“What is often labeled as constructive criticism may actually be destructive jealousy, since the easiest way to raise our own status is to bring someone else down. Are we willing to question our motives before we offer criticism? Does the critical finger we point need to pointed toward ourself first?”
– From the description of Miriam in Tyndale’s NLT Chronological Life Application Study Bible
Labels, in general, are problems, and in this case, the label is not only a problem, but a mask.
Masks keep us from being real. They keep realness down.
In a time where anyone with some pent up anger and a keyboard can besmirch a place kicker’s family, a politician’s integrity (yes, I realize that statement leaves some possibility that there may still, somewhere be a politician with integrity…bear with me here, ok?) or a police officer’s intent (and do so anonymously), we risk losing all sense of decorum and personal accountability.
The waiter at the restaurant. The chef. The teacher at the kids’ school. The attorney that lost our case. The mechanic that didn’t fix our car the first time. The kid that didn’t finish their homework. The spouse that snapped back at us over something trivial.
Easy to get pretty critical of any of them, right?
But what’s our motive? What’s our intent? What outcome do we seek from the critique? Is this about us, or is it about them? And — as the lesson above calls out — did we spend adequate time in the mirror, looking really, really closely before we took the offensive.
When we’re real, we de-personalize conflict. We address the conflict as a solvable problem. When we’re real, our motives are not in question, and they’re not masked. That doesn’t mean there won’t be conflict, and that doesn’t mean that we’ll be selfless in that conflict. It just means that understanding our motives might be more important than understanding their failure.
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