Seeing People Through the Heart of God

Something has been weighing on my heart lately. There have been moments when I thought I had made peace with certain things, only for a memory or a passing thought to bring those feelings right back to the surface. I have prayed about them, questioned my own responses, and found myself looking back at experiences from years ago that I had not thought about in a long time.

It has me thinking about how much our past shapes the way we see the people we love.

I have learned that grief does not follow a straight line. You can be going about your day, perfectly content, and then something reminds you of what you have lost and your heart suddenly feels heavier. I am learning we can grieve that same way when a relationship changes, even when the person is still very much alive and well. Sometimes we are grieving the closeness we once shared, and sometimes we are grieving what we always believed that relationship would be.

Looking back has shown me something uncomfortable about myself. I have spent a lot of my life trying to make relationships okay by trying harder. If something felt unsettled, I wanted to fix it, so I would become more understanding, offer more grace, search for the right words, or make one more effort, believing that if I could just do enough, I could keep things from falling apart. I have even caught myself wondering whether certain moments of reaching out have come from God prompting me to extend compassion, or from that old desire to make sure everything feels okay again.

One thought has stayed with me through all of this, and I keep coming back to it: I can understand someone’s struggles without becoming responsible for managing their emotions.

When we have known someone for years, we build an understanding of who they are. We remember how they responded in hard situations, what they have struggled with, and the patterns we have noticed along the way. Sometimes those observations help us love people better, and sometimes we start interpreting what they are doing today through the lens of everything we experienced with them before. Our experiences are real. They just do not always give us the complete picture of what is happening in someone else’s heart.

I was reminded of that while reading Acts 10. Peter receives a vision that challenges the understanding he had carried his whole life, a sheet lowered from heaven holding animals he had always been taught were unclean. Peter was a faithful man responding out of everything he had been taught, and God was preparing him to see something he had not fully understood yet. Later, standing in the home of Cornelius, a Gentile, Peter says something that has stayed with me.

Acts 10:28 says, “God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.”

The vision reached further than food. God was showing Peter that people he had kept at a distance were never outside of God’s work. And it makes me wonder how often we decide who someone is based on what we experienced with them in another season, long before we ever ask what God might be doing in their life right now.

Because the other side of this is true, too. Other people carry an understanding of us that was formed in an earlier season. There are people who knew me when I was not living the way God was calling me to live, who witnessed mistakes I cannot go back and change. Those experiences were real, and they still do not tell the whole story of who I am. It brings me back to 2 Corinthians 5:17, where Paul reminds us that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, and the old has passed away. That verse never erases consequences, and it does not obligate anyone to trust us. It simply reminds us that God can do a work in a person’s life that reaches far beyond the version of them we once knew. It is easy to want that kind of room for ourselves. The harder question is whether we are willing to extend it to the people who have disappointed us.

So here is where I am landing, friend. I keep coming back to Psalm 139, asking God to search my heart and show me the assumptions I am carrying about other people. I want to know when my past experiences are speaking louder than His Word. I want to recognize when I have taken responsibility for emotions that never belonged to me, and I want to grieve what needs grieving without turning every hard relationship into a verdict on my heart.

How often do we allow our traditions, assumptions, or past experiences to shape the way we see people instead of allowing God’s Word to shape our hearts?

I think that question is worth sitting with for a while. God knows the whole story, even when we only understand a small part of it. He knows what we have experienced, what we have misunderstood, and what we have carried from one season into the next. If I am asking Him to keep changing my heart, I have to leave room for the possibility that He is doing that same work in someone else. And I do not want my past experiences to keep me from recognizing it. ❤️

Love,
Beth

This post is a doorway into a longer chapter I am saving for my book. The heart of it is the same one behind everything here at The Ruffled Daisy: we are all crafting our stories, one project, one season, one surrendered page at a time.