Sometimes it seems like “Love your neighbor as yourself” has become a Christian stock phrase, right up there with, “I'll pray about that,” “Jesus loves you,” and “Everything happens for a reason.” Not to say that any of these phrases are wrong in and of themselves. Each phrase contains a powerful truth that, when applied correctly, can be life-changing.
Take loving your neighbor, for example. Most Christians realize this is what they should be doing, but many think this means having warm and fuzzy feelings about all the people you meet. As everyone knows, this is virtually impossible. So what does it really mean to love your neighbor? And how are we supposed to show our neighbors that we love them?
Something that has struck me during the past two semesters of biblical counseling classes is that loving people is a lot more fundamental to my Christian walk than I am inclined to think, and it also involves a lot more effort and sacrifice than I'm inclined to muster. Prior to seminary, my typical reasoning about loving my neighbor ran somewhere along these lines: “I'm supposed to love my neighbor, so I guess what this means is that I should love my family, be a responsible employee, be nice to my friends, and be cordial with everyone else I meet.” So far, so good.
But while that sounded perfectly fine and nice when summed up in a neat statement like that, I began to realize that I had dumbed down my standard to fit what I was comfortable with. This realization was hammered in for me when I took a pivotal class at Westminster called Helping Relationships, taught by Ed Welch. Dr. Welch talked a lot about what it meant to love people, and a few of the ideas that he introduced me to were the concepts of enjoying others and letting them move me. What he meant by this was that part of genuinely loving people means enjoying them. In other words, actively savoring being around them, the way you do when you're around a good friend who makes you laugh and brightens a bad day. Learning to enjoy another's presence is harder when you're with some people than with others, of course. Some people just seem to rub me the wrong way. But I began to see that if I wasn't actively searching for the good in other people and actively looking for something in them that I could appreciate, it was going to be practically impossible for me to love them.
The other concept Dr. Welch outlined for me was the idea of being moved by other people. Let me explain what he meant by this. For Welch, letting someone move you meant letting their words make an emotional impact on you – really letting them touch you inside and not letting what they were saying simply be water under the bridge. Another way of putting it might be to talk about being fully present in your interactions with others and really listening to what they have to say. As Dr. Welch talked about these things, I began to see how it was easy for me to be “nice” on the outside to people without really being moved by them. How easy it is to exchange pleasantries with someone, smile, and be polite, without really caring for them!
Maybe for you it seems like there's not much to be moved by in your conversations with people. They're just not telling you anything that's that interesting. At this point, it may be time to pause and ask yourself, “Why is that? Am I bored because I'm preoccupied with things in my own life, or is it because this person is just not telling me the full story?” Engaging stories nearly always involve conflict, and anyone who has any age on them will have stories of heartbreak and suffering and relational difficulties and spiritual struggles. Whether they choose to share them with you will depend very much on whether they feel they can trust you.
More thoughts about how to actively love people to follow next week...stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment