We all know how to be kind, thoughtful and encouraging

I have had the privilege of serving as the pastor at First Presbyterian here in Sumter for the last year. My wife and I moved to Sumter about six months ago, and so now it is our home, too.

Although it is hard for me to believe it has been a year (my older, more mature friends tell me that as you age, "the days get longer and the years get shorter!"), I am thankful to call Sumter home. I was told early in my time here "here in Sumter we always try to work together." For the most part, I have found this to be true. There is certainly more we can do; it is easy to become too focused on your own neighborhood or your own church and to forget that our community is larger. I believe one of the greatest challenges we all face is to look beyond our own needs. We are prone to be selfish and to think we have already done enough.

As a minister, I have the privilege of working with all ages. As everyone who is a teacher knows, you must make sure that your message is appropriate to the age of your students. If you have a difficult concept and you are teaching 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, you may spend as much time thinking about what you are going to say and how you are going to say it as you actually spend saying it. Several months ago, in this column I quoted the wisdom of a writer named Robert Fulghum. Fulghum wrote an essay called, "Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." I have continued to think about Fulghum's essay. Repeatedly I have thought to myself, "Why is it so difficult for us as human beings to live by the lessons that our parents taught us when we were younger?" One of the first lessons we were taught in preschool was to share. Why is it so difficult for us when we become adults to share? We were told, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything." And yet the tone and volume of our civil discourse gets louder and louder. We speak without thinking, and we jump to conclusions.

The curious youth asked her pastor, "Are you a good Christian?" The pastor responded, "You will have to ask my next-door neighbor." What would people learn about you if they followed you around for a day? What would someone discover about you if they followed you around for a day and you didn't know they were watching your every move? Do our children learn more from what we say and from what we teach them, or do they learn more from how we treat others?

Maybe we all need to go back to kindergarten and return to the basics. We all know how to be kind and to be thoughtful and to be encouraging of others; now let's do it.

Stewart Rawson is the Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Downtown Sumter.