The Hardest Thing to Do
The hardest thing to do is to accept another person as they are.
That truth resounded once more this week as I listened to a woman talk about a struggle with her sister. They were often at odds, she said, because their lives were so—blood—similar and yet so completely different. They had different career goals, different marriages, lifestyles, parenting styles. Even little things annoyed them, what they ate or how they dressed.
The breakthrough came, she told me, when she realized how all of that was unconscious judgment. Things changed when she could simply look at her sister as she is, and not insist that she conform to her vision of what is right and true and good.
This is the hardest thing to do, especially with those we love, those bound to us in blood. It is relatively easy to let friends and acquaintances be who they are, and feel no pressing need to make them somehow better—right. But our families, our loved ones. That’s a battle.
This is the most basic spiritual lesson: to let people go, to free them. It is the way of God with each of us, to let us be and still to love us. “As I have loved you,” says the Master, “so you must love one another.” That starts with sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons.
Actually, of course, it starts within. We can’t help wagging a finger at others when we are so cruelly hard on ourselves. There is a good reason why the Great Commandment ends with those words, “and your neighbor as yourself.” God knows you cannot love anyone until you have loved your self.
I don’t have a sister, but I do have friends and other family, so I know what you’re saying is true. What we least like in others is usually what we least like about ourselves.
Thanks, David! Just what I needed to hear! Rick and his new girl friend were up this weekend and I’ve been grumbling ever since about them. Now Jenny and her boys are here and I keep wondering why they don’t do things the way I want them to.
Thank you! Thank you!
Love, Anne
Holy Moly that was good! At the beach with my family in NC and it is an excellent reminder that we must be the change we want to see in others.
You might need to create a colored wristband for this reminder. We need it all the time. Thanks David
Yes! And the challenge remains after this epiphany – when I am trying to let those close to me just “be” – I want them to do the same with me (& others). This doesn’t happen (a lot), and my response to it also requires letting go, and letting be.
It’s especially hard to live and let live with our grown children, because we’ve spent a lifetime trying to guide and mold them to be what they can be and it is difficult to know when to stand down and back away. And then it is hard because we DO LOVE our families and when we see self-destructive behavior it’s tough to watch. Though practically speaking that is the one way we try to live.
Ultimately though, Jesus could only set us free by actually seeing what we did and forgiving us in spite of ourselves. Jesus’ “as I have loved you” required dying on the cross for us because in the end we did not make good choices-we were really “headed to hell in a hand basket.” Emulating Jesus’ love for us, doing for others as he did for us, is not the same as stepping back and throwing our hands in the air and sighing “Oh, well. Live and let live.” Instead it requires us to be willing to die for a friend or a relative even those who have slapped us on one cheek or rejected us completely.
To love like Jesus requires us to be the right example in the face of other’s destructive and hurtful actions. Really loving like Jesus means being willing to forgive others who have hurt us and do not show remorse (Forgive 70 times 7 times-that means endlessly). And loving like Jesus is being willing to give to the point of death for the family member or friend who won’t actually notice or care. In reality, we are not able to love like Jesus but that is the command.
David Know you and Pam are having a gret time in your home Loved this one
Just preordeered your new book Bravo!! clark