Parents and teachers are not the only ones who influence their children. We live in a society in which different people have different roles to play in relation to everyone else. We should not measure the progress of a child only by how we see him or by what we think he is receiving from us. Our impression of the child’s progress may be mistaken. We may not be able to know him as he is, nor know what others are contributing. And, least of all, can we know the total effect of all his relationships on what he is becoming as a person. Our anxieties about a particular incident may exist because we fail to see it in its total context.60 Much happens in the development of a person’s life that we do not see, and much of the transformation occurs secretly at levels so deep that we cannot observe it. Although we may not see what is happening, we may be sure that something is. In the sphere of the personal we need to trust both God and man, and if we trust God we can trust man. We then may take a long view of our task, and teach and work and live by faith.
This is what it should mean to be a Christian and a member of the church of Christ. What a wonderful thing it is to belong to a fellowship that is made up of people who may be united by the Spirit of God and through whom we believe that God works! What a comfort it is to know that we do not have to do and believe everything ourselves! Not only do we not have to live and believe and love for ourselves, but others live and believe and love for us at times when we cannot. But let us also remember that we have to live and believe and love for them when weakness or doubt or hostility seems to overwhelm them. This is the meaning of Christian fellowship; namely, that we are not an aggregation of individuals, but instead are members of one body, with every member having his own function, and the function of every member standing in a complementary relation to that of the others, of which body Christ is the head. Here is the source of the love about which we have been speaking and the process through which love is lived in the life of the world that God loves.
[11] Luke 10:27.
[12] From Love, Power and Justice, by Paul Tillich, Oxford University Press, Copyright, 1954. Used by permission.
[13] 1 John 4:10. The title of this book was suggested by the familiar opening words of this verse in the King James Version, “Herein is love….”
[14] Matt. 10:8.
[15] See Luke 19:2 ff.
[16] See Luke 7:37 ff.