I recently saw two documentaries, A Thread of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy, and The Flatwoods Monster: A Legacy of Fear.
What do the two have in common? Not much, except they reinforce something I've been thinking about recently:
We don't have any clue what's going on.
The Hart story is about a large family with a white lesbian couple and six adopted African-American children. (One of them was Devonte Hart, who became famous for giving "free hugs.") They were all killed when mother Jen Hart drove their SUV off a cliff in California with everyone inside.
The Harts lived in Woodland Hills, Washington, and were under investigation by child welfare authorities. It was the third state they had lived in, and third child abuse investigation. (Jen's spouse Sarah had pleaded guilty to assault in Minnesota twelve years before their deaths.)
Thread of Deceit has interviews with friends of the Harts. It seems most of them knew the children mainly from music festivals, political rallies, and the like, and didn't have an inside look into the Hart household. The children seemed very loving to all, and the family's social media presentations suggested one big happy family.
Friends of the Harts had no clue.
The Flatwoods Monster is about an encounter with a being or object in Flatwoods, West Virginia. The film describes three separate incidents within a few nights in 1952. Still-living witnesses Fred and Ed May believed what they saw was a mechanical contraption rather than a living being (so this wasn't about a hairy hominid as I had expected). Their encounter was in the midst of seeming UFO activity in the skies.
It's possible there are natural explanations to what the frightened witnesses saw. But it's also now well-known that the U.S. government admits that it has no clue about the origins of some aerial phenomena.
We don't know our neighbors; we only think we know. We don't know what's in the skies; we might only guess.
No close witness to the Hart family situation is alive to tell about it or to vindicate the parents. The witnesses to the Flatwoods "Monster" don't theorize as to what it was.
We never have all the facts or the full story about anything.
And so we make judgments without them.
Jesus might have been on to something when in John's Gospel he said, "Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”
Perhaps a friend always appears to be kind and gracious to everyone, but then is accused of something awful. Is he automatically innocent just because you don't want to believe the accusation?
Perhaps young kids say they saw a strange monster in the woods. Such a thing has never appeared to you. Should their claims be dismissed out of hand?
We don't experience what others see, and we don't know how unseen forces manifest what we do see.
Judge with right judgment, not rushed judgment.
James Leroy Wilson writes from Nebraska. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. If you enjoy his articles, subscribe and exchange value for value. You may contact James for your writing, editing, and research needs: jamesleroywilson-at-gmail.com. Permission to reprint is granted with attribution.
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