Misperceptions

By Jeff Becraft

Sometimes things are not as they appear.

The other day I was at a stoplight and I was behind a smaller-sized SUV. It had smoked windows in the back, but you could still kind of see through them.

I saw what I thought was the tail of a dog wagging back and forth in the back seat. I thought to myself, “Check that out. That dog is just loving life up in there.”

I looked more closely… “Well, that’s not a dog. That’s the arm of a kid in a car seat. And he’s got something in his hand. He’s just waving that thing back and forth and having a grand old time.”

I kept watching… it’s not the kid, it’s the mom in the driver’s seat. She’s got her arm up with a rattle in her hand and she’s waving that thing back and forth with all she’s got, trying to entertain the kid who’s in the car seat in the back.

As it turned out, there wasn’t even a dog in the car.

It just goes to show that sometimes we may not know what’s really going on. We may see something and we may think we know what’s going on. It may be a person or a situation or what is going on in a person’s life or whatever.

Now, there are people, like my wife, who has an intuition. Of course, she is a woman… which means she can see things that I cannot see (like the scotch tape in the kitchen drawer that I couldn’t find… well, it is invisible tape, you know… maybe if it were masking tape or a big roll of duct tape or something I could have found it on my own). And she will pass on her perception about something to me. I have come to understand that there is a lot of wisdom in the things that she can perceive.

But the whole picture at the stoplight shows us that sometimes we can jump to a conclusion about something… and it could be a wrong conclusion and a wrong judgment. We may not see what is really going on in the whole picture.

More times than not, it is good for us to give to one another the benefit of the doubt… even if we think we see the whole picture.

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope and the Director Emeritus for Youth Corps and has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. Our Place of Hope is a paradigm shift for people living with mental illness that encourages them to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. You can connect with Jeff at  [email protected].