Lessons from Vacation #5: People Watching

A few years ago I did a series of posts of some lessons I learned from vacation about life and ministry. Not only do I think that vacations are important for a variety of reasons, but you can also learn a ton about yourself and your ministry. If you want to see the previous lessons learned from vacations you can check them out here: Lessons from Vacation.

This past year, during my vacation, I became acutely aware of people watching. Not only was I watching a ton of people but I am almost certain a ton of people were watching me. I mean, what psycho guy takes 4 daughters on vacation by himself? I don’t know of many honestly, so I am sure that there were plenty of people watching me my girls. It comes with being a single dad I guess, but I also wouldn’t trade our experiences together for anything in the world.

So, as I watched people I wondered, what kinds of lessons can we learn from people watching? Here are some:

• Be patient and have patience for others. In the midst of our busy world, we need to slow down from time to time. Vacations are ideal for this. After all, why rush when you are vacation? Enjoy the moments and take your time. And, don’t be impatient when it comes to waiting on others.
• Be aware that you are being watched. This isn’t to say that we have to put on an act to others while we are out with others. However, this is to say that we have a great opportunity to be a shining example to others by the way we treat people and interact with them.
• Pray for them. I think we are all suspect to judge and evaluate what people are doing at any given moment especially when we don’t know what they are dealing with behind the scenes. However one thing I thought about was that instead of me judging them or wondering why they did this or that, I should just pray for them.

As I sat and watched the various people at the beach I had some great reflections. The bottom line is we don’t know what others are going through. I know we have all heard that saying before but it is really true. We don’t know know what situations they are working through when we aren’t watching them so who are we to judge what they do in the moments we do see them. And I hope, in our “off” moments people give us the benefit of the doubt and pray for us.

I bet God can do a lot of great things when we simply pray for people we watch.

What do you think? What are some lessons you have learned from your vacations   Share below or use Twitter to share by using @tapounder when you tweet.