Our Neighbors
“I’m not mad at you. And you aren’t in trouble,” I said, squatting next to his chair. After disrupting the rest of the class through most of the story, I asked him to sit down so we could talk about it. I waited as he kicked the table leg and clenched his fists. There were a thousand and one things I needed to get done, but first I needed to fix something. He looked up, finally, and turned his angry stare from the wall towards me. “I’m not mad,” I repeated, and that’s when the tears started.
There has been a bit of a Mister Rogers-aissance lately with movies and podcasts and books praising the humble genius for all of the work he did in spreading love, kindness, and understanding. The more I learn about him, the more my respect for him has grown. Children are wonderful and surprising and full of joy. But they are also unpredictable and frustratingly difficult to understand and full of emotions that they don’t know how to regulate and so they shoot out sideways in ways that can be hurtful. Fred Rogers got underneath all of that and saw the human in front of him. Each one of us was his neighbor, wounded but full of potential, every one of us made in God’s image.
I don’t have the capacity to be fully present for every person I come in contact with in the way I want or hope to be. But I’m trying, in the moments when I am able, to put aside my goals and expectations and show others that they matter. That all the mistakes they make (sometimes mistakes that they are still in the process of making) are not what define them.
In the podcast, “Finding Fred,” the host tackled the weighty concept of how Fred Rogers viewed everyone he came in contact with through a lens of grace. He truly, deeply believed in the biblical model of grace and he lived his life accordingly. In grace, no one is ever irredeemable. No one is too far gone to be loved and forgiven. It’s grace that goes first, wrapping arms around us even when we’re not sorry for what we’ve done or the hurt we’ve caused.
It’s a very bold claim. It feels wrong sometimes, the way Mister Rogers loved people. Because he loved people the way God loves people. A love that’s unimaginably strong and that reaches further than we think it can or should. A love that heals, but also hurts. Because you can’t get close to someone else’s pain without taking some of it onto yourself.
It’s so easy to get caught up in striving. To be so busy with our good work that we forget that so little of it really matters. Having the right answers, saying the right things, being part of the right groups are all hollow if we don’t love our neighbors.
A religious person once asked Jesus to define the word “neighbor” in the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus answered in the form of a story. A man was robbed and left to die on the side of the road. Two men, good men who believed and said all the right things, walked by him. Then a Samaritan, an outsider, saw him. He saw him. He looked at him and didn’t see the mistakes he might have made that ended with him bleeding in a ditch. He saw him.
The more I see of the messiness of human nature and all the ways we continue to hurt each other, the harder grace becomes to preach and to live. But it also becomes so much more vital.
And it starts with seeing our neighbors.
