Love What’s Near TREVIN WAX for The Gospel Coalition
“Our generation is prone to radicalism without follow-through,” Kevin DeYoung writes. “We want to change the world and we have never changed a diaper.”
This quote has stuck with me for more than 10 years now. I’ve thought of it multiple times as life has chastened some of my youthful passion for seeing massive transformations in the culture or the church. Similarly, Andy Crouch has warned against focusing our attention on “changing the culture” out there somewhere (whatever that means) when we find it nearly impossible to cultivate and maintain the kind of flourishing culture we’d like to see in our own home. You think changing the world will be easy? Try changing yourself first.
Having read much of G. K. Chesterton, I now look askance at anyone who seems to speak primarily in the abstract: “fixing the economy,” or “changing the culture,” or “loving humankind.” Why? Because it’s easy to succumb to self-righteousness when you pursue utopian visions in regard to great and massive things. It’s when you are faced with the smaller things and the people nearest you where you begin to spot your own flaws and diagnose your lovelessness.
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We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
In a Peanuts strip from 1959, Linus Van Pelt says, “I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand!” We’re all about “loving others” and “loving people” and “loving your neighbor” in the abstract. But then we discover the others around us and the actual persons we come to know and our real next-door neighbor might turn out to be harder to love than we expected.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima recalls the confession of a doctor he once knew:
“I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,” he said.
