how evidence taught me grace

my evidence class and a talk with a friend taught me a little bit about grace this week.

the federal rules of evidence don't really allow you to discuss a person's character during trial, with just a few exceptions. usually you can't bring up past actions (like a prior conviction for robbing a bank) to show that someone has a propensity to do something (like robbing in general), to show that they did something specific (like robbing the 7-11). we don't want someone convicted of a crime because he's a bad person - we want him convicted because there's enough evidence that he did it.

a friend and i did something to upset one of our best friends about a year ago. not a huge deal, only we live such a long distance from one another that it's been hard to reconnect. so she was visiting again for several weeks over Christmas, and i discovered that i wasn't really emotionally connecting with her. and so i tried to figure out why. eventually i discovered it was because i wasn't really sure what she thought of me anymore. she's a pretty emotional person. i'm a pretty sensitive person. she had responded in frustration in a way that made me wonder what she thought of me.

and that's where evidence comes in. i realized that i believed that she'd taken my negative action and made a negative inference about me. i believed that she no longer believed in me. and i don't know how to be real and vulnerable with someone who has known me deeply, yet stopped believing in me.

then i thought about grace - maybe that's what grace is. it's seeing the negative things that a person does, but not drawing a negative inference about them. it's allowing people to make mistakes, to be human, but to reserve judgment and keep thinking the best of them. and that really is how God sees us. he looks at us and does see the bad things that we do. but he doesn't infer bad things about us. in fact - he goes further and sees us through Christ's work on the cross. he is able to see the good in us, in spite of the bad things we do.

the reason the testimony about prior bad acts is kept out of court is because it's highly prejudicial. juries tend to give great weight to prior bad acts in determining current guilt. i think that's because that's the way we are in life too. we all to often see the bad acts and make the inference about bad character and then basically expect the person to keep doing bad things.

but i want to see the best in people. and i want people to believe the best about me, even when i do stupid things. is that what it means to always protect, always hope, always trust, and always persevere in love?

i kind of think it does.