Giving Respect

In community outreach, there are many variables that can determine success or failure in terms of our effectiveness. One of those variables is attitude. The attitude of the one serving toward the one being served can either be the "attraction" to Christ's message of unconditional love, or the "distraction" from that same message. Simply put, our attitudes many times determine the results of our outreach. One component of our attitude is respect...respect for those we encounter during the course of our outreach. Many times you'll hear the saying, "respect has to be earned." However, Christ's example shows us a different way.

Respect is given automatically, it is not earned.

When we set ourselves up as people that insist on having others earn our respect we are not living in a serving capacity. If we are living from that perspective we are really asserting that all others serve us. We are living from the vantage point that it is within our capacity to discern the motives of people. I in fact don’t understand the motives of those around me very well at all. I am pretty well convinced that this level of discernment is better left in the hands of God.

I don’t know about your life but mine happens at a rate that is so fast that I can’t manage to keep ahead of the pace of things in such a way that I can conceivably make people earn my respect. I meet a lot of people. I am therefore more or less forced to believe the best about people on a regular basis. If it were necessary that I had to make each person earn the right to be respected there would be very few functional relationships happening in my life. Most people would never know where they stood with me because they would be waiting for me to let them know that they had earned my respect. What a horrible, arrogant way to live.

I figured out a long time ago that I must defer to people, even when sometimes those people don’t seem to have the same values as me. Sometimes the differences are even more subtle. We can differ on the grounds we come from different backgrounds, thus we don’t communicate in the same way. When we get to heaven some of us are going to be dismayed to discover that the people we categorized as being unworthy of our puny respect were great in the eyes of God.

As we serve people is it essential that we show respect to every single person we look to serve. We don’t have the time to play a game of “Who is worthy” and who is not. If we were to wait until all earned our respect before we gave it, life would look quite odd. We would live standoffish lives that would hold off from getting involved with others until we felt they were somehow worthy of our little bits of respect and adoration. Life moves at a rapid pace. As we give respect to all, we are behaving like Jesus. We are assuming the best about the person in question and we are not placing ourselves above that person as their judge. Truly, the last place in the world a person needs to be who is jaded is involved in outreach. We need to assume the best about others before we connect with anyone.

The question comes up “Is it ever appropriate to use the term ‘respect’ as something we earn?” I want to suggest this is entirely the wrong word to use. Most of the time when people use this word they are really searching for the term “trust.” One can speak of having a relationship of high “trust” with someone else and speak in truthful, healthy communication. To have that is to possess a beautiful and rare thing. When that is called for, use it, but realize it is going to be the occasional relationship, the rare connection. That type of relationship is so rare, you will only experience it during a handful of occasions in a lifetime.

(adapted from Steve Sjogren's "Serve" E-Zine)