The Hard Battle
This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self. We must feel as a brother towards the man beside us, and say to him the things that we should like to have said to us, and treat him as we should desire to be treated when our hands are hanging down and our hearts are heavy. And this is the very essence of courtesy.
Ian McLaren (aka. John Watson)
I found a paraphrased version of this quote a few years ago that I think sums it up well:
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
We are a distracted society and distraction not only keeps us from seeing the beauty around us, it also causes us to not truly see the people around us. When we are distracted or have full schedules or specific agendas, our fellow sojourners on this earth become peripheral to the task at hand. At the very least, we ignore them, at the worst, we find them offensive, annoying, or otherwise inconvenient and treat them in a way that conveys this feeling quite clearly. But as McLaren states so eloquently in The Homely Virtues, we are all in this together.
Some of us are good at hiding our struggles, others…not so much. Regardless of what percentage of our hearts we wear on our sleeves, I can guarantee that most, if not all, of the people we cross paths with on a daily basis are fighting some kind of hard battle.
I see us, sometimes, as beings of many faces. We struggle with financial difficulties, sickness, marriage problems, mental illness, death, and the challenges of being in certain seasons of life, not to mention the myriad other things that pop up while we draw breath. This includes things that everyone else experiences at some point in their lives, as well as challenges that some of us can’t even imagine. We fight through these things while we drive to work, go grocery shopping, or take the kids to the library.
Life is hard, and we have no idea how hard it is for the person we pass by on the street.
I think what makes it harder still, though, is how we treat each other even while we’re wading through these difficult times. This was illustrated beautifully to me by someone I used to know at work. He came in late one day, his second offense and potentially career-ending for him, and told the story of a car that had been driving about five miles an hour under the speed limit on his way in that morning. He of course got stuck behind her and laid on the horn, tailgating her for about ten minutes of his fifteen-minute drive to work, gesticulating and yelling at her while he watched the time that he was supposed to arrive at work come and go. As he finally sped by to pass her, flashing a single finger in her general direction, he saw that she had three screaming kids in the backseat of the car and was staring out the windshield, white-knuckled, with tears running down her cheeks. He said he felt like a complete jerk, though he said it in more colorful language.
I wonder sometimes, if we kept in mind that life is hard for everyone (yes, everyone), if we carried around a little grace to hand out, if we bothered to take a break from navel-gazing long enough to notice the people struggling around us, that maybe we could lighten the load for someone else. That maybe we could help them a little in their battles and, by doing so, also help ourselves in our own battles as well.
Maybe choosing to be kind is half the battle.
