I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. ~Vincent van Gogh
Photo by Magda Ehlers
I am a task-oriented introvert. This is a terrible combination.
Task-oriented: give me a job and I’ll do it. I might have a hard time stopping, actually. I occasionally get so involved in a task that I forget to eat. Introvert: I gain energy from being alone. People exhaust me; social situations cause various levels of anxiety.
This combination means I love doing a task…and find it very easy to forget about people entirely. This combination once found this teacher leading the charge on a field trip only to turn around to discover that she had out-charged her students in her sheer zeal to get there. My one-track task-oriented mind completely forgot about the long line of geese I was leading in my excitement about getting to the pond.
But it is absurd to think that I am an utter slave to these natural arrangements of my mind. This the glory of practical theology and the kindness of the Comforter whom Jesus sent after His ascension. He must have been teaching me to love people long before I knew He was; but I do remember when He first made me aware of the work He was doing. He made it clear to me that people, themselves, are the joy that I was neglecting rather than the work. I could excuse myself by reasoning that the work I do is for people, but that reasoning also gives me the excuse to mow them over if they get in the way of the job. That’s hardly love.
I love crafting emails, designing posters, creating projects, making things. I get a great deal of satisfaction from the completed task; an end result that you can hold in your hand. But people are never done; you don’t have anything to show for your work, so it doesn’t feel like anything is being accomplished.
If your goal is their gratitude, you seldom get it, and when you do, you know that wasn’t what you were after. It’s curiously…unsatisfying.
When you say one thing, they hear something else.
They will ask much of you, and it might feel like they are asking something quite unreasonable, either because they know more than you, or because they know much less.
According to the way Jesus taught, my job is to love them, no matter who them happens to be. My job is to see them as better than myself no matter age, size, experience, etc. When I don’t, my impatience outstrips my kindness. I leave the people behind for the sake of getting to the pond.
This is hard. No…this is impossible for me. This is impossible unless Someone teaches me what love looks like. Sometimes, this means putting down the very thing I thought I was doing for them in order to be with them. Sometimes, in theatre anyway, that means sacrificing a step toward excellence for the sake of the person who made a mistake, was trying to help, isn’t ready for correction, wants control…whatever. Whatever my response, if it isn’t motivated by love for the person, then I’m really loving my satisfaction in a well-done job more.
Many great art forms have traditions in long training. Years go into making a great chef, an excellent painter, a hypnotic dancer, an exacting architect. Each of these artists will tell you that their work is never “done”; every performance of their art is training for the next; every rehearsal further exploration and preparation. You never arrive. To be an artist is to be extravagantly patient.
To love people is to be lavishly persistent.
Perhaps this is why Vincent van Gogh considered loving people to be an art.
It's Raining Ink 