Many of us judge without knowing the fact. Dogs bark if they do not know the person. Our job is not to judge but to figure out whether someone deserves something or decide who is right or wrong. Our job is to lift the fallen, restore the broken and heal the hurting. Judging prevents us from seeing the truth that lies behind what seems to be. When we judge someone, we do not define that someone, we define ourselves.

The husband pushed his wife in a sinking cruise ship to save himself. This story teaches us something very important about life. As the story goes, a teacher was teaching her class of students when she relayed a story about a cruise ship capsized at sea. On the ship was a couple who, after having made their way to the lifeboat, realized that there was only space for one person left.

At this moment, the man pushed the woman behind him and jumped onto the lifeboat himself. The lady stood on the sinking ship and shouted one sentence to her husband. The teacher stopped and asked: “What do you think she shouted?”

Most of the students excitedly answered: “I hate you! I was blind!”

Now, the teacher noticed a boy who was silent throughout, she got him to answer and he replied: “Teacher, I believe she would have shouted – Take care of our child!”

The teacher was surprised, asking: “Have you heard this story before?”

The boy shook his head: “Nope, but that was what my mom told my dad before she died to disease.”

The teacher lamented: “The answer is right.”

The cruise ship sunk, the man went home and brought up their daughter single-handedly.

Many years later after the death of the man, their daughter found his diary while tidying his belongings.

It turns out that when parents went onto the cruise ship, the mother was already diagnosed with terminal illness. At the critical moment, the father rushed to the only chance of survival.

He wrote in his diary: “How I wished to the bottom of the ocean with you, but for the sake of our daughter.  I can only let you lie forever below the sea alone.”

The story is finished. The class was completely silent.

The teacher knows that the students have understood the moral of the story, that of the good and the evil in the world, there are many complications behind them which are hard to understand. That is why we should never focus only on the surface and judge others without understanding the facts first.

Someday all of us will get separated from each other. We will miss our conversations and the dreams we had. Days, months and years will pass until this contact becomes rare.

Someday, someone will see our pictures and ask: “Who are these people?” With tears in our eyes, we will smile with invisible tears because our heart is touched and we will say: “It was them that I had the best days of my life with. They were there when nobody else was there for me.” 

My heart is full of gratitude when I think of those people who were there for me during the darkest time of my life; when I was struggling to survive; when some people judged me and tried to put me down for selfish reason. Thank you all, you know who you are.

By Tim Pedrosa


  

Tim