Be Kind

The mournful look on his face is permanently pressed into my memory, like one of those patches mom used to steam press over the tear in my blue jeans. Something was torn, terribly deep, in that young man’s life. It had something to do with moral failure and was so painful he couldn’t talk about it. Whatever it was, it had happened recently those many years ago. He wanted help so badly he would sit in my office and just cry, or stare mournfully into some other world only he could see and I could not. Like he was watching the life he thought he was going to live passing before his eyes, slipping from his grip.

I was working overtime not to be voyeuristic in my questioning. I had long since passed the stage where I found the moral failings of others intriguing or even remotely fascinating. If there is any compassion in you at all, the kind borne of self-humiliation, watching others stumble only breaks your heart for them, never seeing their failings as a source of entertainment or distraction. Something had broken that young man’s heart. He was able to say enough to point toward himself as the source of the failure. There wasn’t an ounce of blame in him toward others. But, he was never able to actually name whatever breach of trust over which he was self-destructing before my eyes. Looking back some years, I sense that it had to do with marital infidelity, though, to this day, I don’t know that for a fact. He had certainly broken someone’s trust, especially his trust of himself.

Of all the ministry experiences I’ve wished I could relive, that moment rates at the top. I’ve replayed that hour in my study so many times, saying out loud the things I wish I had said then. Something, anything that would have helped ease his burden or bear it more responsibly. That young man eventually faded into the rest of the faces of the past that stand like mile markers on my memory’s highway. I have no idea what became of him. I wonder what he finally made of the sin that was haunting him that day, his own personal demon.

A colleague recently told me something one of his professors once wrote in Greek on the chalkboard. “Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.” Some people have better poker faces than others and you’d never know anything is wrong. With others, you can read their pain in the grimace being permanently etched into their face as though with a laser, one burning cut at a time.

No matter what we see on the surface, we just never know what stories, what demons, lurk in the shadows of another’s heart. We never know what private battles of conscience they are fighting. It’s just safer to assume that every person we meet is fighting some battle and to be as kind to them as we would have them be to us. Almost certainly, the kindness we extend to others in their private pain will come back to bless us in ours’. Or, not.