Guilty?

Tonight as I was reading my sister's blog it made me reflect on myself and how I sometimes tend to pass judgement.

Those of you that read my blog regularly know that I was in a wreck two weeks ago today. The person that hit me asked me if I would not call her insurance and give her the chance to pay it herself so her rates would not go up. While hesitating with this request I decided to do this and give her the shot. My gut feeling was that I would never hear from her again. Everyone I spoke to afterwards told me that I just let her get away with hitting me and not having to pay a dime. I could not help but wonder in my head if they were right.

I called this person after getting the estimate for repairs and she returned my call within an hour. Everytime I called her she never hesitated to call me back. She would ask me to do things that I felt were somewhat unreasonable because I felt that if I were dealing with her insurance company I would not have to be jumping through these hoops and would not have to take all my time to get estimates all over the place. I would question her and she would tell me it was no problem, she understood where I was coming from.

Finally we agreed that today we would meet at the body shop and arrange to have the repairs completed. Again, I had my doubts as to whether she would show or not. But there she was right on time at 8am. She also made it very easy to work with her and she has been completely up front about taking responsibility. When they told me how I had to handle getting the rental car she quickly stepped in and said she would go with me and be certain that she was covering the costs of the rental car. I did offer to cover it and have her pay me back since I really do believe it cost her more money to do it the way she did. But again she insisted she was covering these expenses.

I felt guilty for having questioned her intentions in the first place. But it is definitely nice to know that honest people do still exist in this world. I am glad that she has been cooperative in covering the repairs for my car.

In this case I was very quick to pass judgement, I never gave this person a chance. I have always tried to believe that as a whole people are honest and trustworthy but there were a few bad ones that make it difficult. I have also always tried to trust people until they gave me a reason to not trust them. For some reason I just had a difficult time doing that.

I would not consider myself a skeptical person but I do try to ask questions and establish some kind of connection with people in order to establish a common trust. That means I do ask a lot of questions but I always try to listen to the answers I am given. I hope that this experience will help me to trust more in the future and to not be so quick to pass judgement.