As a progressive, I believe there are many names for God and many ways to God; this article reflects one of those ways. Take from here what works for you. Celebrate life with joy and peace!
This is the third of what Don Miguel Ruiz calls “The Four Agreements.” These four agreements are something to aspire to. Don Miguel Ruiz says that by making new agreements with ourselves, you and I can begin to undo the destructive agreements we may have made in life that often lead to pain and unhappiness. In this series, it has been truly enlightening to relate the four agreements to our progressive Christianity.
Let’s review:
Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
And if you thought the agreements get more difficult from one to the next – you might think so as we move to the third agreement:
Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
Like the first two, this third agreement sounds so simplistic; but, like the other agreements, it’s easier to say than do, and here’s the kicker, if we don’t make the agreement to not make assumptions about people or situations, the consequences will be greater than we might think.
Can you think of some situations where you’ve made assumptions and had disastrous results? I mean embarrassing!
Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “Whenever we make assumptions we’re asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.” He goes on to say, “All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life is rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.”
Think about how many times we make assumptions – every day! We look at what a person is wearing or hear the accent in their voice or look at the color of their skin or even look at the car they’re driving and we make incredibly complex conclusions without even thinking; we learn a person’s political party and make extensive assumptions about their values and opinions; someone is in a bad mood, they make a snarky comment to us, and we take what little information we have about their life circumstances and assume we know why, including, as we talked about last week taking it personally and believe it’s all about us!
Have you heard of the phrase “jump to conclusions?”
Well, we rarely are able to jump to conclusions; what we are more apt to do is “jump to assumptions!”
We assume our friends and family members and coworkers and even our significant other, know us well enough that they should know what we want and need without us having to say so, and when they don’t deliver, we get all kinds of upset!
Rev. J.B. Lee said, “When we make assumptions, believe them as fact, and then act on them, there follows such confusion and miscommunication and, often, such pain and drama and sadness. Racism and sexism, political and religious divisiveness, tensions at work and at home, miscommunication between adults and teenagers, they all spring from making assumptions, believing them as truth, and acting as if everyone sees, or should see, the same way we do.”
So, why is it so easy for us to make assumptions in the first place? According to Don Miguel Ruiz, we make assumptions because we don’t want to ask for clarification about what we don’t understand. (There’s that ego again!) We have such a sense of self-importance that we don’t want to look foolish by revealing all we don’t know!
He goes on to say, “Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about the assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering.”
Many times we assume others know more about a topic than we do, so we keep our mouths shut. Or I remember in school, when I didn’t understand what the teacher was saying, I was so glad when someone in class said, “I don’t get it, can you explain that again?”
Being open and clear with others about who we are, about what our needs are and about what we don’t understand takes courage, and it takes courage whether we’re talking about a misunderstanding with a loved one, a stranger, someone at church we don’t know very well, or a coworker with whom we have to work productively. It takes courage to ask for what we need, and yet if we don’t, we may spend a lifetime going without clarification and understanding.
Jesus models the courage it takes to be clear about who we are and what we’re all about. Here he is, standing in front of the home crowd at the Nazareth Synagogue, and he reads from Isaiah words about the one who is anointed to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And Luke tells us when he puts the scroll down, all eyes are on Jesus and he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus clearly identifies himself as the one who was promised in the scriptures, and his public ministry begins. Jesus refused to take the easy road, he didn’t assume that people in his hometown would guess correctly who he was; he needed them to clearly understand, and so he told them, and that took courage.
I encourage you to make an agreement with yourself to be clear with the people around you about who you are and about what you want and need, or else you’re paving the way for the disappointments that always come when we make assumptions. This will take courage. If we don’t have the courage to be clear, we will fall back on assumptions about others, and they about us, and there will be confusion and hurt.
Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
May it be so. Amen.
