“They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!”

The expression of making a mountain out of a molehill is the same as what we do when we jump on every little thing and try to blow it up to make a bigger point.  We just love to find contradictions in what people have said or done and then heighten those to levels that are far beyond what was intended or even thought about, sometimes encouraging or inciting an action to occur.  For some, it is almost a game to see who can blow something up the most and do it first.  The problem with this is that by the time we get done with all of the heightening we may have missed the original issue and fixed something or even been avoided.  The more we do this in the workplace, the worse the infighting and the internal politics will become.  I’m working on a situation right now where no matter what one person does another is standing right there ready to blow it out of proportion.  We should guard against this behavior and call it out when we see it because if heightening the contradictions becomes the norm then expect only the negatives being looked for.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the book of John as I am working through it chapter by chapter with a friend in need of feeling loved.  I was so struck by how Jesus took care of the contradiction at play when the religious leaders wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery.  Jesus didn’t heighten the contradiction.  He alleviated it by not judging or shaming, but by allowing the others to make their own choice about what they should do versus what they had said should be done.  Jesus didn’t say, “You are wrong”.  He just let them figure that out on their own when confronted with having to take personal responsibility for what they were asking.  Let’s see if we can be more like Jesus today and also be willing to be held accountable for our actions, not just our words.

Reference:  John 8:7 (New Living Translation)