Finding Fault (Friday Devotional)

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.

- Colossians 3:12

I was fuming. Running late for work, I’d been gathering up my things only to realize my wallet was nowhere to be found. When I retraced my steps, I remembered that Lindsey had asked to borrow my credit card to order something online, so I asked her where she’d put the wallet. Her response was the last one you want to hear when your stuff has gone missing: “I put it right back where I found it.”

So there I was, looking under furniture and through drawers, utterly convinced that she’d misplaced my wallet. Silently (or at least under my breath) I was cursing her irresponsibility, her absentmindedness, and her disregard for my things. I was just waiting for my moment of vindication, the moment when the wallet would turn up, only for her to say, “Oooooh yeah, I did put it there!”

Instead, as I rifled through the laundry hamper, the wallet fell out of the pants I’d worn the day before. The words I’d been waiting for her to say became my line instead. It turns out I, not Lindsey, had been the culprit all along.

It’s much easier to shift blame than to accept it. Leo Tolstoy once said, “Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself,” and that is surely as true today as when he said it. When crises come, we are quick to point fingers, but slow to accept our own culpability. Diagnosing other people’s failures comes so easily that sometimes it doesn’t even occur to us that we might share some of the responsibility.

But Scripture reminds us that believers in Jesus Christ are far from infallible, and we must take steps to avoid letting pride stand in the way of love. With the same breath in which Paul calls us “God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved,” he also cautions us to puts on humility and meekness, compassion and kindness. Our task is not to win arguments, but to win people to Christ.

To be blunt, sometimes you’re wrong. There’s no shame in that—the shame comes when you care more about defending your viewpoints than about loving your neighbor. In a prideful world, Christ calls his disciples to the countercultural witness of humility.