Early in one of my first classes in grad school, during the introduction to the one of the classes, I had an instructor make a statement about a concept of counseling that has stuck with me to this day and has become the mantra of ministry and ultimately life to me. It was supposed to make me keenly aware of the brevity of the undertaking that I was trying to pursue and it did. As time has passed, it has grown in scope to be all encompassing and I find myself now applying this concept to everything that I do. Very simply, what this instructor said was that I was called to do the most loving thing possible for those that I came in contact with.

This sounds both simple and obvious. Of course that is what I am supposed to do because the concept of love is all through the Bible. It’s at the center of what pastors preach about every Sunday morning. John 3:16, the most well known verse in scripture, talks about how much God loved the world and what He did about it. Well, the practice of doing the most loving thing for someone is not as easy as it might seem. I think that much of the time we do what we determine to be the most loving thing which actually often is not very loving at all.

The problem is that doing the most loving thing is sometimes not easy and often it’s downright ugly. It’s hard to tell the truth to someone and, in general, people don’t want to hear it and because of the potential reaction to it we shy away from sharing when the most loving thing to do is to share honestly, openly and with true care for someone’s well being. What’s been created is a façade. We share what is comfortable and the other stuff never gets addressed. We live in an entire world full of white elephants especially in the church. They are tromping through our sanctuaries every Sunday morning and we ignore them without a second thought.

The reason that we tend to not want to share the hard stuff is basically selfishness. It’s about our comfort level and it’s about our fear of rejection and it’s about our dealing with change and ultimately our dealing with possibly causing some one else pain. Getting better hurts sometimes. The cross hurt greatly and it was the greatest event in the history of the world. We truly have to calculate what we say and do and be tactful, but we are mandated to love one another and that involves caring about others more than ourselves and truly doing the most loving thing possible.