Quantum Physics Books and Unknown Swordsmen
"Once when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, 'Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?' He replied, 'Neither; but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.' And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshipped..."
(Joshua 5:13-14)
There's a great scene in the 1997 blockbuster film, "MEN IN BLACK." Will Smith's character (Jay) is going through a screening process with other potential recruits. It's a shooting gallery format with cardboard cutout characters in a downtown city scene. All the other candidates fire relentlessly at monsters they see in the city-scape. As the camera focuses on Will, he doesn't fire... until the very end, and only once. At an 8-year old girl.
The leader (Zed, played by Rip Torn) asks Jay WHY he did that?!? Jay says that the monster hanging from the streetlight looked like he was just working out (and who likes to be hassled when they're trying to get health?!). The snarling monster was holding tissues, so he wasn't angry, just sneezing. But the 8-year old girl (Tiffany) was a white girl in the ghetto at night with Quantum Physics books ("That's WAY above her reading level. She's about to do some serious sh*t!").
We're so quick to judge people. Whether they're "for" or "against" us. Either by what they look like, what they drive, what they eat, what tv news channel they watch, etc. And yet... we might be missing something.
In Joshua 5, Joshua sees a soldier with a drawn sword. Instead of either attacking him (seeing him as a threat) or "buddying up" to him (welcoming him wholeheartedly into the fellowship), Joshua asks a simple question: "Are you with us or against us?" It would have been much easier just to attack him - or at least to assume that he was a threat. But instead, that simple question allowed Joshua to hear something he wasn't expecting: the stranger wasn't a friend or an enemy. He was another entity altogether: God's angel!
Sometimes life would be so much easier if we weren't so quick to jump to conclusions about people (and situations) that we think we already know. It could just be that a surprising revelation awaits... if we're patient enough to wait and ask. Who knows... what we think is a snarling & angry monster in front of us, just might have a runny nose... that's all. Go figure!