We were in San Antonio enjoying all the touristy activities. At the Market Square (El Mercado) we came across a caricature artist. I wondered what he would see when he looked at me. I sat for a few minutes while he sketched. When he gave me the final product, the first thing I noticed was that he captured my large jaws. I loved it and laughed with Lisa about it. I have TMJ which makes my jaws look bigger than they should. The caricature made them look even bigger.
That’s how caricatures work. An artist draws your head three times too big and your nose twice as long. It’s still recognizably you, but it’s not you. It’s an exaggeration built to get a laugh, not a portrait built to tell the truth.
We do the same thing to people, not with a pencil, but with our memory and our imagination. When we’re hurt by someone, or when we disagree with them, or when we just plain don’t like them, we start building a version of them in our head. And like the boardwalk drawing, it’s built out of real material. It’s not pure fiction, but it’s stretched, exaggerated, and simplified until the person we’re carrying around in our mind bears only a passing resemblance to the person who actually exists.
Why We Do It
There’s a reason this happens, and it’s not because we’re bad people. It’s because it’s easier. When someone hurts us or opposes us, our minds go looking for an explanation. And nine times out of ten, we reach for the explanation that costs us the least: something is wrong with them.
Meanwhile, when we do something hurtful or thoughtless ourselves, we reach for a different kind of explanation entirely: we were tired, we were stressed, we didn’t mean it that way, we were having a bad week. We extend ourselves grace and extend them a verdict.
Once that verdict gets handed down, it starts collecting evidence. Every time that person does something we don’t like, it confirms what we already decided about them. Every time they do something kind or complicated or surprising, we barely notice, because it doesn’t fit the story we’re telling. Before long, the caricature isn’t just a distortion anymore. It’s the only version of that person we can see.
It’s a short walk from “I disagree with that person” to “that person is the enemy,” and once we’ve made that walk, we stop being curious about them. We stop asking questions. We stop wondering what their story is, what they’ve been through, what might be true on their side of things that we haven’t bothered to find out. It’s a lot easier to dismiss a caricature than to sit across the table from a real, complicated, image-bearing human being.
And that’s the cost nobody talks about. It’s not just that we misjudge the other person. It’s that we lose the chance to actually know them.
What Scripture Says About This
Jesus put His finger right on this in Matthew 7. He said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3, ESV). Before we go correcting or condemning someone else, He’s asking us to take an honest look at ourselves first. A caricature only survives in a world where we’ve stopped examining our own hearts. The moment we get honest about our own log, the speck we thought we saw so clearly in someone else usually looks a little different too.
James is just as direct. “Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law” (James 4:11, ESV). When we caricature someone, we’ve quietly made ourselves their judge. We’ve decided we know the whole of who they are, and we rarely have that kind of information about anybody, let alone someone we’re in conflict with.
Getting to Know One Another Instead
The answer here is not complicated, but it’s also not easy. The answer is getting to know one another. Ask a question instead of assuming an answer. Sit across the table. Let someone surprise you.
You can’t hold onto a caricature and get to know someone at the same time. The two can’t survive in the same room. Real people are too complicated, too surprising, and honestly too human to fit inside the flat version we build of them when we’re hurt or frustrated. But it takes work to let the real person back in. It takes humility to admit the version in your head might be wrong. And it takes love to want to find out.
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