Am I the only sane person left!? I am the only one in my family who hears and sees Yanny in a gold and white dress! Everyone else? Laurel in a blue and black dress! What is that!? It seems so obvious to me.
By now you’ve surely heard of the bizarre meme which tore through the internet recently. If not, it was a recording of a voice saying “Yanny.†However, some crazy people immediately heard “Laurel.†It was very reminiscent of 2015’s viral sensation picture of the clearly gold and white dress some mistakenly saw as blue and black. (#TeamGoldAndWhiteDress)
Well, the truth of it is, neither parties were crazy. The blue-dressers were no more or less crazy than the Yanny-hearers.
The audio clip really explored cognitive tendencies in our audio perception. The debate over the dress picture was centered on each individual eye’s color perception. (There should be about a hundred big words in those two sentences, but I’m not going to even pretend like I understand…)
However, there is a word I want to focus on in both explanations: perception.
It’s bananas to me how differently two can people can hear or see things. When my wife and I first heard the Yanny clip, she could NOT believe I heard Laurel. Likewise, I still can’t believe she sees a blue dress.
We do this with people. We see what we perceive and decide who they are – sometimes positively, sometimes not so much. We entertain our perception of a situation and assume we know all there is to know about it.
How does God perceive? How did Jesus perceive while He was on this earth?
In 1 Samuel 16:7, God says regarding Jesse’s son Eliab, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart†(NLT).
God looks at the inside. He sees our hearts. That’s reassuring in many ways. It means when I mess up and am sorry…He knows. Even if others just see my failure, God knows my heart.
Jesus, in John 4, meets a Samaritan woman and talks with her – in public! Jews of His day would not do that. But, Jesus did. He saw more. He didn’t just see a sinful, mixed-race, female outcast. He saw a heart needing to be touched.
When we see people in a difficult situation or in a bad light, let’s be sure we’re not just seeing our perception. Let’s be careful to see hearts, to see lives, to see people trying to live life in a good way.
After all, we may perceive Laurel in a gold and white dress, when in fact it may be Yanny in blue and black dress.