How do you feel whenever Diana Ross sings “Reach out and touch somebody’s hand, make this world a better place if you can,” and everyone holds someone else’s hand? I know we don’t do a lot of touching since COVID.  It was no coincidence that “We Are the World” shattered fundraising records.   Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech touched the world because it dealt with a love, respect, and liberty for all of God’s children.”

The best advice I ever received didn’t come from a person, it didn’t come from a song, not even a Nobel Prize winning speech, it came from a book I began reading as a child and from time to time would return to over the years.  It is advice that is keeping me sane these days.  We are living in a time where so many people seem to be in discord with everything that I grew up loving.  The advice comes from the Holy Bible and has served me well whether I was embracing Christianity, ignoring it, running from it, or running to it.

Now mind you, this post is not about religion because this is a belief I understood before I understood the concept of religion…before I understood the concept of advice.

I understood it when I was a small child on the playground.  I understood what would hurt my friends and prospective friends.  I understood that I didn’t want to harm them.  I understood that I wanted them to be my friends, and I wanted them to be okay.  I wanted them to be safe. I wanted them to prosper. I wanted to get to know them. I understood this as I got older, that in this life it is just easier to love people than to hate them…that it is easier to find common ground and grow from there than to push people away because they are not the same. Not one of us is the same. 

I remember the bullies in school and wondering why they did it…why they hurt people.  I always thought that maybe their lives were not as good as mine.  Sometimes I thought it was because of things they didn’t have, but all too often they were the kids who seemed to have everything.  I didn’t know their situation; I just thought something must be wrong with a kid or an adult that was always looking for what was wrong in this beautiful world.  They always seemed to have friends, though…kids or people who were a part of their circle.  Maybe it was out of fear, maybe out of feeling of belonging…I truly never understood it.  I never figured it out.

Nowadays when I run into the same people, they are almost always different.  I imagine they learned later what I knew in my gut as a child…life is just easier when you love people and even better is they love you, too.  The few that didn’t learn usually bear the scars of a life not fully lived.

FYI, the best advice I ever got…John 13:34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

On my worst days, I stray from this advice.  On my best days, I remember it and try to walk in it.  But on no day do I forget it.