A Fresh Perspective on a Tough Problem

The world disappeared overnight.

I stepped outside before sunrise into air so cold and wet it tasted like metal, and the lake was simply gone. Not hidden. Gone. The far shore, the treeline, the sky, all of it swallowed by a white so complete it felt less like weather and more like the world had been unfinished, erased back down to the canvas before the painter had a chance to lay in the background. I could smell wet pine and cold water and the faint sweetness of woodsmoke drifting from somewhere I couldn’t see. A loon called out, echoing across the water, and the fog swallowed the sound halfway, the way a held breath swallows a word.

I had forgotten something in the car at the landing, which meant a lake crossing. Fine on a normal morning. Not this one.

I eased the boat off the dock and idled out into the white, and within 20 feet the island behind me vanished as though it had never existed. The water was black glass, rippling out from the bow in slow rings that dissolved into nothing. Pine tops floated in and out of view like ghosts of trees, rootless, hovering, there and then not. Somewhere off to my right a cabin light glowed like a candle behind a bedsheet, a warm orange smudge with no house attached to it. It was a Thomas Kinkade Christmas card, if Kinkade had painted the version where you can’t find your way home.

Ten feet of visibility. Maybe less. My eyes strained at nothing and found nothing, and my ears took over the way they do when sight quits, listening past my own motor for the sound of another one. I told myself no one in their right mind would be out in this.

And that is exactly when a little red boat came out of the wall of white.

Two fishermen, hunting for a spot to drop a line, close enough that I could see the surprise on their faces, which was surely a mirror of the surprise on mine. They were moving faster than I was. A half second of nothing at all happened, and then it was over. A quick wave, two boats, two directions, back into the white.

My heart was still racing when I reached the next visible landmark. I set my compass, kept my hands steady, and felt my way across on faith and the compass needle until the dock appeared out of the murk. By the time I came back, the sun had burned every last thread of fog off the water, and it was a clear, blue, ordinary, beautiful morning. You’d never have known.

Life does that. You’re cruising along in the routine of your own life, and something comes out of the white at you, fast and close, and you never saw it coming.

What You Get

I try to live as transparently as I know how. What you see is what you get. The good, the bad, and once in a while the ugly, but it’s all out in the open where anyone can find it.

What troubles me is the opposite. The people where what you see is not what you get. The ones who play games, who talk behind your back, who gossip, who spread rumors, who say things about you in one room they’d never say to your face in another.

I used to be one of them.

Then one day I got my head handed to me. I said something unflattering about a man to a friend. The friend went straight to him and repeated it word for word. The man I had talked about called me. He confronted me directly, and he had every right to.

I could have denied it. I could have softened it, spun it, explained the context, done any of the thousand things we do to wriggle off a hook. Instead I took it like a man. I admitted it, I thanked him for telling me to my face what I hadn’t had the courage to say to his, and I apologized. Then I told him he’d taught me something I intended to keep.

There’s an old adage that’s proved true every time I’ve watched it play out: whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. The friend who brings you news about someone else is, at that very moment, showing you exactly what he does with news about you.

Why We Talk

The psychology of it is more interesting than you’d think, and less flattering.

Most negative gossip is a shortcut. Psychologists call it downward social comparison, which is a clinical way of saying that tearing someone down is the cheapest, fastest way to feel bigger without doing the work of growing. It costs nothing. It requires no change. And it feels wonderful, for about 90 seconds.

Often it’s envy wearing a costume. It’s far easier to whisper about someone’s success, someone’s marriage, or someone’s good fortune than to sit still with the ache of wanting it yourself.

C.S. Lewis got at the root of it in Mere Christianity. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something,” he wrote, “only out of having more of it than the next man.” And then the line that lands: “It is the comparison that makes you proud, the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.”

That’s the whole engine. Gossip isn’t really about the person being discussed. It’s a small ceremony we perform to place ourselves one rung higher.

There’s another old line, usually credited to Eleanor Roosevelt but actually traceable to a 19th-century historian named Henry Thomas Buckle: great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. I’ve never once been proud of a conversation that fell into the third category.

Since the day I got caught, I’ve been careful. If I don’t have something good to say, I don’t say it. But I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes I still want to. Sometimes the words are right there behind my teeth and it takes real effort to keep them in.

It Came Back

Not long ago, word got back to me that someone I considered a friend had said something ugly about me behind my back.

It knocked the wind out of me. Not the criticism. The friendship. I sat with it and felt genuinely hurt, and underneath the hurt was a question that wouldn’t leave me alone. What did I do to deserve this? Did I anger him? Did I wound him somewhere along the way without ever noticing?

My instinct was to confront him, exactly the way I was once confronted. Sometimes that’s the right call. But before I picked up the phone, I called a different friend to get some perspective.

Pride Before Love

“Why does this bother you so much?” he asked. “Welcome to the world. Have you never been betrayed before?”

Of course I had.

Then he took me to Romans 12, where Paul writes that we’re not to repay evil for evil, not to take revenge, but to leave room for God to sort it out. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he’s thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

“Understand what’s happening here,” my friend said. “The evil one wants you to react. He wants you to stir it up, to make this bigger than it is, to get you prideful and thinking, ‘After everything I poured into this friendship, this is what I get?’ Eric, your pride is standing in front of your love.”

He let that sit a second. Then he said, “Your response should be love. Not anger.”

Something in my chest let go. It’s a strange thing when an answer arrives and your body relaxes before your mind has finished agreeing with it, but that’s what happened. He was right. Meet the problem with love instead of a confrontation.

And once the anger stepped aside, other questions had room to walk in. What if I wronged him and never knew? What if he’s carrying something heavy right now? What if I failed to give him credit he’d earned, and this is what that looks like coming back around?

Ian Maclaren, a Scottish minister writing a Christmas message in 1897, put it in nine words that have outlived him by more than a century: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Everyone. Including the one who just took a shot at you.

The world’s instinct is to fire back. But what if your instinct became the same grace that was extended to you, back when you’d done nothing to earn it?

Heap It On

Then my friend told me his own story.

He’d poured years into a man. Mentored him, backed him, opened doors for him. And the man turned around and stabbed him in the back. My friend’s first impulse was the natural one: cut him loose, close the door, move on with life. Nobody would have blamed him.

Instead he chose love. He kept calling. He kept showing up. He treated the man as though nothing had happened and just kept heaping those hot coals of kindness on his head, year after year, with no apparent return on the investment.

It took years for the reason to surface. The man had survived a horrific, traumatic childhood he had never told a soul about, and it had been driving his behavior the entire time my friend knew him.

Slowly, the relationship healed. And eventually the man came to Christ through the one person who refused to quit on him.

“God put a small voice in me,” my friend told me, “and it kept saying, you can’t give up on him. I put him in your life for a reason. Be there for him no matter how badly he treats you. Just keep showing up.”

That was decades ago. They’ve been close friends ever since.

Lewis Smedes, who wrote a whole book on this, said it as well as anyone: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” My friend didn’t stay to rescue that man. He stayed and got rescued right along with him.

No Accidents Here

People get dropped into our lives on purpose.

Sometimes they’re angels sent to help us. Two showed up in my life just this year, each arriving at exactly the moment I needed them, each with a job to do that neither of them knew about. What looks random in the moment often turns out to have been architecture, and you only see the blueprint looking backward.

I carried anger for years over a man who wronged me. Looking back now, he did me a favor. He forced me into a lesson I was refusing to learn any other way. But before I could see that, I had to set my earthly pride down and ask the only question that ever helps: what am I supposed to learn here?

Bad things happen to good people. A dear friend of mine recently lost her husband. She could be shaking her fist at heaven asking why. Instead she’s rejoicing over the years she got, thanking God for every one of them, and trusting there’s something in this she’s meant to carry forward.

My prayers have changed over the years. I no longer pray for success. I pray for guidance, for lessons, for the courage to get through hard seasons, and for the ability to treat people with grace when they haven’t earned it.

Every customer I’ve ever had, every video I’ve ever sold, every person who has ever walked into an event I created, none of it came from my brilliance. It was a gift. So is every good thing in your life. And so, I’d argue, are a few of the hard things, the ones that arrive precisely because nothing else was going to get our attention.

Ask Yourself This

Human nature runs downhill toward the negative reaction. It takes no effort at all to get angry or get even.

But what if you changed the script? What if, instead of firing back, you set your pride down and looked inward first? What could I have done to cause this? How could I have been a better friend? How could I have loved this person better?

I slip up constantly. Pride gets in my way all the time. Ego walks in and tells me I built something, when the truth is that everything I have was handed to me. Whatever ability I’ve got, whatever timing worked out in my favor, it was given, and it can be taken back just as easily. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it stays on loan so I keep leaning on the giver instead of admiring myself in the mirror.

Because I’m not anything special. And neither, if we’re being truthful, is the person who hurt you.

So here’s what I’d ask you to consider this morning. 

What are you facing today where someone needs grace from you and hasn’t earned it? What lesson have you been refusing to admit you need? 

And where in your life could you afford to lean a little harder on your Maker and a little less on yourself?

The fog burns off. It always does. But you still have to steer while you’re in it.

Eric Rhoads