When I was in elementary school, I called a boy in my class pathetic.  I blame part of that on watching too much Ren and Stimpy with my cousin when we probably should have just been sleeping instead.  I blame the other part on my inability to filter well.  I didn’t even know what pathetic meant.  I just knew that he wasn’t like the other boys in our class.  About the only thing he could do well was run and he seemed to do that alone.

To this day, I think about that boy and how I called him pathetic.  I didn’t know the whole story.  I had no idea that he actually had a learning disability and couldn’t help the fact he didn’t read as well as the rest of us.  I didn’t know the whole story but what I did with what I thought I knew– got me in trouble and hurt someone else deeply.

I guess that boy told my teacher because she made me look up the word and read its definition out loud.  She then made me apologize to the boy in front of the whole class for calling him pathetic.  Lesson learned. 

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“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

“We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.  “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Eve eventually gets talked into eating from the tree and Adam goes right into disobeying with her.  (Totally Adam’s fault. 😉  (Please know the sarcasm.)  The bottom line is, they ran with something they really knew nothing about and it caused pain and strife.  They didn’t know the whole story.

I’m guessing that you’re as guilty as I am in not always slowing down to be sure you know the whole story before you talk.  Imagine the pain that could just go away if we’d stop causing strife on each other in ways that we can fix.

So, I dare you.  (Means you have to do it now, right? 😉   I dare you to hold back on all of the sharing until you know that you know…. You know the whole story.