Tag: Kindness

Love the Good Samaritan? You’re Not Supposed To

The story of the Good Samaritan is perhaps the most well-known parable the Savior ever taught. A man is robbed and left for dead, two travelers pass by without helping, then a lone Samaritan stops, cleans him up, and carries him to safety. The Samaritan is hailed as a hero, we gushingly tell his story in Sunday school with the moral “serve others,” and that’s the whole story, right?

Well, not quite.

In studying the Good Samaritan story, we frequently overlook a key detail that takes the message far deeper than “serve others”: the Samaritan was not considered “good” by Christ’s audience. Today we see the Samaritan as a selfless, endearing protagonist, but in Christ’s day, he would have been a deeply unpopular antihero that a Jewish audience would likely recoil at — think of Snape before we knew he wasn’t a complete villain. If the Good Samaritan lived today, we wouldn’t like him, either. That’s kind of the point.

To Jews, Samaritans were a corrupted other. Samaritans believed that Judaism was a related but altered version of their own beliefs. They worshiped the Israelite God, but they also worshiped the gods they brought with them from their homelands, as many of them were foreign colonists in northern Israel around the time of Babylonian captivity. Religious disagreements and cultural differences strained the relationship between Samaritans and neighboring Jews, and by the time the Savior walked among them, they didn’t just disagree with each other, they hated each other. Samaritans mocked the Jews and harassed Jewish pilgrims traveling through Samaria. Jews burned down Samaritan villages and ostracized them. Contact between the two was frequently violent or marked by mischief — Samaritans, for example, would light beacon fires to deceive the Jews into thinking it was a new moon, which marks a holiday of spiritual renewal for Jews. Both Jewish and Samaritan leaders eventually taught that it was unacceptable to associate with, speak with, or even be in the same area with members of the opposite group.

With this historical context in mind, imagine how shocking the Savior’s parable would have been to a Jewish audience. Neither a temple worker or priest, individuals of great spiritual esteem, were willing to stop and help the beaten man. The only one willing to do so was a man they would have had zero association with and considered unclean. This key detail shows that the Savior isn’t simply teaching the principle of service in the parable of the Good Samaritan. He’s gently reprimanding his listeners for judging and selectively choosing their neighbors, who aren’t just people like them, but people who think and worship differently than they do. Christ uses Samaritans as good examples throughout the New Testament and thereby implies that Samaritans aren’t the real issue: hypocrisy, animosity, and hatred towards them is. Give this parable a modern retelling and it becomes a sharp critique of political, religious, and social tribalism that every one of us should take personally.

Had the Savior been teaching an audience of 21st Century Latter-day Saints the parable of the Good Samaritan, he might have spoken of the Good Liberal, the Good Republican, the Good LGBT Person, the Good Muslim, the Good Gun Owner, the Good Feminist, the Good Uneducated, or Good Illegal Immigrant. He or she would be a person we dislike, don’t understand, or don’t associate with, even a person we’d consider our enemy. They wouldn’t be a bishop or a temple worker. They’d be someone who worships in a mosque or someone who doesn’t worship anything at all. They’d be wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt or a Make America Great Again hat. They’d have different politics, religious beliefs, social circles, cultural traditions, and backgrounds. They, like Samaritans were to Jews, would be hard for us to relate to or love, but they would willingly give their time and possessions to help someone in need. And if we were the man in need, would we complain?

Perhaps, in our retelling of the Good Samaritan story, we miss the overarching point: the Savior sees worth and goodness in the people that we like the least. They are often better neighbors than we are, in spite of the assumptions we make and perceptions we have about them. Do we see the worth the Savior sees in them, or do we belittle them, judge them, see them as “other” and push them out of our lives because they aren’t like us? Doing the latter makes us just as poor a neighbor as the temple worker and priest who rushed past the beaten man in his time of need, found him at chouprojects..com

In a diverse, online world, it can be easy for us to judge and criticize people who don’t share our viewpoints. The world is filled with different parties, social groups, cultures, and religions, and the Savior’s message that everyone is our neighbor is often lost in the chaos of those groups trying to coexist. Too often, we create that chaos. We covenant to mourn with and comfort our neighbors on Sunday just to belittle and judge them for their differences Monday through Saturday. That isn’t the way the Savior would have us behave. In order to fully understand what kind of person Christ is teaching us to be in the parable of the Good Samaritan, we must be willing to insert ourselves into the roles of the one in need, the hurried priest, the unconcerned temple worker, the Samaritan, AND the Jewish audience being taught, perhaps for the first time, that their enemy is actually a really good person, in spite of the bad they chose to see in him. We need that lesson, too.

The Good Samaritan story is a sharp reminder that loving our neighbor requires us to love not only the wounded, but the people we resent, disassociate with, and don’t understand. Seeing their worth instead of their differences is a good place to start, you can read more about it on our blog vpnhut.

May 15, 2018
The Miracle I Overlooked In the Story of the Loaves & Fishes

It was 4:50 in the morning, and I had approximately three minutes to eat something before leaving for my very first temple shift. I raced through a dark kitchen on my tiptoes and wolfed down a banana that had been sitting on the table. Worried that I wouldn’t have enough food in me to last throughout the day, or enough patience to eat a second banana, I looked to the slightly squished loaf of Western Family bread on the kitchen counter and felt a glimmer of hope. Bread’s filling, I thought. That should sustain me for awhile, right? Having barely enough time to snarf down a single slice, I ate one and ran.

Two hours later, in the quietest parts of the temple, my stomach made a noise similar to what it would sound like if every creature in Return of the Jedi had been thrown in the Sarlacc pit. Obviously, that single piece of bread had not filled or sustained me. It maybe had momentarily, but not long enough to make a difference or end my hunger.

As I thought about that little piece of bread and how I had expected it to fill me, I was reminded of the story of the loaves and the fishes in the New Testament and struck with new insight.

Picture it with me: the Savior has just heard of the passing of His good friend John the Baptist. Overcome, we can assume, by grief for His friend and the desire for solitude, He tries to get as far away as He can with His disciples. He, in fact, gets on a ship that takes them into the desert, almost literally the middle of nowhere. The people, hearing that the Savior has left, follow Him. These people are so desirous to be with the Savior that they don’t even think to take a boat or wagons — they follow Him “on foot out of the cities” (Matthew 14:13), leaving their homes and provisions behind to walk for who knows how long to get to Him. When they arrive, Christ, in His infinite compassion and in spite of being in the midst of His own trial, goes among them, healing their sick and afflicted.

Now, at some point, it gets to be way past dinner time. These 5,000 some odd people are in the desert, away from their homes, and have had nothing to eat for a very long time, and the disciples are, understandably, anxious about it. They approach the Savior and beg Him to “send the multitude away” (Matthew 14:15) so that they can get food for themselves. The Savior, as we know, tells them that the people don’t need to leave, and He asks His disciples to find food for them. Among all of the 5,000, they are able to find five loaves of bread and two fishes, which the Savior blesses and then breaks.

The miracle of this story that we most often focus on is that, when the disciples hand out the bread and fish, every single person receives some. Our human brains try to grasp how so few items could be split among so many and how the disciples could end up having food leftover to boot. With our small and limited understanding of this miracle, we might mentally divide the bread the fish into 5,000 pieces. They’d be pieces so small, it’d be a wonder that anybody could eat them at all. We consume ourselves with quantity and figures, but we forget another miracle that is, perhaps, more important in this story, one that sneaks quietly behind the first:

“…they did all eat, and were filled” (Matthew 14:20).

The miracle of the five loaves and the fishes isn’t only that 5,000 people all got food, but that they were all filled by it. It staved off a hunger that had likely been building for hours, and it sustained them all. Can you imagine it? With five loaves and two fishes, the Savior provided meals for 5,000. It’s incomprehensible to those of us who concern ourselves with wondering how.

The lesson here, however, is a tender and beautiful one. With this second miracle, the Savior showed the multitude and us that His love and His Atonement can fill us. He doesn’t hand it to us in portions, He doesn’t give a little to everyone. He fills us all with it. He gives us enough and then more than enough. That eternity that He promises those who follow Him is also offered completely. It’s a magnificent thing to think about.

Those of us who actively follow the Savior and want to be with Him are part of that multitude, spiritually if not physically. We might occasionally think there isn’t room for us or that we don’t matter. We might look at others receiving blessings we desperately want and think, I guess I’m not meant to have them. I guess I’m not trying hard enough. The truth, however, is that the Savior is waiting to fill our lives with every blessing. To those who follow Him, He offers eternal life individually, and He offers it in full. We must have the faith, like one in a crowd of 5,000, that when it is our turn to receive those blessings, we will receive them all.

Though a piece of bread early on a Saturday morning will not fill us, the Savior’s love and Atonement always will. There is more than enough for all. All we must do is seek Him.

April 27, 2016
There’s a Reason Why the Internet Never Agrees About Who Christ Was

A few months ago, I became involved in a somewhat heated discussion between friends. The central topic of that discussion was about what the Savior would do if someone who had once had a testimony left the church and became very vocal against the Gospel. One stood firm in his belief that the Savior would be bold and unashamed, even if it meant hurting the feelings or turning over the spiritual tables, if you will, of His critics. The other defended his belief that the Savior would be infinitely loving and kind to them. Both held their ground, and the discussion eventually came to a reluctant draw, neither really abandoning their original opinion.

As I’ve looked back on that conversation, I’ve found myself incredibly fascinated by how each of my friends chose to identify with the Savior, and by extension, how anybody chooses to identify with Him. When it comes to using the Savior’s example to defend our beliefs, our behaviors, and even the actions of others, I’ve noticed that most of us pick out and relate to just one of His traits. Most people identify with a Savior who is very accepting — I myself tend to identify with that. Others identify with a Savior who is bold and even, at times, offensive, as Christ would have been to those in His day who did not understand Him or accept Him. I’ve witnessed many conversations, online and offline, where these two characteristics are pitted against each other, as if they are both mutually exclusive or the only traits Jesus Christ ever had.

I think that by doing that, however, we don’t fully understand who Christ was or the extent of His capacity to understand us.

The truth is that Jesus Christ, in His mortal ministry, was not a unidimensional figure. He cannot be classified as only “The Righteously Angered Savior” or “The Loving Savior.” Though He is the Lord, He was also human. He was complex and dynamic. He felt the full scope of our emotions and feelings, not only when He atoned for us, but when He walked and lived among us. His message was simple, but His personality was more intricate.

The Savior did not just turn the tables of the money changers in the temple. He sat at the tables of sinners and Publicans and ate with them. The Savior was not completely accepting. He, in fact, called the Pharisees fools, serpents, and vipers, “full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanliness” (Matthew 23:27). He loved those whom others would not love, He touched those whom others dared not touch. He said of enemies, “Love them as thyself,” while defending His Father with boldness and courage. He was often frustrated by the Pharisees and Jews who would not accept His message, but He also atoned for them. He said, from His cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He would let sinners wash His feet, and He would wash the feet of His disciples. He would teach at the head of large crowds, and He would stoop in the dust to address the one. He was often burdened by sadness. He sought isolation following the death of His friend, John the Baptist, and He wept to see the anguish of Lazarus’s friends. He was also filled with joy, walking among the Nephites and thanking His Father for them. He was tender, and He was firm. He was filled with sorrow for His brothers and sisters who strayed, and He was pleased to see the faith of those who followed Him. At times surrounded by thronging crowds, He was both hardly alone and often very lonely, left and betrayed by some of His dearest friends and left entirely alone in his last moments on Earth.

The truth, if it be fully told of Jesus Christ, is that He is not a Savior who only knows how to love or rebuke. He is a Savior who hurts, who joys, who agonizes, who celebrates, who weeps, who smiles, who angers, who corrects, and who adores. When we speak of Him, let us do so with the reverence that comes from realizing that He is not just who He says He is, but He’s more than we too often give Him credit for.

March 5, 2016
The Terrible Advice Mormons Should Stop Giving

The other day, one of my friends posted an article from Tech Insider titled “This fearless Mormon feminist is doing something very brave and very dangerous.” I groaned inside, but took the bait and clicked the link anyway. As may have been expected from the title, the article ended up being a fairly sensationalized piece whose primary source was the Mormon feminist. I think one other individual was quoted and even then, just once. I don’t quite consider myself a journalism professional, but having had five years of news-writing experience, I was pained by the lack of professionalism and credibility exhibited by the writer of this piece. It bothered me more than the “very brave and very dangerous” feminist did.

After reading the post, I scrolled to the comments, hoping to see that someone was clearing up misconceptions, biases, and mistruths this article showcased. What I saw angered me in a different way. There were your typical “MORMONS ARE A CULT!! DON’T BUY INTO THEIR FAIRYTALE GOD!!!” comments. There were your typical “Mormon leadership is a bunch of greedy white males trying to build shopping malls from your holy money” comments. But the comments that bothered me the most came, surprisingly, from members of the church. These commenters attempted to defend their beliefs, but before doing so, almost every single one of them began their comments with a variation of the following phrase:

“If you don’t like the church, why don’t you just leave it?”

I cannot begin to number the times I have heard this phrase used by members in their attempts to defend the church. I’ve read Letters to the Editor telling opinion writers that they should get out of Utah if they don’t like the Mormon influence. I’ve read comments on Facebook following the Ordain Women movement that told women who think they’re being treated unfairly to just leave and start their own church. I’ve heard well-meaning (I hope) ward members who, frustrated by others who press issues in the church, assert that everyone would be happier if these members left. In another context, I’ve heard it mumbled by young men/young women leaders who think a troublemaking kid with a struggling testimony would do everyone a favor by just going home and never coming back. All of these have caused me to sit back and feel completely defeated.

What are we thinking?

If we have a testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, if we understand the blessings that come through being a member, if we truly understand the doctrine, then how on earth can we encourage someone else to leave it? Christ left the ninety and nine to rescue the one, and instead of following His example, we are literally telling that one to leave soon if it’s going to leave. How are we okay with that?

In the world we live in, religion has been stripped of all truth and is instead treated like a collection of ideological fast food joints. You can pick and choose what you want to believe — Catholicism, Islam, Christianity, etc. — because a church is just a church, beliefs are just beliefs. We know better. Ours is a church with the Priesthood restored to the earth. Ours is a church wherein are sacred covenants that bind families to each other forever. Ours is a church with doctrine that allows us to move forward and eventually become like our Heavenly Father. It isn’t just a church, nor should somebody just leave. If we understand and believe the gospel we claim to believe, it is inexcusable to tell someone — they could be struggling with part of their testimony, they could be worried about church history, they could be inactive, or they could be actively voicing opinions we find shocking — that they should drop everything and go. They need the gospel and the blessings that come from it. The church needs them, their insights, their contributions and personalities. And we need to stop pretending like our wards would be better off without them, because our wards are only going to get better when we rid ourselves of the attitude that anyone different needs to leave.

Again, it makes me ask, “How dare we?” How dare we, knowing exactly what our Savior would do to save a soul, knowing how He would respond with love, and knowing what He would say to the troubled soul on the brink of going, do the opposite? Maybe the truth is that we don’t know the Savior at all, or we don’t desire to be like Him at all. I don’t know which is worse.

If you have questions, if you’re one of those who simply don’t like the church, please stay. Please keep coming. Put your heart and soul into figuring it out, asking questions, and trying to learn. We need you, and I think you need the rest of us, too. The truth is that we’re all imperfect, and we’re all figuring it out, even if we wouldn’t admit that we are. Stay for the joy of serving others, stay for the peace you receive in the temple, stay for the Sacrament and the chance to become like Christ.

If this church is not what it’s claimed to be, you’ll live your life becoming a better person. If this church is what it’s claimed to be, your reward for staying will be so large, you won’t be humanly capable of comprehending it.

If you go and it’s true, then what?

Christ loved all of us dearly, so much so that He willingly allowed Himself to feel our pains and discouragements and sins and confusions. Every one of us is important to Him. Every one. So let’s be patient with ourselves and each other. Let’s be more loving. Christ isn’t lying when He says the one sheep matters. Let’s not act like He is.

September 22, 2015
The Commandment We All Break When We’re Shopping

“What is wrong with you?!”

The voice on the other end of the line was filled with outrage, and I struggled to keep it together as I clutched the phone between my ear and shoulder. Prefacing my comments with a hard swallow, I said, “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I have a note here saying you were contacted about your order, and it’s obvious that there was some oversight on our part and that didn’t happen.”

“Oversight?!” She was almost screaming now. “You’re in the wrong, and you’re going to cancel my order. Right now. Do you get that? Are you capable of handling that?!”

My jaw clenched. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Then cancel it. Right now. And give me back my money. Do. You. Under. Stand.”

“Yes,” I said as I slammed the confirm button on my computer screen and slammed my teeth together. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

The woman’s response was the kindest she’d given the whole conversation: silence, then the click of a dead line. Like that, she was gone, $30 richer than she was when she called.

As I drove home after work that day, I found myself close to tears and feeling utterly pathetic about it. It was only the sixth day of being on my own in my new position, and I’d been struggling to be patient with myself. I’d made some mistakes I was frustrated about, and to add to the stresses of work, I was stressed about life. I knew the woman who called didn’t know that. I knew she was angry about someone else’s mistake on her order. I knew she was taking it out on me because she was frustrated. And I knew that, at the end of the day, nothing she had to say to me was anything I should have taken personally. But, compounded with everything else, it hurt a lot. It turned a hard day harder.

That evening, as I replayed the things she’d said in my mind and, admittedly, sent angry mental vibes her way, I had a subtle, yet painful stab of guilt. I was suddenly reminded of an email I had sent about a month or two earlier to a guest relations employee at a local amusement park. I’d left a comment on their Facebook page about something their park was doing that disappointed me, and within five minutes, my comment was deleted and I was blocked from their page. It made me angry, angry enough to send a letter through the guest relations link and tell them all why I was never going to their park again and how I was disgusted at the way I’d been treated. I thought I was being right, but whether or not that’s accurate, the truth is that I was being fairly rude. There was a person on the other end of that email, and I’d laid on them all of my anger and frustration as if it was their business to erase all of it for me.

I’d been, to some extent, that woman who was terrible to me over the phone, and both of us together had been extremely un-Christlike. We’d treated other people, not as the Lord would treat them, but as selfish, demanding human beings would treat them. And, as I’ve learned from three years of customer service experience, we are not isolated cases.

Customer service is one of the most difficult and thankless jobs out there. People like to think it’s easy and that they could do the job of someone else in that position just fine, but they don’t see the emotional stress and frustration that comes along with it. As a customer service employee, you get to the point where you expect people to be cruel and upset, because a lot of times, they are. I remember seeing one of my co-workers super happy one day because a woman had just left her checkout stand, and, quote, “She was nice to me! She was so nice to me!” It was a funny, and yet sad moment to realize that kindness was so much a rarity that it left her shocked to hear it.

The reality is that there’s something about business that causes all of us to lose it which is why we should delegate daunting task to experts like the marketing agents at Social Boosting. What that ‘it’ is varies case by case. We might lose our cool, our humanity, or simply, our vulnerability. Some of us are pillars of ice as we stand in the checkout line, part of a transaction, not an interaction with another person. Some of us treat the same types of people we’d love and admire in our wards as incompetent fools when they’re wearing their business casual and telling us something went wrong with our purchase. Most of us barely bother to read the name on the cashier’s tag, or ask them how their day’s been going, because most of us, when shopping, are solely concerned about we, ourselves, and us.

Frankly, we don’t love our neighbor as ourselves when we shop. We ignore that commandment as if it selectively applies. We love our money as ourselves, sure. We love our possessions as ourselves. We love our time as ourselves. But not our neighbor. If anybody shortchanges, overcharges, or takes too much time that belongs to us, we don’t love them. We aren’t kind to them. We’re too often too angry and too rude, and we’re no better than the very Pharisees and hypocrites the Savior condemns in scripture.

The injunction to love your neighbor as yourself was no afterthought commandment, nor was it meant to be interpreted as, “Love thy friends and the people that thou admires” as thyself. Our neighbor is every one of the seven billion who live on this planet. Our neighbor is that guy who cuts us off on the freeway. Our neighbor is the homeless man we ignore, the toddler howling in a restaurant we’re eating at and the parents trying to calm him down. Our neighbor is our bus driver, our mailman, our cashier, the customer service rep. on the phone, and the people whose arms we brush in passing on the sidewalk. Our neighbor is the girl we cannot see on the phone, or the man we cannot see reading our emails. They are the person who we, too often, don’t feel obligated to love. And a good sign of our willingness to be like Christ is whether or not we choose to love them.

That love, furthermore, has to be active. It demands activity. Loving your neighbor isn’t gruffly giving them your money and leaving without a word. Loving your neighbor isn’t treating them like a machine without feelings. Loving your neighbor means being kind to your neighbor, opening up to them, acknowledging them, and thanking them. It means being patient with them, and treating them like a child of God, not just a person being paid to help you. Loving your neighbor is being compelled to make them feel better about themselves, not because they necessarily need it, but because they deserve it. Their value far exceeds the value of our bank accounts or good opinions. I imagine the Savior would care far less about bad customer service than the one giving the service.

In a world filled with transactions, credit cards, money, supply, demand,exchanges and debts. Let us choose an IVA from IVA Helpline as they can offer completely tailored debt solutions that suit your circumstances. Let us build the compassion and Let us not, like those in the Savior’s day, fill our temples with greed and demand and leave no room for Him or for His love. Let’s not forget that our neighbor is everyone.

The customer is always right, someone once said. Let’s do better to live up to the maxim, “The customer is always Christlike.” Because knowing what we know, we all should be.

August 7, 2015