Something to Learn from Everyone

“Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion.” ―Romans 12:16

God places us in families and churches to change us; to use the strengths and weakness of others to shape us into more mature persons. “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend” (Pr. 27:17). He gave Adam a wife because he needed help. He gives us families and church communities because this is one of the main ways He supplies all our needs. We have something to learn from everyone, great and small, young and old, rich or poor, wise or foolish, educated and uneducated, etc. When we self-consciously embrace this fact, we find ourselves maturing; becoming more and more like Christ. God does not want me to be them, but He does want me to be more like them than I am. He at least wants me to learn from them. I might need to know what they know or do what they do (positive learning); or I might need to learn from their foolishness and not do what they do (negative learning). In either case, I need them a lot.

Moreover, I have a Christian obligation to love them, serve them and help them grow as well. I am called to strengthen the weak, encourage my brothers, and to assist in their Christian maturity. People, who are all made in the image of God, are fascinating. G.K Chesterton said, “There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.” Quentin Lauer, in his book, G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio, writes:

Apparently Chesterton was incapable of finding anyone as uninteresting or a bore. The responsibility, it would seem, for any one being a bore lay with the one who found him or her boring. Maisie Ward quotes an unnamed man friend as saying, “When you talked with Chesterton you didn’t feel how brilliant he was but how brilliant you were.” …Chesterton comes across, not as one who made an effort to help people find themselves interesting, but as one who himself actually found them interesting. It was because he found people intelligent and interesting that they could find themselves so. In any event the picture that comes through is of one who found life so interesting that he could not find people uninteresting. He undoubtedly saw in them more than was there, but it is also undoubtedly true that, when they were with him, there was more in them than there usually was. The point it that Chesterton did in fact find the world and the people in it wonderfully exciting―which is to say real: “It is, in short, the man who thinks ordinary things common who is really the man who is living in an unreal world.”