Gentle

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.

Ephesians 4:2

Dang Paul. Way to bust America’s chops. This verse feels so… un-American.

• We name our business after ourselves. (Or our blogs…)
• We name buildings after great champions of sport, business, and politics.
• We celebrate confidence.
• We glorify experience.
• We pride ourselves by pursuing the best.

But we don’t do humble.

• We’ve got passive-aggression down by pre-school.
• We give sarcastic people TV shows.
• We judge people based on performance.
• We tell it like it is.

A gentle American? Hard to come by. We bear the societal DNA of the daring, those who left their homeland to pursue something else. And you don’t tame the wild west by being gentle.

• Slow internet makes us grind our teeth.
• We charge for counseling by the hour.
• We tap our fingers on the steering wheel at stop lights.
• We think poorly of the single mom who is consistently 5 minutes late.

Americans are impatient. We are too good to wait more than 30 minutes for a pizza.

• We wait for a person to leave the room to talk about them.
• We kick people when they are down, holding them to unrealistic standards.
• We blow off steam on the internet instead of dealing with conflict.

Bearing with one another in love? We’d rather not have friends.

We can each look at these things and agree with some and disagree with others. (Also an American-ism.) We have a tendency to argue vehemently against fingers pointed at the collective “us.” But I don’t bring this up to say we are horrible people. I bring this up as a reminder to myself that this is the cultural hand we’ve been dealt.

Our society isn’t just ethnocentric… it’s prideful about it’s ethnocentricity.

“You’re doggone right I’m proud to be an American!” Yeah, me too. But my nationality is not a birthright or excuse for bad behavior.

A Counter-Culture Calling

Paul’s instruction to us is clear: Fight these cultural instincts.

We need to learn what humility is. We need to be gentle and allow others to be gentle with us. We need to fight for patience.

We need to bear with one another in love.

Well crap, Paul.

That ain’t easy.

Photo credit: Nathanael Boehm via Flickr (Creative Commons)