PATTERN RECOGNITION

 John 1:45-46

"Philip found Nathanael and told him, 'We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote - Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.'

'Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?' Nathanael asked.

'Come and see,' said Philip."

Here's another insight from Scott Adams:

"There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do.

1. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world.

2. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition.

3. And they don't know it." (Loserthink, p.66)

Rings true, doesn't it?

Nathanael came within inches of missing out on meeting the very Son of God. Why? Because of faulty pattern recognition. Apparently, every Nazarene Nathanael had met in his lifetime was a jerk or an idiot (in his eyes).  

Perhaps Nathanael  had been put off by the first person he ever met from Nazareth. Maybe the second too. Soon he was noticing something disagreeable in every Nazarene who crossed his path. 

Fortunately, though, for Nathanael, he was willing to give his friend's judgment some credibility, even when it conflicted with what he already "knew"; he was open to the possibility that a pattern he previously "discerned" did not have predictive power in every case. 

As a result, he acted upon Philip's invitation to "come and see", and this particular Nazarene put Nathanael's earthly life and his eternity on a completely different path. 

But he almost missed something incredibly good from Nazareth.