When There's Always the Sieve of Opinions

Unless you are a hermit, you're likely to discover that everything you say and do ends up going through the sieve of other people's opinions.

Unless, like I said, you become a hermit, and then, be sure people will have opinions about that.

Don't worry.

The things other people say and do go through the same sieve.

It's not the sieve that matters so much as the quality of the pumpkin going through it. 

When your actions and words and attitudes have all been chopped to pieces,

bubbled, and boiled,

skinned,

mashed, smashed and squeezed through the sieve,

will the end product be gold--or dross?

It's not the sieve that matters.
It's the pumpkin.
The black horned mon-steer can chew the pumpkin to bits, but it's still pumpkin.

It can come out transformed into meat, or milk, or eggs, or sausage.
Or it can be dumped in the compost heap as garbage--and still be transformed into something useful down the road. 

It's really not so important the grade that people give you--
people who can only read faces and dresses and nose tilts and trembling chins and narrowed eyes and furrowed brows and smiles and voices that miss the beat,
but who can't read what's inside the heart.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3, confronted a fledgling church where there were squabbles and jealousy and divisions;
but in the very next chapter, he chided those who thought they were of such spiritual stature as to be even greater than the apostles who brought the gospel to them.
They thought they were gorgeous,  Cinderella pumpkins...

compared to the common, ordinary, despised apostles who really were rather dumb, uneducated, defamed, un-illustrious, funny-shaped ministers like Paul who had some sort of embarrassing thorn in the flesh to buffet him.

 Matthew Henry writes, "He that would make it his chief endeavor to please men would hardly approve himself a faithful servant of Christ. He...must despise the censures of men for His sake. The best of men are too apt to judge rashly and harshly. It is a comfort that men are not to be our final judges."

Thus he cautions the Corinthians, and us as well, against censoriousness. To judge out of season or to judge "the secret springs and principles" of others' actions is "to assume the seat of God."
And have we not all at times felt like someone was acting like God over us when they judged the motives of what we have done or said?
Henry goes on, "We should be very careful how we censure others, when we have a Judge from whom we cannot conceal ourselves.

 "Christians may well be patient under unjust censures, when they know such a day as this is coming. But how fearful should they be of
 loading any with reproaches now
 whom their common Judge shall hereafter commend."
The gold in the clouds of the censures we may be receiving is this comfort--
that God is a just Judge, and also a merciful One.

Perhaps when we are judged, it should remind us of how others feel when we put their actions and words and attitudes through the sieve.
What if we reached out to help when they are in the sieve, instead of deciding they are sinful or carnal in how they are dealing with a situation?
What if we lifted the load that they are falling under instead of loading their backs
with reproaches and criticism on top of everything else they are carrying?

What if we consider to be just a bunch of pumpkin
what God is refining into gold?