19. Everyone Is Fighting a Battle
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about." It's a common saying – you can see it everywhere from online tweets to printed wall hangings. In online collections of quotes it's often attributed to some of history's great thinkers like Plato and Philo of Alexandria. But the truth, as is so often the case, is more interesting. The quote "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about" is actually a modern version of something written by a little-known British clergyman named John Watson over a hundred years ago.
Watson was born in 1850 in Essex, England, and after studying theology at university he became a minister in Edinburgh, Scotland. He later travelled to the United States where he lectured at Yale University for a while and actually died in the US in 1907. Watson wrote several books under his own name, and a number of other books under the name of Ian Maclaren.
It was as "Ian Maclaren" that Watson seems to have penned the quote we now know only slightly differently. A short piece mentioning the origin of the quote was printed in a periodical in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1898:
"'Ian Maclaren,' along with other celebrities, was asked to send a Christmas message to an influential religious weekly in England. He responded by sending the short but striking sentence: 'Be pitiful for every man is fighting a hard battle.' No message is more needed in our days of stress and storm, of selfish striving and merciless competition."
The expression "Be pitiful" would now be "Take pity" – or "Be kind" as the quote is usually reproduced today – but its message is clear and certainly biblical. The apostle John wrote: "If anyone … sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?" (1 John 3:17).
But Watson's words speak not only regarding those in need, but also of those facing any kind of struggle. In 1903, he expounded on his own words in a section of one of his books – The Homely Virtues (pages 168-69): "This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavoring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past.…"
These words speak of the battles and struggles we all experience in life, as well as the battle scars we accumulate. They also imply what our response to that universal fight should be – something the apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2 ESV, NKJV). Watson himself put it this way:
"And when this occurs to us [that we see our neighbor's struggle], we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self. We must feel as a brother towards the man beside us …" It's an everyday application of the good soldier's attitude, a "Main Street" enactment of the "He's not heavy, he's my brother" way of the battlefield. In fact, when Paul tells us in Galatians 6:2 that we should help carry each other's burdens, the word translated "burdens" (Greek baré) was often applied to the pack carried by a soldier on the march and in combat. We are all fighting battles at some level. The warrior of the Way strives to keep that in mind.