Dear Reconcilers,

This month’s guest contributor is Sheila Graham, who shares her thoughts on how we can become more empathetic in our relationships.    

Love Supreme

How do you make decisions about people? Most of us make some kind of judgment about people when we first meet them, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Have you ever thought that judgment might be predicated on how good a day they were having. 

Back in 1964 jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, inspired by his relationship with God, recorded an album he titled A Love Supreme. Coltrane accompanied by his jazz group recorded this album in less than one 33-minute session. 

Coltrane was admired as one of the great jazz musicians, but his personal life was a mess. He struggled for years with drug and alcohol addiction until God intervened in his life. His addictions didn’t automatically go away when he was converted but now he had help in overcoming them. 

God can and does make dramatic differences in people’s lives. But what If we had met Coltrane on one of his bad days, lost in the throes of drug addiction. I’m afraid our judgment of him would have been very different from the day he recorded A Love Supreme. 

When we saw him in that state, we wouldn’t know how hard he struggled against his terrible addiction. We wouldn’t know how much self-hatred he suffered knowing he had been forgiven by God but had slipped up anyway. 

We are all one in what we call this human race. All of us slip up sometimes. Let’s leave the snap judgments behind. Let’s give others the grace, compassion and mercy we all want for ourselves.

Sheila Graham has a master’s of arts in religion and a master’s of arts in women’s studies in religion. Among her published writings is The Proverbs 31 Woman and Other Biblical Women, coauthored with Michael Morrison, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which also addresses the question of what roles women can play in the church today.