Gentleness

“Your gentleness made me great.” – 2 Samuel 22:37

“Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent it is than force!” – Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Is it easy for you to conceive of God as gentle? Perhaps that has to do with how much gentleness we ourselves have received, and I look back now with thankfulness for that in my life. I don’t have many early childhood memories, but nearly all of them are of gentle physical gestures: my dad holding me while walking in the dark of our living room at night, tucking me into bed. Dave, who is stronger than me in many ways, is someone I would describe as gentle in word and deed. I spent an extended year of training at Hopkins with an attending who was known for his gentle manner towards difficult patients. 

Gentleness is often considered synonymous with kindness, but they aren’t the same: if kindness describes our actions, gentleness gets more at the manner in which we act. If kindness is goodness in action, gentleness is more goodness in disposition. How we do what we do. When we handle something with care, we are making a statement about how valuable that item is to us, about its relative fragility compared with our relative power. We are choosing to wield our strength in a way that honors and understands the nature of what we’re dealing with, in a way that expresses grace, care, and love. In the New Testament, the word for gentleness, praytes, is often associated with meekness, as in “the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:1). As Gayle Erwin writes, “When I look at the clues that indicate the nature of Jesus—born in a barn, questionable parents, spotty ancestry, common name, misdirected announcement, unattractive looks, reared in a bad neighborhood, owning nothing, surrounding himself with unattractive co-workers, and dying a shameful death—I find his whole approach unable to fit into the methods that automatically come to mind when I think about ‘winning the world.’ His whole approach could easily be described as nonthreatening or nonmanipulative. He seemed to lead with weakness in each step of life.”

Strength in weakness. Greatness through gentleness. I have always loved that line of David’s, because it is an attribute of God we so rarely hear praised. God has been gentle with me: never forceful or harsh; every rebuke and encouragement bathed in the gentle love of his presence. When I acknowledge and receive that from Him, I am able to be gentle with myself. I am able to be gentle with others, to be more careful and less careless in how I treat this person for whom my gentle Savior died.