Because my family moved every couple of years, I attended a handful of schools growing up. I think this is the reason I don’t really remember any of my teachers before High School, except for one. I will always remember my second grade teacher: Mrs. Strickland. As an adult, I marvel at how appropriately named she was. I was in her class at Valparaiso Elementary School in Florida. I remember her clearly because that school still utilized corporal punishment for dealing with discipline problems. In the second grade, I had terrible ADHD (really, I still do). Because I couldn’t sit still, Mrs. Strickland sent me to the principal’s office often. Mr Fuller, the principal, paddled me for not sitting still on many occasions before my mother stepped in and put a stop to it. Mrs. Strickland also put a letter in my school record suggesting that I was mentally defective. This prompted several trips to see a psychiatrist and special classes. I know I was certainly a difficult student to deal with, a trend that continued throughout my educational career. However, Mrs Strickland put real effort into making me miserable because I was difficult, and I remember her today as a result. I believe that we all encounter people daily who are challenging to deal with. Sometimes they’re annoying or require a little extra patience to talk with, or they’re just plain awkward. Regardless of the reason, when we encounter those people it’s easy to treat them poorly. Sometimes, it’s even enjoyable to do so. It’s easy to be impatient or to avoid them altogether. The one great lesson I learned from Mrs Strickland was that I don’t want to be remembered by people because I made their lives worse. I don’t want to be an example of “what not to be” or the reason someone went home miserable at the end of the day. Every person we encounter in life is a unique creation of God, loved by Him dearly. In every instance, we have choices to make regarding how we impact their day and, given enough days, their entire lives. There is no greater investment we can make in those we deal with than to treat them as people of value and with dignity. In doing this, we obey what the Bible calls the Law of Love. It’s a simple idea: Love your neighbor as yourself. This means we love folks who are sometimes difficult to love. This sounds like an easy set of platitudes when it’s mentioned without specifics. It gets more challenging very quickly when we put it into a day to day context. We are to love rude people. We are to love folks who mistreat us (and pray for them). We are to love people who disagree with our politics and choose to be jerks about it (and pray for them, too!). We are to love folks that don’t look like us. Now, you might be thinking that it’s a weird law that we have to feel pleasant toward folks who are jerks. In reality, love, as it is presented in the Bible, refers to how we treat people. Paul summarized it well: Love is patient, kind, not envious, not bragging, not arrogant or rude, doesn’t insist on its own way, isn’t irritable or resentful, doesn’t rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the truth. There’s more to 1 Corinthians 13. I recommend reading it and using it as a template for how we deal with the annoying people in our lives. This would be the best and fastest way to treat all of the resentment and division in our culture.
