Watching for Goodness or Guilt

When Mistaken Identity Tries to Sit on Love

“We’re watching you. Watching.”

The day before, my neighbor had approached the car parked outside my house. In it, my son and his friend sat chatting in the friend’s older BMW. My son looked up, readying a smile, to greet her.

But instead of a friendly hello, the neighbor pointed to my son’s friend. “Who is this?” She demanded. Before my son could answer, a black Tesla pulled up behind them. The neighbor said something about a drug deal before leaving in a huff.

The Tesla driver was my husband’s physical therapist.

The next day, I went to the neighbor to try to smooth things over. She proceeded to rant about my son’s friend, saying he had to be a drug dealer. She demanded that this person never darken our street again. “How does somebody like that get to drive a BMW?” she said. “Especially someone with no teeth!”

I tried to listen. Yes, my son has struggled with substance use. Is still struggling. But he is learning about harm reduction and has made a lot of progress. He’s never done drug deals in front of our house. I told our neighbor that I don’t want drugs dealt on my street either and apologized for her discomfort. Her last words to me were, “We’re watching you.”

This incident has me thinking about how we approach our lives. I used to watch my son for signs of use too. I confess to shouts and pleas and ultimatums to get into treatment or else. But that watchful attitude came with assumptions, and the assumptions often jumped to inaccurate conclusions.

I had to ask myself if I was watching for goodness or watching for guilt.

Such as the woman ahead of me in the checkout lane who counts out pennies while I shift my weight impatiently. I watch her and think, OMG could you possibly count any slower? A Buick in front of me—it’s always a Buick!—on the freeway merges at about twenty miles per hour and snarls up traffic. I watch him or her (can’t tell—their head doesn’t clear the steering wheel) to see what other idiot move the Buick may take.

The skinny guy at the corner flies a sign that says, “Any help is welcome” and watchful me thinks he just wants to get high. The teenager with a rainbow shirt must be gay. Everyday, I’m watching just like my misinformed neighbor, jumping to conclusions I’ve preselected, not noticing that they are real people whom God happens to love.

Jesus talked a lot about the kingdom of God. He also helps pry the fingers of judgment from the hearts of people like me. For me, at least the kingdom isn’t so much a place as a journey. A journey away from biased watching (in case someone fails to live up to my standards) and toward watching for connection.

On the road to a more loving watchfulness, that annoying Holy Spirit keeps reminding me of the psalm about watchmen.  Am I so busy watching for someone to mess up that I miss the opportunity to meet God?

Was I watching for goodness or watching for guilt?

If God is love, then love is what I’ll see as I watch for the holy. If I mistakenly think that God is that Old Testament meanie who casts down fire and brimstone on wrongdoers, then I will be watching for wrongdoing. It’s strange, but when I get super judgy, the God I watch for hates all the same things that I hate. Which only reinforces my righteousness. What serendipity.

My neighbor surely thinks she’s protecting “the children.” She said so several times while jabbing her finger at me. But her watching seems tainted by assumptions that simply aren’t true. My son’s friend is a disabled veteran with all of his teeth. He had to rehab the Beemer to make it drivable.

But here is my own challenge. Can I watch for my neighbor’s goodness even after she insulted my family? Can I stop the inner eye-rolling when the lady at the checkout counts pennies? Can I regard every person as having a story, that they deal with things that might break a heart—break my heart?

We all have a choice: to stay snug in the cocoon of our prejudices, free to watch over others with poison flowing through our veins. Or to watch life unfold before us, reflecting the goodness of God in each person.

I’m all for getting the drug dealers out of my community. I’m all for my son’s recovery and I’m for getting along with my neighbors. Yet I don’t want to go through life condemning what I don’t understand, rushing to judgment without facts, jabbing my finger in righteous indignation.

For me, real love doesn’t ignore hard truths, but it can’t toss out sinners with the proverbial bathwater (lovely mixed metaphor!). Real love must hold sacred everyone’s personhood, the image of God etched into all our faces. A better kind of watching might be to wait for the Lord as watchmen for the morning and let parked BMWs alone.