Paul Prather: To be truly spiritual, learn to love those closest to you

The other day, channel surfing, I happened across a televised seminar by Bible teacher Joyce Meyer. Several thousand people were present, the great majority of them women.

Meyer’s lesson concerned the Christian commandment that we genuinely and actively love others, one of Christianity’s foundational rules.

During her talk, Meyer seemed to momentarily misplace her water bottle.

What if I’d asked that someone please bring me a drink of water, she said to the audience.

She speculated probably 500 people would have sprung to their feet and elbowed one another out of the way to be the first to serve her, because she’s a well-known religious personality.

Now, let me ask you this, she continued: How do you react when your husband says, Honey, will you get me a glass of water?

The audience guffawed in recognition.

Before you, gentle readers, get your hackles up in indignation, let me assure you Meyer’s larger point wasn’t that women ought to leap up to serve men every time they ask for something to drink.

Her point — a very good one — was that often it’s much easier to show love, or at least offer service, to celebrities or casual acquaintances or even strangers than to love and serve those closest to us, such as the members of our own household.

I’ve been thinking about that little snippet of her lesson for several days.

It reminded me of something I read almost 30 years ago in, as I recall, a non-fiction book about a famous family of crusading newspaper owners.

This family was much regarded for its progressive social activism and good works. And, as it turned out, these same folks were much to be pitied for the raw dysfunction of their own wealthy family.

In summing up one family patriarch, his son told the author: Dad was a man who loved humanity in general, but nobody in particular. (Or words to that effect.)

It’s a great line. Sadly, that sentiment could apply to a lot of us.

We Christians, the religious group with whom I’m most conversant, frequently pride ourselves on our righteous deeds.

Yet I wonder whether performing our charitable gestures toward the world at large isn’t sometimes a means of avoiding harder obligations at home.

That is, you might find it easier to ladle out stew at a soup kitchen a few hours a month than to help feed your ne’er-do-well brother-in-law. You might find it easier to fly off on a missionary jaunt to Haiti than to accompany your wife on her dream vacation to Vegas.

Not that these things are mutually exclusive, I realize. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen and also help your in-laws. You can travel to Haiti and to Vegas.

But sometimes, we go out of our way to do good to people we hardly know, while treating those nearest us with neglect, disdain or even cruelty. We brag about our good deeds to whitewash our misdeeds.

We’re kinder to the person who sits next to us at the office than to the spouse who sleeps beside us in our bed.

It seems to me — and this is what Meyer was saying — that love and service, or even basic politeness, ought to begin at home.

Of course, it’s difficult to be nicest to those we know best, our spouse or kids or siblings or parents or in-laws, for exactly the reason that we know them best.

We know their immaturity, their selfishness and their petty meanness. We’ve accumulated years’ worth of slights, real or perceived. We bear grudges.

In the Christian economy, at least, that’s why we should treat these dear ones well and wish them well. It’s a spiritual discipline that reforms our hearts through struggle, by reminding us again and again that we also are immature, selfish and mean, or else we might be able to surrender our resentments.

To show love to those we know best, we have to gradually grow up. We have to become adults even if those around us continue to act childishly.

We have to develop humility. We have to acknowledge that not only are we flawed, too, but we’ve contributed our share of wrongs to the difficulties between us. Over and again, we have to bludgeon our petty egos. We have to re-examine the past and question our claims to victimhood.

We have to become willing servants rather than preening masters. We have to fetch that drink of water or good-naturedly go on that vacation we don’t want to go on. Nothing is better for us than that.

Doing all this takes practice, perhaps never-ending practice. It takes a gradual allotment of grace from the Holy Spirit to our hardened souls, day after day, year after year.

But ultimately, if we stick with it, we realize we’re starting to act — yes, haltingly, yes, imperfectly — a bit like God’s very children. Because he, by definition, is generous to the flawed and undeserving.

Which is why he’s been so generous with us.

This story was originally published February 14, 2016 at 8:43 AM with the headline "Paul Prather: To be truly spiritual, learn to love those closest to you."