Here comes the Judge!

While waiting for food at a local diner with a friend last week, I thought I saw our waitress snitching a french fry from an order waiting to be picked up. Friend asked what I was looking at and I told her - this of course brought all of our attention away from our conversation and onto the waitress. And what do you know! She did it again. Friend exclaimed, OMG! After the third fry disappeared into her mouth we were mesmerized....and since Friend had ordered fries i think she was wondering how many had been sampled from her order :) Hmmmm.

And it just so happens that we are halfway through the season of Lent. How's that been going for you? Friend told me her daughter had given up coffee and had experienced a somewhat severe withdrawal.....I bet she did! She asked what I had chosen as my discipline and just at that moment our waitress came by the table to tell us that the cook had mistakenly made a burger & fries instead of the bacon and eggs I'd ordered :) So she had been nibbling away at the "mistake". Oh dear....now Friend and I had to erase all those less than kind thoughts that had been multiplying in our heads....sigh...our minds are so quick to assume that which we do not know to be true!

Which brings me to my reply to Friend about what I'd given up for Lent - it was a judgmental attitude :) And how well is that going for me you ask? Do you know how many judgments I make in one day? one afternooon? one hour? over one breakfast order? So here is a wonderful prayer for my desire to not judge.

A Prayer for Morning
I am so weary, Father, of using myself as the measure of everything and everybody. Just for this one day, I beg you, help me to find release from the old pattern of seeing the different-from-me as either less-than or more-than me. Grant instead that, for just this one day at least, I may see everything and everybody I meet in terms of how I want you to see me at this day’s end.
—Phyllis Tickle

p.s. that is not a picture of our waitress