I was just watching a video clip of a young man and girl on you tube.  It was the typical, Simon Cowle makes a face or tweaks his mouth in reservation, judging them.  If you look at the faces in the audience, you see they too have made a determination about this couple.

Case in point.  You have to see this.

You see what I mean?

Later, we see this:

 

We, as people make snap judgments on everything we see or hear.  We often times don’t wait to get the full picture. I do it all the time and I generally hate myself for it afterward.

We are often hardest on one another. Judging. Always judging.

If someone walks out of the john with toilet paper trailing behind them, we tend to snicker or let it be, we do nothing to rescue them. Mind you, I didn’t let that pass, but did notice many who did.

If someone looks different, smells different, is fat, has too many tats, hair too long, varied in color or they look tattered, dirty or perhaps their mascara or lipstick is smeared or worse yet there’s a good looking guy with a big booger in his nose. What do we do? Do we tend to turn away and think, yuck!?

At that moment when the young woman came out of the ladies room trailing tissue, I ran up to her from behind and blocked the view as best I could and tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Stop! You are trailing tissue and your skirt is up!” Though embarrassed, she hadn’t gone far and was so very grateful. I had rescued her.

I remember feeling like a hero. The thing of it is, she was a large girl with poor posture and sadly dressed. She had all the makings of a joke, the kid in school that everyone would make fun of, yet something inside me didn’t hesitate.  I’m sure she may even have had the same level of confidence of Jonathan.

Yeah, yeah. While it may appear I pat myself on the back, I don’t.

There have been times, I would have wanted someone to tell me if something was askew, instead of me finding out hours later. There have been many a time I was not the rescuer.

I’m sure we all recall moments in time where we fell short.

Like the young kids above, sometimes people need “rescuing” in different ways. Sometimes, they just need a helping hand.

The story above is a lesson to us all and in many ways. On the surface it’s one of friendship and loyalty true, but it’s more than even that. At least to me it is.

At first he’d been judged and then she was judged.

Sometimes I think in rescuing others, we rescue ourselves. In the end they went their separate ways amicably two years later. For a time though they needed that bond they found in each other to give them each the lift needed to work independently. He had time for the stigma of his size to pass.  As Jonathan and Charlotte’s confidence level improved, they were both finally free to explore their talent, each in their own way. Both are doing extremely well on their own now. 

Sometimes, if you see a friend in need, or if someone reaches out, it doesn’t have to be forever but only for a time. You never know what impact you might make on someone’s life, but especially your own for having been there.

I once had someone tell me that the good deed doers are in it for themselves, for how it makes them feel to do it. Perhaps. I can’t deny, it does feel good to help someone but what harm is there in that?

As for the booger.

It was me who didn’t tell the good looking guy he had a booger in his nose.

We were in high school. Granted he’d been surfing earlier and water tends to do that, but I thought he should know that. I remember him flirting and smiling and I wouldn’t give him the time of day. All I saw was the booger. Besides that, it seemed that all he ever did or cared about was surfing. Out of high school, he went on to be a fireman. It turns out he wasn’t a loser. While fighting fires, he got a contractors license and built some very nice homes in California. Later he would move to Hawaii with his wife, a former cheerleader which surprised everyone and went on to build multi million dollar homes there.  At our class reunion, he told my husband how he’d always thought I was so hot and how I wouldn’t give him ‘the time of day’! Yeah, that was me.

My husband and I have a word for that. “Idiot”

As I said, don’t judge a book by it’s cover.  You will almost always be surprised.