“Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.” Matthew 7:1, NLT
When I was younger, we used to watch a television show entitled The Rifleman. It was a fictional story about a widower, Lucas McCain, who moved to the New Mexico Territory with his young son, Mark. He wanted a fresh start in life after his wife died. Of course, as the title implies, he knew how to use a rifle and was very good at doing so.
As a young person watching this show, I did not like it very well. McCain seemed to be a hard taskmaster and things had to be done right. Of course, there were a lot of judgments passed out with the use of his rifle. According to the TV segments, the bad guys deserved justice because they didn’t care about doing right. So they experienced frontier justice at its swiftest.
Years later now, I recently happened across this program again. What a surprise I found it to be! It was not anything like I had remembered it. Mr. McCain still had the rifle, of course, and justice was dealt out. Yet I now understand that this father in the story was concerned that his son, Mark, grow up to do right and have a good work ethic.
I’m sure that this television portrayal was true to the lives and desires of many who crossed the Great Plains and struggled to establish new lives and help build their country. Not everything went right. Fires destroyed. Storms and drought affected harvests. Injustice raised its ugly head. But people were also concerned about how their children were brought up. They wanted a place for them to live, work, and grow. How wonderful it must have been to play a part in settling parts of their nation.
Almost fifty years have gone by since I first watched The Rifleman. Time and life lessons enable me to see differently than I once did. I no longer see things with the black-and-white judgmentalism of youth. Age has tempered me and I am now able to look at the whole picture instead of at just one aspect of it. Sure, there are still some days I can slip back into old, old habits and whip out a “judgment” faster than Mr. McCain could whip out that rifle of his and exact judgment on that television program. Thankfully, Jesus reminds me that judgment is not for me to deal out. That’s His job.
I am working on letting Jesus be the director of my “program” and not me.
Mary E. Dunkin
First published in In His Presence (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press), 2018.
Carolyn R. Sutton, editor
