Have you ever had an experience where someone accused you of having poor motives when you felt sure that your motives were good? You were positive that you did not intentionally determine to do anything with poor motives. Did you ever realize later that they were right?
In an episode of Project Runway All Stars, a designer named Helen was asked to tell the judges about a dress that she had designed. She said “I was more concerned with creating an actual textile.” “I didn’t want to take the crafty route and just glue everything on to a muslin base.” “There’s no way that purple or orange is going into this looking like a clown dress.” “I felt like it would be a cop out to hot glue to muslin.” (Camera pans to dresses on right and left that are orange and purple and have stuff glued to them). One of the other designers whispers, ”Shaaaade.” When they all go to the back room, no one moves to make room for Helen on the couch. Someone says to Helen “You undermined everybody else to make yourself look better.” Helen looks shocked and hurt. She asks, “Why would I say anything rude about any of you people?” Her emotion grows, she stands up and shouts almost in tears, “Like, why would I do that!?” She walks away and then says in tears, “I respect all of you guys, the last thing I would want to do is offend anybody.”
It seems obvious by watching her reactions that she really didn’t think that her motives were to throw others under the bus; she really hadn’t intentionally set out to hurt or offend anyone. But it is also very clear that she did make others look bad to make herself look good, and we all saw it. So the question is how could she have done something so obviously devious and yet kind of not known that she was doing it.
I think it is because we don’t know our own motives (1 Cor. 4:4-5). There are lies that we believe that we are not even aware of. These beliefs shape our motives. We act on them subconsciously and don’t even notice that we are doing it. Our character is a mixture of good and bad and it can show itself without our purposeful decision to act.
Helen did say all of those things with wrong motives just like they said she did, but she didn’t consciously determine to hurt and discredit people; she wasn’t fully aware of her own motives. Most likely, if she is at all introspective, she recognized that she did do something that was shady. And ideally, even though she didn’t consciously intend to hurt anyone, she can take responsibility for the fact that she did hurt them. And hopefully she was humble enough to apologize.
It really hurts to be accused of poor motives. And it damages our pride to accept responsibility for things that we didn’t fully mean to do. We need to have an accurate view of what it means to be human to be able to navigate tricky situations like this. We need to understand that we are a mixture of good and bad; never only one or the other. We are in a battle with evil and it deceives us with lies. But we don’t have to be perfect to be acceptable to God. We are at all times acceptable and “enough” even if we are not “good”. This security in Christ frees us to be humble enough to recognize our faults and ask for forgiveness from others. An ego that is secure in Christ has nothing to lose by admitting our faults.
The best thing we can do when someone points out that we hurt them is to acknowledge that we don’t know our own motivations and that sometimes we do things that we didn’t even know we were doing, and admit that we did hurt them, and take responsibility for the damage and apologize for the pain that we caused.
Another application of this is to go easy on others when they hurt us. People do things and say things that hurt us, but they don’t necessarily do things to hurt us on purpose. Allow people the freedom to be human. Don’t villainize people for one mistake. Seek reconciliation and growth rather, than retribution.
The goal of the Christian life is Christ-likeness; the transformation of our souls. We can’t solve our character issues by focusing on our behavior. We have to look deeper and uncover the heart. We have mixed motives and multiple motives for everything we do. If we are going to uncover our unconscious belief system, it will require purposeful and honest introspection. The transformation of our hearts will result in reflecting the character of the God who created us.
