Pratt: Jumping to conclusions not a healthy exercise
The greatest exercise most of us get is unrelated to athletic attempts to be healthy, but to our tendency to jump to conclusions about people based on how their speech, appearance, religion, politics or other characteristics fit intoour experience or knowledge.
Among those basic experiences that can either help or harm us growing up is family finances, which often shape our perception about what we can or cannot achieve.
The second issue that comes to mind when considering the development of self-image involves real or imagined disabilities in mind or physical appearance.
Every child is an impressionable personality with one-of-a-kind DNA, an inheritance that is due respect, but is also subject to all kinds of challenges on the road to adulthood.
Suffice it to say that a healthy physical and mental development begins in the home and continues in the community and beyond with our choices.
A big part of the challenge resides within our personal reactions that make us who and what we are – individual beings, not robots to be programed into a certain way of responding and living.
Walter Davis, a long-time member of our church, grew up in a two-room house, the eldest of six children in Weinert, Texas, and truly knew what it meant to be poor.
That he was noted for his intellect, especially with numbers, caught my eye because my dad had that gift, along with a phenomenal memory of anything he read. As eldest child, he had to drop out after 8th grade to help on the farm, but he never seemed to resent his more fortunate siblings.
Born at the cusp of World War II in a country still reeling from the Great Depression and Dust Bowl days in a different, but also difficult time, Walter, was able to graduate from McMurry College. He earned master's and doctoral degrees at North Texas State University in Denton. While there, he met and married a Floydada girl, Mary Alice Withers.
After a few years as an educator, including a stint as assistant superintendent at Ralls, he bought his father's custom combine business and later did carpentry. He was builder of the Assister pumpkin barn between Ralls and Floydada.
On Labor Day we attended Walter's funeral. A large family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren gathered to pay respects to a man who always had a special place in his heart for children, including 45 years helping in our church nursery.
While others fight and claw and sometimes cheat their way into the upper reaches of fame and fortune, Walter chose to do what he could to help others.
Together, he and Mary Alice modeled for their children a deep faith in Jesus, the humble carpenter who walked the way of humanity to give us the hope of eternal life beyond our human imagination.
Beth Pratt retired as religion editor from the Avalanche-Journal after 25 years. You can email her at beth.pratt@cheerful.com.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Pratt: Jumping to conclusions not a healthy exercise
