Last night I visited my lovely hairdresser, Greg. Half way through cutting my hair, having just asked me a how I was doing, he suddenly said,
“I’ve just had a deja-vu moment! I feel as though I have been in this conversation with you before!”

I went back over what I had just said to him.

“I need to rest.” Is what I had said.
I laughed, “Maybe it’s a sign that I really DO need to rest, if you feel you’ve heard it before!”

“What is that deja-vu thing anyway?” he asked, “Isn’t it that a part of your brain just shuts down for a minute and sleeps, or dies, or something, you know, when its had enough?”

I laughed even harder. “So basically, you are telling me that I bore you so much that part of you died in order to cope with talking to me?” I joked.

Now it was his turn to laugh.

Obviously, I twisted his words for comic effect…and I wasn’t in any way offended by our hilarious chat. But some of us, some of you reading this, ARE offended. Right now. If I asked you, and you were honest, you would say that something is niggling away at you deep down.

Someone has made you feel annoyed, small, angry or worthless. They have insulted you somehow and injured you. You are carrying it and wearing it like dirty clothes that smell bad, however much perfume you try to spray over them.

It may not have been deliberate. But a person who gets accidentally run over will be as injured as much as person mown down deliberately. Offence still hurts.
So what are you feeling and why? And more importantly, what are you going to do with that offence?

I remember when I was once working for a large organisation and sat in a meeting where it was clear I did not know all that was going on. You could have cut the atmosphere with a blunt saw. Tense tempers were flared. Afterwards, I asked a colleague what was happening. She very wisely commented that a number of the people in the room had been “quick to take offence” at something and left it at that.

I wondered about that phrase, “quick to take offence.”
Am I quick, or slow?
Do I look for it, and therefore find it, or do I give people grace and the benefit of the doubt?

There are a number of times in scripture where we are taught that God is slow to anger and abounding in love. In other words, He is slow to take offence. SLOW. He is King of the whole universe and sees all the sin and wrong-doing and pain we cause Him and others, and yet, He chooses to be SLOW to anger. Not because He is not capable of anger, but because He truly understands the consequences of that emotion and action in Himself. God’s anger is not to be messed with.

In the third episode of the West Wing series 1, Jed Bartlett the president is faced with an issue. A US military airplane is shot down. His chiefs of staff advise him to act with a proportional response. He is angry and says “I want to blow them out of the sky with the fury of God’s own thunder.” He asks,” What is the virtue of a proportional response? Won’t they be expecting that?”

He eventually calms down and decides to go with the advice. “To act like a responsible superpower.”

That is what God is like too. He could use proportionate anger in response to everything wrong we do. Instead He uses disproportionate love, grace and forgiveness. The kind we don’t deserve.

What insults you more than anything else?
Is it unnecessary swearing?
Is it when people belittle you?

For me it is simple. It is being ignored. I hate it more than anything else.
I used to really get angry and hurt when people did not respond to texts and emails. Not so much any more. I try and think about their world and their feelings and their needs.

The poet AE Housman (1859-1936) reportedly kept a notebook in which he jotted down useful insults and unpleasant remarks that occurred to him.

I don’t want to be like that. Do you?
I don’t want to keep a mental or emotional list of things that bother me and recite and rehearse them in my spirit.

If I am hurt about something or upset with someone, I tell them. They may not like it. I may not like it. But that is the precedent we are set in scripture.

Let’s not be those who are quick to take offence. Let us be slow to be offended today.

I leave you with a bitter-sweet quote from Sammy Davis Junior who died in 1990.

“Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.”

I am off for a rest.

Anyone got deja-vu?