Seeking charity
What would you do if you had a neighbor that backed into your car while you were sitting in it in front of your house talking to another neighbor, causing thousands of dollars of damage and hours of time, and then the neighbor who backed into was angry that you were in his way? And then his daughter started yelling at everyone who stopped in front of your house, saying it’s illegal to stop there? And even when you had a carpool coming by to pick up your daughter for soccer, that neighbor came out and yelled at the parent in the car telling them to move? Or when you had a youth group over for a service project and a mom pulled up in front of your house to pick up her daughter and the same neighbor came out and yelled at the mom to move her car because it’s illegal to be stopped in front of our home? What would you do if you asked that neighbor to please stop yelling at your friends and guests and, rather than saying “Oh, sure. Sorry about my temper,” that neighbor ignored you and continued to yell at people stopped in front of your house at your walkway and insisted the only way she would stop yelling is if you told anyone coming over never to stop in front of your house? What would you do if then, because you felt like you had no other option, you said to that neighbor that if she didn’t stop screaming at the people who were picking up or dropping off carpools (or just parked by the curb to clean the windows or drop off a package) you would need to file a harassment claim and then the father that originally backed into your car emailed to say “you don’t talk to my family anymore and we won’t talk to yours?”
What would you do if then on the following Sunday you were asked to help out at church in the nursery with the little kids, one of whom is the daughter of the screaming neighbor, and after spending an hour helping that little girl, and wiping her nose and getting her snacks and singing to her, the mom comes in, sees you, and says to the nursery leader “What is she doing here? I am not ok with that!” What would you do?
Feel hurt? Feel angry? Feel helpless? Be tempted to yell or cuss or punch somebody? I am writing from personal experience here. What do you do with someone who, no matter what you do or how kind and forgiving you try to be, continues to harbor resentment and animosity and anger against you to the point where it makes you feel ill just seeing them? But it’s your neighbor and you aren’t planning to move any time soon? And they refuse to have a conversation? I don’t know what you do. The only thing I can come up with is to pray for charity.
There is a lot of anger in the world. A LOT. Just look at the news. Look around. You can see anger within relationships, within schools, anger between races and political parties, anger in the world. People are harboring resentment for how they’ve been treated, for things someone said, for friends or family who have been hurt, for property or land that has been damaged or taken away. Sometimes the answer is simple—have a conversation, take ownership of your part, forgive, move on. And sometimes, despite our best efforts, we have to live with a situation we can’t control where someone is being flat-out cruel and refuses to change. Maybe all we can do is seek for charity.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Jesus Christ lately and what the scriptures say about how he was treated: he was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). What did he do? He didn’t yell at people or cuss or punch them in the face. I wonder if he ever wanted to? I wonder if it was hard? He was part mortal, after all. I’ve been thinking about the struggle he may have had to forgive. To have people spit on him and abuse him and laugh at him, and in the end he still chose to say, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
I think that’s why we call charity “the pure love of Christ.” It’s getting to a place of love no matter what someone has done to hurt you, no matter whether it was justified or completely without explanation. Part of charity allows us to treat people with kindness even when we have been treated badly. That’s a gift for them. But part of charity is an ability to be free from carrying the burden of anger and resentment. That is a gift for us.
President Russell M. Nelson had this to say: “Charity is the antidote to contention. Charity is the spiritual gift that helps us to cast off the natural man, who is selfish, defensive, prideful, and jealous. Charity is the principal characteristic of a true follower of Jesus Christ.” I want to be a follower of Christ.
This holiday season my goal is to learn more about charity. I want to have charity in my heart not just for the people in the world who have been kind to me (easy), or the people who have been neutral toward me (pretty easy), but for the people who have been awful to me (really, really hard). I don’t know exactly how to get there other than to pray every day to have the gift of charity in my heart so I don’t develop the hardening resentment that can ruin my own ability to have peace. I think that’s something I can learn from the way Jesus lived. It won’t be easy, I know. But hopefully it will make a difference. As Martin Luther King Jr. once taught, “You can’t fight darkness with darkness. Only light can do that.” I can’t think of anything more full of light than charity.
