Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment. John 7:24
My grandmother had something of a green thumb. Her house had all sorts of houseplants that she nurtured and encouraged to grow. One example was a pair of philodendrons that she had growing on either side of the breakfast room window. When she died in 1986, my mother moved into Granny’s house and took over the house plant duties. They promptly died.
This meant that the two old vases in which the breakfast room vines had been growing were now void of purpose and moved to the back porch. Here they stayed, those ugly, olive green relics of a by-gone era with curly-cue handles and faded pink flower bouquets affixed on the front by some early reproduction process. I mean, they were ugly. So one day, while visiting my mother, I asked her why she kept these junk store refugees.
“They’re antiques!” she said.
“They are hideous,” I countered.
She then tried to explain to me that they had been in the family since before my grandmother had been born. Indeed, I had seen pictures of my great-grandmother as a young girl with those two vases in the background. So I agreed they were old. They were also ugly.
I could see the look on my mother’s face that said Yes They Are Ugly But They Could Be Valuable. So I softened my stance and offered this compromise: I had friends in Memphis who dabbled in antiques, and they could perhaps give us an idea if there is indeed any reason to save them. Given hope, she agreed. I was sure they were worthless.
The two vases went in the trunk of my car where I promptly forgot about them until one evening at a cook-out I remembered that cast-off crockery and asked if I could get their opinion on this. They were agreeable and even interested. I went out to the car where, to my surprise, they had survived Memphis traffic and I carried them inside.
I barely got into the kitchen when “oohs” and “aahs” broke out and they wanted to know where I got that wonderful majolica. (I had to look up what majolica was.) I was dumbfounded; my mother was right. After more examination and discussion, I carefully took the vases out to the car and buckled them in the back seat.
They never went back to my mother’s house. I took them home and put them out on top of the buffet in the dining room. I still thought they were hideous, but NOW they were worth something!
Jesus cautions us not to judge by appearances, but don’t we do that all the time? How can we judge rightly when we don’t always know the full story. That’s something I struggle with all the time. I am sure you do too. The best we can do is think “How would Jesus look at this?” Perhaps we won’t be so easy to judge.