Dr. Phillips Brooks, all his life a bachelor, was a great pastor because he practiced childlike gentleness.
On one occasion a young mother in his congregation had a baby -her first- but the baby was stillborn. The poor woman panicked and suffered a severe denial that would not let her face the facts. She clung to her dead baby and cowered in the corner of her room in a rocking chair. When anyone tired to take the baby away, she clung all the more fiercely. It finally became clear that the baby would have to be forcefully taken from her arms in a desperate and grasping scene. But then God intervened in the desperate situation.
Enter the gentle servant Phillips Brooks.
He walked to the woman’s rocking chair, smiled kindly at her, and said, “What a beautiful child. Would you mind if I rocked her a while?”
He was so gentle and kind that the woman extended to him the child, and to the surprise of all, Dr. Brooks took her seat in the rocker and tenderly rocked her baby.
An ugly crisis had been solved by a gentle spirit.
Gentleness is the key to unlock the conflicts and crisis’s we may find ourselves in. God’s gentleness displayed through us in compassion, tenderness and leniency. Can God’s gentleness calm the storm of angry bitter arguments? Can God’s gentleness heal the open wounds of offense? Can God’s gentleness mend what has been torn apart? Yes, and God chooses to use us as his ambassador of hope, healing, and peace – his ambassador of gentleness.
Gentleness is a mature expression of love, applied God’s truth, wisdom.
The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. – James 3:17
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