lessons from a ham...

I prepared the country ham that my family will be eating for Christmas brunch (and for the next few weeks most likely...)good old country ham. As I unwrapped it and washed the mold, yes mold,off of the outside, I thought, how like people this ham is...
No, I am not referring to drama queens, or show offs. I was thinking of the old saying : never judge a book by its cover. Once a country ham was sent to friends out of state, they threw it away because they thought it was spoiled. Granted they look positively dreadful right out of the package, but you wash all that muck off and you have one amazing piece of meat. 
I got to thinking, people are sometimes a lot like that ham, they might look kind of scary on the outside, but if you look deeper, well, you might just find something amazing. 

Never judge a person by what they look like on the outside, take the time to get to know them before you mark them off because they look "different". 
That is not to say that first impressions are not important, and occasionally most accurate. There are times however that the people that look or seem the nicest at first glance are the ones that end up stabbing you in the back, to use a rather graphic colloquialism, but it is true. Then there are those that you think "I sure would not like to meet them in a dark ally" sometimes they turn out to be the ones that would stick by your side in the face of the "safe looking" back stabbers. Amazing, all that from a moldy ham. One other thing to remember, "Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart"