“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou.
My goodness, I have learned so much from this woman over the years. I quote her so often, you would think we were friends. I would like to believe if we had ever met in person, we would have become friends. She’s kind of like a Yoda to so many of us. (Except she makes far more sense than Yoda.)
One of my favorite Maya quotes is the one above. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I love this advice. I love it so much I taught it to Michala when she was growing up. I love it so much, I tend to dismiss it.
I know you just read that last line and thought, “Wait. What?”
Hear me out, though.
I am a bit of a stubborn woman. So I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, a few too many times. I often excuse bad behavior when it should be inexcusable. I want to give grace when met with grunge. This is what we should do. The first time, anyway.
But when people show us who they are, we should believe them. We cannot change bad behavior or bad people. Just because we would not act one way does not mean other people won’t.
“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.” - Proverbs 4:23 (NLT)
Something Bob Goff wrote in Love Does stuck with me, but I tend to not practice it. He wrote about bad people, “I don’t mean to sound callous, because the bad ones need friends too. They just don’t need you.”
I think sometimes we (as lovers of Jesus) try so hard to be like Jesus, we forget we aren’t Jesus. In other words, we can’t save someone or change someone … only Jesus can. And Jesus does not expect us to become someone’s emotional punching bag. We have to guard our hearts. If we allow someone else to spew their misery on us, we are not guarding our hearts, and our hearts determine the course of our lives.
So the venom continues to spread, if we do not cut it off, at the source.
I very much believe we are to be kind and gracious even to unkind, hateful people. But it is also okay to see them as Bob Goff described: “bad people need friends, too. They just don’t need you.” We can still pray for their hearts to be changed. We just need to pray from a distance.