Love In The Little Things

There should be no schism in the body, but . . . the members should have the same care for one another.

1 Corinthians 12:25

Courtesy is one of those things that is so simple we forget about it. Most of us want to get involved in the large, huge, loving things. But you see, courtesy isn’t the great big love involvement. Courtesy is love in the little things. Courtesy is the simplicity of love.

You can take the most untutored person and put him into the highest society, and if he has a reservoir of courteous love, he will not behave unwisely. A person who is committed to God’s kind of love, as simple as he may be, will know what to do and will be accepted. Carlisle said of Robert Burns that there was no truer gentleman than the plowman poet. “He loved everything, and all things great and small that God had made. So with this simple passport he could mingle with any society and enter courts and palaces from his little cottage, and be accepted.”

I’ve known people like that. Maybe they don’t have the right clothes or don’t know just the right words to say, but because of their simplicity and their easiness with people and their courtesy in conversation, they seem to be accepted in any strata of society. That is the simplicity of love.