Challenging Those Untrue Attributions

The run-of-the-mill human being has a way of ‘discovering’ the intent of others – that which occurs outside the realm of fact – and too often it gets them into trouble.

We do very often, by nature, ‘think up’ what others are thinking, feeling or doing—the common attribution—but what we often don’t realise is we’re frequently so far off track we’re playing with, and processing, all sorts of wrong information.

Imagination, Self-Talk and Projected Values

Isn’t it amazing how great God is that we’re even capable of such sweeping visions of incredulity? There are many advantages; we have the ability to dream and to envision, motivating and inspiring us and others.

But, there are many disadvantages in the stridency of imagination—we make several unaccounted leaps and suddenly we’re imagining things that are tantamount to fiction.

Many of our vagrant imaginings come from our unchecked self-talk and from projecting our very own values, expectations and plans onto our situations. The pity for us (and unsuspecting others) is this: our situations are not solely dependent on us, they involve other people—people who think and feel much differently than we do.

One little leap of over-imaginative thinking soon has us suddenly way off course.

The Great Favour We Do for Our Relationships

The rapport that we enjoy in any and all of our relationships is buoyed in one thing above all things. That is that we remain well within the bounds of fact.

Facts, as we know, need to be established in observable or known data.

It really does us no good at all to run with unchecked information.

Caution in Matters of ‘Spiritual Discernment’

The gift of spiritual discernment is not to be limited in this, but in terms of our relationships we have to be wary to measure our intuited thoughts back again to fact for the better part.

Not always will we have fact to check our discernment by, and on these occasions we’re blessed to be doubly cautious, always ever prepared to give people the benefit of any doubt.

As it pertains to the attributions we can’t help but make, facts are always the most important.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.