Hurting People Unintentionally

Two Thinking Friends wrote that they were “deeply disturbed” (which I took to mean “hurt”) by my June 30 blog post. Certainly, I did not intend to hurt anyone, but unfortunately, sometimes we hurt people unintentionally.  

Three Episodes

In reflecting upon hurting people unintentionally, I soon thought of the following three episodes that I remember with some chagrin.

1) Part of my July 10 blog post was about Magic Eye pictures, and I mentioned how in the 1990s I used such pictures in sermons a few times—and I remember one such time with some embarrassment.

As the guest preacher at a Japanese church, I talked at some length about magic eye pictures and had some on hand to show during the sermon and for people to look at afterward.

After the service, a woman came up to me and said that she was visually impaired (=blind), so she was not able to get much out of the sermon. I was embarrassed that I had unintentionally hurt her by not realizing that there could be someone present in the service who was unable to see.

2) This month I have read the slim and powerful book The Cry of the Poor (2010). In the first chapter, author Eduard Loring quoted all four verses of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s powerful poem “Richard Cory.”

One Sunday at Ekron [Kentucky] Baptist Church, which I served as pastor while a seminary student, I taught the teenage boys’ Sunday School class, during which I read “Richard Cory” to them.

You can read all of that poem here, but the last two lines say, “And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head.”

Just as soon as I read that last line, I realized that I had “goofed”: not long before, the grandfather of one of the boys in the class had committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot. I had potentially, but certainly unintentionally, hurt the boy in my class

Even though that incident was nearly 60 years ago, I still remember it with some chagrin. It is embarrassing when we hurt people unintentionally.

3) Back in the 1990s when I was the part-time pastor of the Fukuoka International Church in Japan, one Sunday in December I was preaching about the great joy of the old couple Zechariah and Elizabeth when John, their first child, was born in spite of their old age.

In talking about the joy of John’s birth, I mentioned how happy my oldest daughter and her husband were when after several years during which it was uncertain whether they would be able to have children, Kathy gave birth to a fine baby girl. They named her Katrina Joy.

During the sermon, one young woman got up and left, seemingly upset. After the service, I found her outside, and she was still disturbed. Why? She said my talking about people being joyful at the birth of a child made her feel very sad because she was an unwanted child—and that made me sad.

Three Suggestions

1) Try to be sensitive when speaking to a group, realizing that there are many people who harbor hurts that can be exacerbated by insensitive remarks.

2) Try to speak with political correctness as much as possible, seeking to be aware of the feelings (and internalized hurts) of those who are BIPOC (the acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous, and [other] People of Color), LGBTQ, or any other discriminated-against group of people.

We don’t hear quite so much about it now, but “political correctness,” as I wrote in my 2/19/16 blog post, when used positively “describes the attempt not to use discriminatory or demeaning language about other people, especially about those who are ‘different’ from the one speaking.”

3) Don’t let fear of unintentionally hurting others curtail speaking a “prophetic” word when needed. Sometimes the attitudes, words, and actions of our friends and acquaintances, as well as our own, are injurious to groups of people such as mentioned above.

If our friends or acquaintances are offended when we advocate for the well-being of individuals in such groups, shikata ga nai.*

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* Shikata ga nai is an oft-used expression in Japan. It means “it can’t be helped.”