Give us Tender Hearts
I ran across a video from several months ago of a man with a bloody and bruised face. He was holding his side, cradling his broken ribs. Hans Hamilton had been hospitalized for the brain bleed that he sustained on an ordinary day when he stopped to help a fellow motorist on a Florida highway. Someone had crashed a car into a guardrail, and as he got closer, Hans realized that the other driver was lying on the ground. As soon as this good Samaritan stepped out of his car, the “unconscious” driver of the crashed vehicle jumped up, ran toward him, and began punching him mercilessly, blow after blow landing on his head, his face, his neck, and his sides.
It’s a wild story, but something even stranger happened when this battered and bruised good guy stood up to talk to reporters after his hospital stay. With tears streaming down his face, he said, “I’m not going to let this give me a hard heart.” I was so intrigued by this attitude that I tracked down other interviews where this man shared similar thoughts. He begged viewers to continue to be kind to people, to stop and help, to take care of each other. And again, he reiterated that he refused to have a hard heart after this harrowing experience that still drew tears weeks later.
His choice of words has really stuck with me. The concept of a “hard heart” is generally something we associate with the pharaohs of the world, the lost, the God-haters of society, but in truth I think it isn’t all that difficult for Christian people to feel our hearts harden within us. All kinds of circumstances can cause our hearts to lose tenderness toward others, from very personal hurt caused by someone we love to the ways that people in different political parties talk to and about one another.
We have opportunities every day of our lives to make the choice to be tender toward our fellow humans or hard and harsh with them. Hans Hamilton has every reason to announce to the world that he will never again help a stranger, but he is making a conscious choice to love and help people instead, and he is encouraging others to do the same thing.
As Christians, there’s something we must understand about our relationship with Jesus. When we begin to develop a hard heart toward people, we are also growing a heart that is hard toward Christ. We can’t love and obey Jesus and be cold and harsh or uncaring with our fellow human beings. Loving Jesus and loving people go hand-in-hand. So while Han Hamilton’s story may cause many who hear it to cross to the other side of the road when someone needs help, for Christians, it ought to inspire us to keep our hearts beautifully soft, refusing to let division or prejudice or hurt or plain old fear keep us from laying our tender hearts out like a welcome mat for a world that needs Jesus.