I'm A Blamer
At a leadership conference several years ago, Brene Brown shared a story that resonated so much that it’s constantly in the back of my mind. One morning, she was drinking coffee on her couch and spilled her cup all over herself. The first thought she had was “Dang it, Steve!”. Steve is her husband, who by the way wasn’t even in the house at the time. However, the night before he had been late or had been working on some project that kept her up past her normal bedtime. Therefore, in the morning, she helped herself to a second cup of coffee, and it was this cup that she spilled on herself.
She uttered one phrase that stuck with me, “I’m a blamer”. Even though Steve really had nothing to do with her spilling her drink, in her mind she immediately connected the dots between the late night, the second cup of coffee, and the spill and blamed Steve for it.
I have to admit, I’m a blamer too. I am a master at mentally connecting all the red strings from different situations and making them lead to someone else. But one of the things that I’ve learned is that by admitting that I have a tendency to blame everyone or everything else for my problems, I am better at taking the extra few seconds to process what really happened. Yes, I stepped on a lego while barefoot. Yes, I want to blame my kid for leaving a lego in the middle of the floor. But it’s not really his fault that I stepped on it. It’s my fault for having a lego party with him the night before and not picking up every single piece. It’s my fault for walking into a hazardous environment barefoot, and it’s my fault for not paying attention to where my feet were landing. And to be fair, when my wife told him to clean his room because she was tired of stepping on things, he promptly replied “Wear shoes”.
We see early on in the Bible that blaming others has been around since the fall. “It was the woman YOU put here.” “It was the serpent”. We refer to these as “scapegoats”, which might surprise you to find out that this is actually a Biblical term. It’s found in the book of Leviticus and was literally a goat that all the blame was placed on and then released into the wilderness to make an atonement for sins. Then Jesus came and became the scapegoat for all of our sins even though he is completely blameless. We have to stop blaming others for our own choices. It starts with admitting our own guilt, but it ends with Jesus reconciling us back to God which is a wonderful place to be.