THE LOST ART OF RELATIONSHIP
excellent test of character or social acumen. If you take someone out of a formal work setting, you start to see the real person come out.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you will always be able to assess a person accurately. They may be incredible actors that can fake even a longer lunch or dinner interview. However, it is less likely to hold up under the pressure of time and social distraction.
Love Your Neighbor as Yourself
Our culture pushes first impressions mainly because we are thinking of ourselves and what someone can do for us, instead of what we can be and do for someone else, or possibly just wondering who they are as people.
How do first impressions change when seen through the lens of loving your neighbor as yourself? When thinking of yourself, you only want to give someone thirty seconds, because time is valuable and you cannot get it back.
When thinking of others and treating them how we would like to be treated, our view of the first impression changes. Give someone the gift of time to show who they really are. Allow them to make mistakes. Maybe you have been placed in their life to help them get to a different place, a better place, or vice versa.
Loving your neighbor as you love yourself teaches us to look at others as potential connections where we both mutually benefit, and others benefit as well. If we simmer down those initial starting points and base our future connec- tion on just a short period of time (say, one to two minutes), we could be missing an opportunity to have a relationship that is valuable to both of us.
When Jesus walked this earth, He didn’t take the preconceived notions of the religious over us. He showed us that first impressions rest in our hands to judge— and we are not that proficient at judging others by the outward appearance.
There is no way we can judge the heart of someone, either.
One Final Thought
Why is it that we push the first impression?
Is it because we do not want to take the time to get to know them? Are we so busy on our own stuff (work, to-do lists, our agenda) that we force others into a thirty-second-to-one-minute time frame of pressure? Can we make a judgment in that short time frame about whether we want to spend any more time with them? It seems to me we have already made that decision when we force them into such a short assessment.