Last Sunday Pastor gave the message about our Christian life and how contradicted our life with our spiritual life. We always said that we want to serve God, give our lives to God, but in reality, our lives are just very opposite.

The most interesting part of the message, Pastor gave the example of the spectator. Our lives have many windows where people look into your live through these windows, or we can also look into other people lives through these windows.

By looking through other people’s windows, we often criticize others about what they do or what they don’t do. We have become a spectator who judge other people lives.

As a Christian, we also become a spectator of others’ Christian lives, we often criticize and the worse things which used to come, we blame others for something which is not right in our eyes.

I have lived in this country almost 6 years. People in this country really crazy with Cricket. It is a kind of sports which is played by 22 people, 11 people in each of the team. Unlike other sports which only last for 1 to 3 hours, this sport can take the whole day, and people can sit in front of TV only to watch this game.

My husband is one of the fan for cricket game and he normally doesn’t want to get disturbed whenever he watch the game in front of TV. There are times when the country team lost, people would burn the photos of the player, cursing them, etc. Even the spectators in the TV would said if the player would have done this or would have done that they could win the game.

One day I told my husband, if these spectators who kept criticize the players went down to the field, would they win the match? I don’t even think they can even play better than the player themselves.

Sometimes in our spiritual life, we are also like those spectators. We tent to criticize other people, but why don’t we just jump to the field and do something instead of criticizing others. Let’s work for Jesus. Let us not to kept ourselves idle and prone to temptation to start criticizing.

I remember one day when I was talking with one of a person, we were talking about work and busy life. That person ask me why do I always be busy, I told her that sometimes being busy is a good thing, so we don’t have the time to think or talk bad things about others.

I think it is really true, I think the reason why people are criticizing and saying bad things about others, is because they just have too much free time. I don’t think if the person is busy, he or she will have the time to think the negative side of other people.

I have a very bitter experience with a woman, she is still the family of my husband. She always criticized and says bad things about me, even for the stuffs which are not make sense for me. She even criticized and taught her son about my favorite vegetable “eggplant”. Her son is only 4 years old and it is still the time for him to learn many words and sentences. When she taught her about one eggplant image, she taught the son that this is eggplant and eggplant has many worms which Tina Chachi (This means aunty in Indian language) likes to eat. Eggplant is my favorite dish, my mom used to cook terung balado, it is an Indonesian dish, the eggplant was cooked with the chilly and onion pastes, but surely I never eat the worms with the eggplant.

This is only a small thing, not mentioning other big stuffs which she kept talking and talking to her neighbors and friends, not spare the guests who went to visit her home… The main topic is always me and my mother in law.

People said the reason why she did this to me is because she is very jealous with me and because I’m much ahead of her in many things. But I just still don’t know why she would spent so much of time only to talk bad things about me.

Anyhow, I never want to sweat on her, just let her talk whatever she fells. It just doesn’t matter for me because I’m very busy with my life and I don’t have time to take care on silly things like that.

I could understand that she has so much of time as she is a full time housewife and she has many maids to do her homeworks, eventho’ she could have used her time for things which are more precious than gossiping about me to other people.

So, let us not be a spectator, but be the player. Criticize is good as long as it is used to encourage people.

Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way.  (Roman 14:13)