Beneath the Surface (Friday Devotional)

 

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

- Leviticus 19:18

Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain on earth.

Does that come as a surprise to you? It did to me when I first heard it. After all, most of us have had that piece of trivia memorized since grade school, right along with the cheetah being the fastest land animal and the Nile being the longest river. But it’s true: Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii—not Mount Everest, the crown jewel of the Himalayas—is the largest mountain in the world.

…at least, from a certain point of view. If you were to place Everest side by side with Mauna Kea, you would undoubtedly assume the former reigned supreme; the Hawaiian giant only rises to about half Everest’s height. The trick is to look underground—while Mauna Kea only rises to 13,802 feet above sea level, another 20,000+ feet is buried below. From base to peak, Mauna Kea edges out Everest—you just have to look beneath the surface.

Sometimes the same principle applies when dealing with people. There are probably a few people in your life you barely tolerate, people who manage to rub you the wrong way seemingly every time you interact with them. For the life of you, you can’t figure out why they say the things they say or do the things they do. What is wrong with them???

But the truth is, people aren’t often purely malevolent; there is almost always something beneath the surface guiding their actions. Maybe it’s pain in their past which is shaping their present, maybe it’s a motive you aren’t aware of, maybe it’s some other missing piece of a puzzle you haven’t yet put together. The point is, you don’t know what’s going on beyond what you can see.

Do any of these things excuse bad behavior? No; sin is sin, whatever the rationalization behind it. But part of what it means to love your neighbor is to give them some benefit of the doubt instead of assuming the worst. It means responding to others with humility, trusting that you may have more to learn. And ultimately, it means reaching for forgiveness and reconciliation instead of vengeance and resentment.

There’s always more going on beneath the surface, and if you love like Jesus, you’ll do your best to find it before jumping to conclusions. After all, wouldn’t you want your neighbor to love you that way?