We Get To

For those who invest in people through what are known as the helping fields, there is a particularity about the approach to people in need that necessitates seeing everyone in the light of very equal value and worthiness of dignity and care.

Engaging someone in any given setting includes the combination of 1) the traits of who they are, 2) how they perceive and feel about people similar and different from them, 3) any otherwise effects or impact of their experiences and beliefs, and with all this, 4) how they ultimately present and conduct themselves--and 5) all this interacting on some level with these same traits of our own.

When conversing with a deeply valued friend about this, someone I trust significantly and with expertise in the area of helping, she made a statement that had a residual ring in my heart. She said that when we work with people, we have to care about everyone the same, no matter who or how they are.

Off the top, this seems common sensical, albeit a helpful periodic centering reminder throughout the journey of helping people. But it wasn't just what she said. It was how she said it. Not begrudging, disenchanted, belaboring, ungrateful or demeaning. But rather with a gentle, tender compassion and genuine care that spoke beyond her words in an undercurrent voice that actually said we get to care about everyone the same.

We get to.

We have the honorable privilege to care for someone different from us.

Do we realize the potential for impact with this? The opportunity to significantly touch and affect change in someone's heart and trajectory of life? This might be one of the ultimate forms of availing our lives to the hand of God to minister love and grace to another.

But how easy do our differences and mismatches distract our hearts, cloud our vision, and clutter the space we must create to sit with someone in need?

There is a way to retrain our vision and our hearts, to see people from the inside-out. To know them and be capable of loving them where they are, as they are, creating a context of safety and grace that enables us to speak honestly and truthfully in an inviting manner.

Now all this said, this place does have boundaries of which we must be cognizant. On the one hand, by virtue of this conversation, we are hopefully passing from the land of improprietal prejudice into a centered, honest grace. But the bound of the other side of the spectrum is set to keep us from the area of overcompensating with the person we are helping in a quasi-codependent, overly coddling fashion.

However, many of us may find ourselves needing to take intentional measures to dismantle or reorient perspectives, assumptions and memories that negatively affect our ability to see someone for their innate worth and value them as such.

But how powerful of a place to endeavor in! Imagine…someone who is not only already in a difficult or vulnerable place in their journey, but connecting with someone very different from them who is able to foster safety by the respect and compassion given them perhaps never experienced before. How much healing might take place just in that!

What can we do to grow into a more available vessel of the ointment of the Lord to pour through us into broken, dry places of the heart and soul of another?

One thing I do know: if we're willing, we get to.