The Challenge of Caring for People

Scripture — Nehemiah 1:2-4 (NRSV)

[O]ne of my brothers, Hanani, came with certain men from Judah; and I asked them about the Jews that survived, those who had escaped the captivity, and about Jerusalem. They replied, “The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire.” When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.

Devotion

Leadership could be so much easier if we didn’t care for people. Consider, for example, the experience of a boss who must lay off several employees because company income is down. A boss who doesn’t really care for those being fired will clean house with minimal anxiety. But a boss who feels compassion for those being let go will be weighed down with sadness. (I’ve had this experience. It isn’t fun.)

Leadership may be easier if we don’t care for people, but I expect you don’t aspire to that kind of “easy-way-out” leadership. As a reader of Life for Leaders, you seek to lead in a distinctively Christian way. So, if you want to imitate Jesus as you lead, then caring for people is not something you can ignore or reject. Loving people is one of the central aspects of the Christian life (see Mark 12:28-31).

Sometimes caring for the people we lead is joyfully rewarding. When someone I supervise does excellent work, I am delighted. Or when they experience personal blessings, like the birth of a new baby, I am thrilled. I have always prioritized personal care for my direct reports and am mostly glad to do it.

But if we care for people, there will be less joyful times, even painful times. We see an example of this in the opening verses of Nehemiah. While he was in Susa (today, the Iranian city of Shush), he was visited by his brother, Hanani, and some others from Judah (more than 700 miles away from Susa). They delivered the unhappy news that the Jews in that area were “in great trouble and shame” and that the wall of Jerusalem was still broken down, more than a century after it had been destroyed by the Babylonians (1:3).

How did Nehemiah respond to this news? At first, he did not make plans to fix the problems, as we might expect given his behavior in the rest of the book of Nehemiah. Rather, here’s how he describes his initial response, “When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven” (1:4) His grief had to do, in part, with the dire condition of Jerusalem. But surely Nehemiah was also sorrowful over the suffering of his fellow Jews. He was dealing with a relational challenge that comes when we care for people.

Leaders need more than just pity for those who hurt, however. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once preached a sermon based on the parable of the Good Samaritan called “On Being a Good Neighbor.” In this sermon, he contrasted pity, an “impersonal concern” with genuine sympathy: “Pity may be little more than an impersonal concern which prompts the sending of a material check. But true sympathy is a personal concern that demands the giving of one’s soul. Pity may arise out of a concern for a big abstraction called humanity. Sympathy grows out of a concern for ‘a certain man,’ a particular human being lying needy at life’s roadside. Sympathy is feeling with the person in need—his pain, his agony, his burdens.”

What Dr. King emphasized about sympathy is exactly what we see in the heart of Nehemiah. He felt for the Jews in need, feeling their pain, agony, and burdens. This deep care for others led Nehemiah, on the one hand, to weep before the Lord. On the other hand, it also led him to take action, as we’ll see in future devotions.

Caring for people is a significant relational challenge. It’s an emotional challenge because it calls us to genuine sympathy, sympathy that can be joyful or painful or sometimes a combination of both. Also, caring for people is a strategic challenge because it raises the question of whether we should do anything to alleviate the suffering of others and, if so, what. As leaders, we can only do so much “for the people entrusted to our care,” as my Fuller colleague Scott Cormode would say. Since we can’t do everything, we need to decide what our something might be. In the case of Nehemiah, his “something” was a rather big deal.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the High Calling archive, hosted by the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: A Modern Day Nehemiah.