EVERYDAY ENCOUNTER WITH GOD
Pastor Sylvia's Enconters with God in the Midst of Everyday Life
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ABOUT THE COLUMN Sylvia would love to hear your thoughts about this week's encounter. Please send them to sylvia@pastorsylvia.com |
The
Pygmalion Effect Moving required that Husband and I sort through the
random items in our garage, and there were a lot of them! On some dusty
shelves I found a stack of Life
magazines that my father had saved for reasons known only to him.
Without taking time to read them, I threw them in a plastic tote bin and
kept going. Last week I took time to see what he had valued from the
1960’s. In one of them was a picture of two little girls
who looked like they were no more than seven-years old. Their hair was
neatly braided. Their expressions were timid as they walked through a
gauntlet of adults. The girls were African-American. The adults were
Caucasian. In a black and white photograph, the racial contrast was even
starker. The adults’ faces were contorted with rage, caught
by the camera as they screamed epithets at the little girls. In the
photo, their anger almost looked like a caricature that was exaggerated
for affect—but it wasn’t. The raw emotion sent a chill down my back. My first response was to quickly close the magazine
and turn away from such ugliness of the human spirit. Surely, it had
nothing to do with me, with my life. That kind of biased hatred is only
seen in bad, evil, crazy people. In the story attached to their picture, a reporter
wrote that TV cameras caught a conversation between the little girls.
One of them said, “Don’t worry. Momma said if we’re nice to them,
they’ll be nice to us.” Some time back, a friend of mine designed a garden
for a man who had a “prickly personality.” At times he could be charming
and engaging, but other times he was petty, spiteful, and just plain
mean. During his mean times he yelled and swore and was easy to dislike.
My friend said, “He became, in my mind, recalcitrant and unredeemable.
Inwardly, I called him Mr. Despicable.” Then, one day the mean man expressed his gratitude
for a particular area of the garden in which he was able to relax. He
voiced the first kind words my friend had ever heard him speak.
Suddenly, he was more than his steely and unpleasant exterior. “I realized that somewhere inside was a frightened
boy who didn’t quite know how to escape the emotional fort he’d been
hiding behind. And I wondered how my own labeling had helped him
continue to hide. As long as he acted as I had labeled him, and as long
as I treated him according to that label, I intentionally withheld any
kindness, opting to nurse my resentment.” The Pygmalion Effect is a phenomenon in which we
tend to treat others according to how we think about them or perceive
them. Then, they in turn perform only to our expectation of their
behavior. If I expect my friend to be supportive, caring, and
understanding, she’s more likely to behave in those ways. But if I think
she is self-centered, ill-tempered, and selfish, I will treat her as if
that is true and eventually that is how she will respond to me. Looking at the
Life magazine picture, I paused to wonder who in my life I have
unfairly labeled. Who are my “Despicables?” Author Henry James is quoted as saying, “Three
things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second
is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” We can only be kind to people if we are first
present in their lives. Sometimes that takes great courage. Those two
little girls had the profound courage to be present and “nice” in the
face of undeserved hatred. They are my heroes. |
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Sylvia and Husband John have published a new book,
BOOKS BY SYLVIA
LAURA AND ME; A Sex Offender and Victim Search Together to Understand, Forgive, and Heal
THE RED DOOR; Where Hurt and Holiness Collide
Availible at Amazon and Barns and Noble