Everyone's a critic: our spouse, our boss and co-workers, our friends and acquaintances, our parents, and even our children, all find fault with us at times.
The criticism is sometimes a comment, and sometimes only a look, a sigh, or even silence. But we have no doubt that we've been found lacking once again.
We can respond with defense or offense. We can pretend indifference.
We can conjure up justifications for ourselves, explaining why we had to do what we did, or why it was reasonable to say what we did.
We can collect our outrage and self-righteousness and condemn the critic - in our hearts or out loud.
We can even accumulate accomplishments to use as armor against our critics.
We can charm, or we can intimidate. The message is the same: don't judge me. Love me or fear me, but don't judge me.
None of it seems to help much.
Why can't we just ignore the criticism?
Because deep inside we know we're not as good as we should be.
Relationships get us in the most trouble. We often seem to get them wrong: we do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, and fail to notice the things that we're supposed to notice.
We're never going to get it completely right with anyone. And they're never going to get it completely right with us.
We all know that, but we still don't want to be told that we're less than perfect -- not when it comes to anything that matters to us.
We have unrealistic expectations of ourselves -- and of others.
We think of human beings as being at the top of the heap, as the best there is. That's a tall order.
When we remember that only God is perfect, and that he, in all of his knowledge and wisdom, loves each one of us just as we are, the criticism is a little easier to take.
It isn't that we don't care about what others think. We just care more about what God thinks.
And God doesn't love us less when we do something wrong.
God is not a critic.
If He can love us - and He does - then we can live with the lesser critics, and maybe even be less critical ourselves.
Read on . . .