If They Answered Truthfully

In 1855, a prominent attorney named Edwin Stanton was handed a co-counsel he did not want on a big patent case in Cincinnati. The man was a lanky prairie lawyer from Illinois. Stanton refused to work with him, would not eat with him, and by most accounts mocked him as a long-armed ape. The lawyer sat in the back of the courtroom all week, unused, and went home humiliated.

Seven years later that prairie lawyer was President of the United States, and he needed a Secretary of War. Abraham Lincoln chose Edwin Stanton.

He did not pretend the insult never happened. He simply refused to let it be the most important thing about the man. Stanton was abrasive, but he was also honest, tireless, and brilliant, and Lincoln chose to build on that part. He believed in him and told him so. When Stanton's infant son died in the middle of the war, Lincoln, who had just buried his own boy, grieved alongside him. No lecture. No analysis. Just presence.

On the morning Lincoln died, it was Stanton who stood at the bedside in tears and said, "Now he belongs to the ages."

I thought about that story this week because of a single page. I had just finished my friend Jerry Leachman's book, Brave Hearts, Strong Arms, and was flipping through the appendix when five questions stopped me cold. Jerry doesn't ask how you think you treat the people closest to you. He asks how they would answer.

• Would they say I accept them as they are, and that I dwell on what is good in them rather than the little that isn't?
• Would they say I want what's best for them, and that they know I believe in them because I've said it out loud?
• Would they say I really forgive, or that I keep a file and reopen it?
• Would they say that when they hurt I sit with them, or that I start fixing and explaining?
• Would they say I listen long enough to understand, with no comment and no verdict?

Then Jerry closes with the one that got me: how would I fare if they answered truthfully?

A Rolodex of faces started spinning. My wife. My kids. Teammates I've worked beside for years. And if I'm honest, I did not like every answer I imagined.

Paul wrote the dress code for this long before Jerry wrote the questions:

Clothe yourself. That's getting-dressed language. None of this is a personality type some people are born with. It's a choice you make in the morning, the same way you choose a shirt. And notice where Paul starts: holy and beloved. We don't accept, forgive, and listen in order to earn something. We do it because it has already been done for us. Christ saw our 20 percent in full and went to the cross anyway.

Here is what convicts me. It is often easier to wear these clothes at the office than at home. I can listen patiently to a teammate at two in the afternoon and be half-present at my own dinner table at seven. I can coach an employee through a mistake with grace and then bring up an old one with someone I love. The people closest to us tend to get what's left of us.

And at work it runs the other way. We call it accountability when we fixate on someone's 20 percent. We call it coaching when a hurting teammate needed empathy first. We assume people know we believe in them because we haven't said otherwise.

Leaving people better for the encounter doesn't start with the stranger. It starts with the people who see us every day.

Whose face came to mind as you read those five questions? Which question would be hardest to hear answered truthfully, at home and at work?

Think about the people at home and at work this week. Tell each of them, specifically, something you believe about them. Then ask one of them the question you least want answered, and listen without defending yourself.

Lord, thank You for accepting me in full, the worst of me included. Forgive me for giving the people closest to me less than I give everyone else. Help me put on compassion, kindness, and humility before I walk out of my bedroom each morning, not just before I walk into the office. Give me the courage to ask the hard questions and the grace to hear the answers. Amen.