I wanted to tell my mother off after I had come home from Morning Prayer a few weeks ago, and she started to hurl her flaming arrows of criticism at me. “Do you have to go to church to pray? Can’t you pray at your yard”? (Mind you I had said nothing to invite her criticisms except “Hello”.), “What you are going on with is not working; she goes on to talk about the chores that I consistently don’t do, “How can you expect to get anywhere when you can’t even do the basics?” etc. etc.
Before I had gotten home I was having a conversation with a friend from church Mr. Jerald Hill. Jerald Hill works for the MBTA, he used to be a bus driver but now he is a revenue collector. In his years of service Mr. Hill has seen an amazing amount of stuff go down, he’s seen children blossom into outstanding citizens of society; he has also seen children grow up only to be ground up by the machine of institutional poverty and violence that exist in Boston, for instance he recounts a horrific incident where he witnessed a young man die after being stabbed on a bus.
Speaking with Mr. Hill really grounded me in the reality of what it means to be a follower of Christ because he also spoke about the opportunities he often had to talk to passengers about Christ. He talked about the joy he had in seeing some of their eyes open up to the reality that there was a God out there who loved them, and of seeing their lives turn around as a result. It was a very inspiring conversation.
Fast forward 40 minutes later, I am in my kitchen trying to make breakfast and my mom is, as usual, pestering me. I want badly to tell her about the conversation I just had with Mr. Hill. I want to tell her that her complaints about me are unfair and ungrounded, and that although I’m not devoting my life to cleaning the house and getting a “real job”, my life is still making a major difference, because it is directly intersects with the heart beat of God. I figure, however, if I told my mother any of this that she would hear me for a second and then go back to thinking that I was wasting my time.
So I don’t tell her anything, I just go back to my room, and sulk. And then I ask God this question, How can I get my mother to see that the things she complains about are irrelevant, compared to the things You care most about? Basically, how can I introduce some relevance into this situation?
After I asked this question I sensed the answer in my spirit, “the way you live above the ding and distraction of your mother’s endless criticism is to, just love her”. God is love and when you have received out the abundance of His love, you give it to people. Simply loving my mother would introduce more relevance to our interaction than all the brilliant words and arguments that I could muster, because love speaks so much louder than words. But when God says love, He doesn’t mean love in the corny Barney sing-a-long sense, He means the 1 Corinthian 13 kind of love.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. (1 Cor. 13: 4-8)
If I wanted my mother to take her mind out of the gutter of superficiality and unto what mattered most, then I was going to have to do the most relevant thing I could do, love her.
If you are a chick, or just a guy who’s into his appearance, you’ve had the experience of trying on something that looked just awful on you. Normally after you gets a glimpse of the offending outfit you banish it from your body, yes you take it off. 
