“I guess sometimes I just worry that if I divulge too much about myself, you will find out you don’t like me.”

Those are the words that my friend said to me this morning on our drive into work. We were talking about the way that she pushes down her real feelings creating a pollyanna-ish view of herself. I love the Pollyanna in her, but I also like to dig through the layers of a person to see who they are and what makes them tick. I love to see the inner workings of the inner being, and I admit that I was digging deep with her this morning–although she was giving me permission to do so.

This morning, I explained to her that, for me at least, it wasn’t about whether I judged her or not. It was about finding out who she was and sifting through the sandy layers of what made the reasons to why she reacts the way she does.

“Don’t you ever get surprised by what you learn about a person?” she curiously asked me, and the question took me back for a moment because it’s true that very few things really surprise me. I told her that I am an observer and I have analyzed human behavior nearly my entire life, and that there is a very a good chance that I have already deduced more about her than she could ever tell me. That comment took her back.

I’m not a counselor or a pyschiatrist, not even a psychologist, but I do love people and I love finding out who they are and what makes them who they are. I’m no saint, either. I make snap judgements about people all the time, but I try to keep the snap judgements in a holding pattern. I call them my pending file.

In my pending file, are all of my first impressions of a person and I keep them there to refer back to if I need to. Sometimes, the pending file holds personality traits that are incredibly unpleasant to me, but this rarely stops me from discarding the relationship altogether. The reason for this is that I instinctively don’t trust what’s in the pending file. If I let the pending file be the key to a relationship, I would have missed a lot of great and valid relationships in my life. So, I leave the pending file sitting there, and I start working on what I learn about the person after I start digging.

The truth is, I haven’t always been like that, either. I have made some judgements about people that I have loved and have ruined the relationships. I have made grave mistakes with people that have caused irreparable harm, but those mistakes were the catalyst for the pending file that I created in my brain. Those mistakes taught me to take a second, third, maybe even a fourth look at someone and to see them with new eyes. My friend doesn’t know some pretty gritty details about me, either.

When Jesus met the woman at the well, he had enough information about her to make a snap judgement. He told her all the dirty details about her life, but he did it without looking down on her. Based on what he knew about her, he could easily have walked on past her and never have spoken at all. Instead, he chose to speak. He spoke to a woman, a samaritan, an adulteress and even knowing all of this, he still offered her living water. We have to learn from him and offer others living water as well, but we can’t do that if we aren’t willing to first let go of the data we keep in the pending file.