You spot it, you've got it

Yesterday I worked from home, which is a nice flexibility to have occasionally, and in the middle of the day ducked out to catch up with my friend Penny from Overcomers Outreach. I have stepped back from being involved in OO this year, mainly because the meeting clashes with Connect Group again, and it had become a situation where I just turned up at a meeting once a month and that was all I was doing, which didn’t seem so plugged in and effective to the ministry. But I have loved it and learnt a great deal and hope to keep catching up with Penny and what’s happening. So we had lunch and I gave her back a book I had on loan etc.

Penny has this crazy life, and it’s hard to catch her, and conversations with her often leap from one thing to the next at an astonishing pace, but it’s always fascinating. She has spent so much time now immersed in helping people with their addictions and other problems, attending courses and conferences and doing her own form of counselling, that she has gathered up this vast wealth of ideas, and a conversation is often littered with these kind of one-liner asides. Sometimes I wish I had a tape-recorder. But one of these one-liners I picked up yesterday was “you spot it, you've got it” (I don't thing it was "you've" but I couldn't tolerate the grammatical incorrectness).

The context is that, say you are having some kind of difficulty relating to someone or understanding where they are coming from and so you say “I think they ….” and go on to diagnose their state, well the point is, that if you can see that particular problem/condition in them, you probably have some form of it in yourself, so you need to ask yourself where it’s coming from within you. I thought that was mind-stoppingly helpful. Sometimes we can think that we are a superior kind of human being, and can objectively diagnose what’s going on with other people, when the reality is that we are always doing that through our own framework, and we need to be aware of that.