I don't think it was meant as a compliment

I went to dinner tonight with the guys from work.  We do this every now and again.  I think it's a nice way to get to know the folks I work with.  We shared a few stories.  You know me, I have a million of them.  We had a conversation about beers of the world.  Me, I used to be a Budweiser man.  Not so much these days.  I'm more of an iced tea man.  I don't know what brought the subject up that I'm about to tell you about.  Maybe it's because the restaurant was quite crowded.  But whatever the reason, the guy sitting across from me said this about me:

Dale must be dead.  He doesn't even look at the girls.

I shared with you a verse from the book of Job a while back, where he talks about looking at other women lustfully when you're married.  Jesus also had some words on the subject.  I guess that's a lot of it.  To tell you the truth, I didn't even notice it, save for this one thing.  There was a table full of women seated near us and I purposely chose a seat with my back to them.

My reply:  "I'm married."  To be fair, I wasn't real busy looking at anyone.  I was just enjoying the conversation.

That's when I heard this old standard lie:  "Married doesn't mean dead".  Implying, of course that it's OK to look, when clearly the lesson from Job and the words of Jesus say otherwise.  I always thought looking was harmless and I'd be a liar to say I never got caught looking.  I guess I just took what I read to heart.  Granted, too, I took looking way too far.  Anyway, we just laughed about it and the conversation changed to another topic.

I noticed something else tonight too.  I used to get frustrated with people when they weren't understanding what I was trying to tell them.  I was trying to understand something one of the guys I work with was telling me and he wasn't understanding what I was trying to explain to him.  Instead of getting frustrated, I just said in a very polite way, "I don't think you're understanding what I'm trying to tell you.  Sometimes, I don't do a very good job of expressing myself, so let me start over and see if I can try to make myself more clear.  I'm really trying to understand what you're saying and I'm just trying to figure out how this works."

OK, even I'm wondering where that came from.  It was almost like a different person was wearing the Dale suit today.  But then again, I think that's supposed to happen.