by Jennifer Jill Schwirzer

I received a call one day from what sounded like a slightly drunk woman.

“This is Cheri Shives* from Ohio. We’d, ah. . . like you to come (giggle) for our ‘Women Alive’ weekend at, ah. . . the Camp Gideon (hee-hee) Retreat Center in (tee-hee) Mechanicstown. Are you available the weekend of, (long pause. . .) November 4^th of this (giggle) year?”

I envisioned a young woman barely out of her teens who had never worked very hard, or for that matter thought very hard, who acquired the responsibility of booking the retreat speaker by default because the more lucid women were too busy being productive and functional. She was the product of soap opera addiction and chocoholism, I thought. Or maybe a spoiled daughter of wealth, high on pedigree but low on talents. Or a human Barbie Doll who lived for fashion and whose greatest character test to date had been a broken nail. In any case, she was a flake, and she was in charge. Bad combination.

“Should I go?” I asked my husband. “What if I drive all that way and the whole weekend is as disorganized as she is? I don’t know if I can trust this situation. She practically lost her train of thought in the middle of her name!”

Michael agreed with my concerns. He had seen me fill one too many invitations that went bad because of flaky “organizers.” After some thought, however, I decided that duty called me to put my comforts aside and venture forth in the spirit of self-sacrifice to share the gospel. I took a deep breath, called Cheri back, and accepted the invitation. As I hung up the phone, I felt ready to be sainted.

Upon arriving at the Camp Gideon Retreat Center, I met Cheri face to face. To my surprise she was a middle-aged woman whose manner of dress and deportment put her squarely in the “practical, conventional, level-headed” category. Solid shoes, thick wool skirt and jacket, hair neatly tied in a knot at the back of her head. The vespers praise service included a sweet, shimmery soprano which I traced through the crowd to her lips. Talented, I thought. Cheri was beginning to show me that first impressions are often wrong. But I would learn a more biting lesson about first impressions. They can lead us to judge in ways we later regret.

Cheri had a suspicious limp which I had noticed immediately. As we left the service on Saturday morning, it became more than a limp. From a distance I saw Cheri being carried to her car by two women. Turning to the person I was with, I asked, “What’s going on with her?”

“Cheri has multiple sclerosis,” the woman said. “Sometimes she loses all strength in her legs and has to be carried. She has problems with coordination and balance too. There’s a chance she’ll wind up completely paralyzed. And it affects her mind. She loses her train of thought in the middle of a sentence sometimes.”

Immediately my previous snap judgment came back to haunt me. I had assumed she was a self-made TV-aholic ditz. In reality she was a survivor of illness, struggling desperately against the odds.

An epilogue to the story is an incident that occurred sometime later involving my youngest daughter, Kimmy. She had gotten reprimanded in school for passing a derogatory note about an academically challenged boy named Tyrone. Her teacher was aghast at the unchristian sentiments the note expressed, and had somewhat piously denounced Kimmy’s behavior. Although the teacher was right, I could see that my child’s heart was hard to the reproof.

I thought a different tactic might work. Had not I just fallen into the similar sin of belittling an already challenged person? If I told Kimmy the story, admitting my own unchristlikeness, maybe she would see hers.

At family worship I shared the story of my encounter with Cheri Shrives. Sure as the sunrise, the Spirit worked. I looked over at my crestfallen daughter and saw tears standing in her eyes as she stared into nowhere.

“Mom, that stuff I said about Tyrone,” she whispered, “I didn’t mean it.”

God’s ways are better than magic. For both Kimmy and me, He had revealed the cruelty of first impressions gone awry into unkind judgments. All of us, including the judgmental ones, are wounded people struggling against the odds. Some struggle against physical and mental disease, but others struggle with the disease of a fallen nature and a failure to love. In all cases, there is a Savior who saves all who come to Him.

*Most names and places have been changed.