Judge Not Lest You Be Blind
@bethvogt
Sometimes we just don’t know.
That’s my takeaway from all the news swirling around Simone Biles. Sometimes we just don’t know the entire story and we need to be okay with that.
Simon Biles is an American Olympic gymnast. The GOAT — the Greatest Of All Time. People love her. Love her story. She’s a gymnastics powerhouse and when she wins, America wins.
Biles leads the U.S. women’s gymnastics team at the Tokyo Olympics. We watch her perform, imagining all the gold she’s going to haul home. And yes, we were watching her yesterday when her vault went wrong, and she withdrew from the team finals competition.
That was not the way things were supposed to go. Her story went awry. All the imagined headlines? Rewritten.
But Biles is more than headlines. Behind the news stories is a 24-year-old woman.
What happened?
We may never know the entire story — and we need to be okay with that, rather than fabricating our own stories about why Biles didn’t compete in the team finals.
Biles clarified it wasn’t a physical injury, but that she was “dealing with a few things.” Whether her reason for withdrawing was a physical injury or stress, either one is a valid reason to back out of competition. No athlete, whether they are a rookie or the GOAT, should force themselves to compete when they are mentally or physically struggling or injured.
Yes, athletes push themselves all the time, but they also need permission to decide when not to push themselves. When to say, “Enough,” without marring their reputation.
We judge athletes based on their performance all the time. The truth is, we judge one another based on our performance — or lack thereof — all the time, too.
We so easily forget that we rarely know the entire story of why someone does something. Or why someone chooses not to do something.
As an athlete, Simone Biles faces judges every time she walks on the gymnastics stage. Yes, she’s chosen that. Let’s not judge her now when she’s chosen to step away from competition. We don’t know the full story. For whatever reason she decided against competing, she made the hard right choice for herself at that moment — and she wasn’t forgetting about her team.
Choosing not to judge someone else? It’s called grace — and judging others, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, blinds us to grace. I want to be more lavish with grace, while ignoring the impulse to judge. After all, how would I want others to respond to me? With judgement … or with grace?
Others may think they know who we are. Why we act the way we do or say thing things we say. But they don’t know the entire story – the war being waged in our minds and hearts. Remembering that we just don’t know prompts grace, not judgement.
Judge Not Lest You Be Blind #Olympics #SimoneBiles
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'Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.' #quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer #grace #hope
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