Today's Maxwell Quote

From That Ye May Believe (1992), 161:

One of life's toughest interpersonal challenges involves our tender concern for an offending friend who deserves reproof. Yet because of friendship we are reluctant to reprove, fearing that only further distance will develop. We fret over how to help, but unfortunately we often end up by not "interfering." It's a mistake I've made a few times.

A wider sense of proportion would sensitize us much more to the needs of those being offended as well as to those of the offender. The offended and their feelings matter too. These individuals, however, are sometimes under-represented as compared to our immediate and intense concerns for the offender. A sensitive inventory of all those being adversely affected might evoke a little more democracy of sympathy. Usually we resist reproving lovingly "early on," as the scriptural word betimes directs (see D&C 121:43). But we are not someone's enemy just because we tell him the truth.