Life Coaching: The Good Samaritan

Early this morning as I was walking Trixie, I started thinking about the parable of the Good Samaritan—what it means and how can apply it to my life today. I admit Trixie wasn’t the least bit mindful of my morning musings because she proceeded to get on the grass and do what all good doggies do when they’re walked. I get no respect…

Samaritans and Jews hated one another. In fact, one translation calls him, despised Samaritan. The aminosity goes all the way back to the vision of the northern and southern kingdoms. You can do a quick Google search and read all about it. To put it briefly, Samaritans weren’t eager to help Jews, and Jews weren’t eager to accept such help. The Bible doesn’t tell us if there were words exchanged between the Samaritan and the Jewish man. My mental playing out of the parable views it as the Jewish man beaten unconscious, thereby rendering him incapable of speech for at least a while; however, this is only my imagination. We can’t really know what was exchanged between the two. But, we can know this because the Bible says it…the Samaritan was moved to compassion, dressed the Jewish man’s wounds, put him in his donkey and carried him to get the care he needed.

What moved the Samaritan to compassion? It was seeing the state of the Jewish man. It was looking at him lying there by the side of the road, bleeding and broken, left for dead. And the Samaritan knew he could do something about it. What is our take away from this parable? What can we learn and apply on today’s society?

People are hurting all around us—your neighbor, your coworker, your friend. What are we doing about it? Are we merely keyboard warriors, or are we feet on the ground soldiers, in the trenches, helping others? It’s easy to post a meme. It’s hard to hold the hand of the hurting and watch them take their last breath. It requires something of us.

We worry about what’s taking place one thousand miles away, yet what are we doing at our own back door? If you feel called of God to move to the darkest corner of the earth and spread the gospel, by all means, go. That’s a very noble and true calling, and it’s needed. But we are ALL called to love our neighbor. Every.single.one of us has that calling. And the easiest, most immediate way to do that is to show them. Show them love. Show them compassion. Show them Christ. I think we Christians have somehow lost that. Somewhere in the noise of the world, we have ignored the cry right next door.

I am writing this on a Sunday, gloomy and rainy, before church. I’m thinking about getting ready (I haven’t actually worked myself up to the actual getting ready phase just yet), and yet here I sit. I write these things because I know we are all guilty In some way of ignoring the cries of the broken. My question is this: What are we gonna do about it? Are we gonna continue to post meaningless drivel on social media, or are we actually gonna try to help the one we can—our neighbor? Helping our neighbor is a messy business. It means we have to care. We have to be inconvenienced. We have to take our face away from our phones for a hot minute. But the rewards are great, both now and eternal. And the greatest reward is this—it will please God immensely to see His children emulating His Son.