jokes that centered around things like observations about the male anatomy in pornos they had seen.

My annoyance peaked when one of them started to tell indignantly of how some girl at the bar they had come from had started striping. She then qualified her statement saying she had stripped in the ally behind the bar before but NEVER in the bar. That was apparently just too far.

After the current game was over I left still angry at the intrusion on my evening, and it was not till the next day that I articulated why that last statement the girl had made annoyed me so much. At the time I wanted to shout at her that just because you can find someone more depraved than you does not mean that what you do is ok. But that is only half of it. When I thought it through I saw that beyond just justifying her own behavior, what she was doing was setting her own self as the standard of conduct. That is to say that in her mind, anyone who behaved worse than her was evil. Anyone who behave equally to her was normal. And anyone who behaved better would be righteous. She was her own standard by which she could judge the rest of the world.

I then realized that I do this to. Almost any time I am annoyed with someone it is because they have violated that standard by which all things are judged, which is me. It was then that I realized that if it was ok for me to use that standard for the rest of the world, then it would only be fair that Jesus should apply that same standard to me. Not the standard of me, but the standard that He laid out in His life. By that standard I am damned.

Therefore, for me to feel annoyance at others because they are doing things that I would not, such as having loud, lewd conversations with total disregard for everyone else in the room, is to travel a little down the road to hell. So I have to constantly remind myself that I am not the standard barer, and forgive them as I want God to forgive me.

If you make a conscious effort to do this, you'll be amazed at how quickly the anger, stress, and annoyance, that you may not even have known was filling you, is replaced with patience, compassion, and peace.