A person to be loved

I’m involved in the leadership of our men’s group in my church. We often discuss how we can motivate the men in our congregation to fulfill their assignments to watch over and care for the families in our neighborhood, and it often feels as though our efforts are falling flat. We spent the first part of our recent meeting discussing the problem, and I’m saddened to admit we became overly frustrated and critical. Why couldn’t they see that we needed more from them?

The next morning I was getting ready for work and pondering that and other challenges in my life. I find my bathroom to be a place for meditation as I go through my daily grooming, and some of the most amazing inspiration comes while I’m there. As I watched myself in the mirror I was reminded of a quote from Thomas S. Monson, former leader and prophet in our church: “Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.”

I’ve always enjoyed that quote, but I was struck with new insight as to its potential meaning. I’ve always interpreted it to mean that the people around us are more important than the problems we face. This time I understood it quite differently: Often the problems we face are the people around us, and rather than trying to figure out how to solve them, we need to first and foremost focus on loving them.

It’s easy to forget that the people we come in contact with are just that: people. They have their weaknesses, their struggles, their doubts, their problems–which could just as likely involve us. Rather than feeling frustration with them we need to figure out how to love them. We need to attempt to understand them.

That’s not to say that we excuse bad behavior and let them continue to repeat it. But we’ll get a lot farther if we start from love in our efforts to coax them into better behavior. To put it another way, people won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. People always take correction better from people they know care about them and have their best interests at heart.

Far too often these days when faced with people who don’t act as we want them to it’s easy to assume it’s because they just aren’t hearing us. It’s like we’re attempting to make foreign-speakers understand us–if we just talk louder and slower they’ll surely be able to understand our own English. More often than not we just come across as condescending.

Worse yet, these days its becoming fashionable to scream, to get into one another’s faces, to “punch back twice as hard.” As if that’s going to produce anything even remotely resembling the desired effect. We only make enemies, who would rather die than give us the satisfaction of coming around to our point of view.

I’ve needed correction in my life more times than I care to mention. It’s invariably easier to take coming from someone I know to be a friend, someone who knows me and likes me anyway, someone who not only has my best interests at heart, but knows the right way to deliver the message so that I’ll listen.

It’s easy to scoff at the trite bromide that “love is the answer”. It’s clearly not going to solve all the problems out there. But a great many of them might have been solved earlier on if approached as a person to be loved instead of as just another problem to be solved.