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A Lot to Fix

Blog / Produced by The High Calling
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"Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." Luke 6:37-38


I work for a social service agency that ministers to families mired in multigenerational urban poverty. I am a middle-class white man come to help the poor—a population largely Hispanic and African-American. In this neighborhood, I love, nurture, and teach because I care and because I want to improve lives there. Murders, thefts, drugs, and teen pregnancies are rampant and nearly every man spends time in prison. There is a lot to fix, and I am there to help.

But wait. Do the families I serve have anything to teach me? Better said: does God want to teach me through the families? In coming only to teach and not to learn, do I judge these people and inadvertently cause them to judge me?

One woman that I serve is 22 years old and a single mother of five. She is in a job-training program and holding on to hope. Another woman wakes up at 5:30 every morning to catch a bus and get her son to our center. Then she attends classes to earn her high school diploma. Perhaps I should sit at the feet of these two women to learn of tenacity and resiliency. How would that change my life? I wonder. Come to think of it, how would it change theirs?

Luke 6:37 and 38 says that I will receive what I give. If I give respect, respect returns to me. If I reject an individual’s value, then not only will I never learn from that person’s life, but he or she will likely reject me and never learn from my life. It is easy to read this passage without truly considering its depth, but its message merits our contemplation.

Take a look around your own life. Whom have you judged? Who judges you? Do the lists line up? On the other hand, whom have you blessed and who blesses you? My hunch is that those two lists are likely to have something in common.