Vol.XI No.IX Pg.1
November 1974

All We Are People

Robert F. Turner

The husband may be a highly educated scientist, brought up in a city. The wife may be a country girl (met him when she came to town to take nurses training) who understands the man even though she doesnt understand his job. They appreciate one-anothers strengths, and supplement one-another in times of weakness— because they love one-another, and the home they share.

The son is a husky eighteen: football star, self-confident. The older daughter is an uncertain thirteen: so bashful— lady-like one day and all giggles the next. And there is the two-year-old: exasperating, into everything, spoiled, spanked, loved. But together they make a family. The child experiments; mature ones correct and guide. One frets, another forgives. There are storms, but in a pinch they pull together.

These, and greater differences are overcome in order to weld families, teams, businesses, and even nations into useful units of society. If you are successful in business, government, sports, or family life it is probably due in great measure to your ability to adapt to and work with the heterogeneous society of our day. If you are a failure in life, check your ability to get along with folk.

And if the church of which you are a member is plagued by chronic frictions, before you blame it on insurmountable doctrinal differences take a good look at your ability and willingness to get along with people of different social, economic, and domestic backgrounds.

We are not suggesting a course of petting, flattering, or compromising ones convictions. We are aware that genuine issues may divide brethren, and that our individual obligation to God must come first. But dont expect to teach another, in a single lesson, what you learned over many years.

The church is country-city, well-educated and no education; people who have grown up in the church and others who but recently learned Christ in a non-sectarian way. But love for the Lord, and one-another, in that order, can weld us into a close family.