Joe Lycett

From Steve Chalke, minister, speaker and social entrepreneur: 
I want to tell you a story. Not one that I’m proud of. My only excuse – my ignorance. It was back in the late 1980s. My wife and I had just – with a lot of help from friends – set up a safe house to provide accommodation for young people who’d been rejected or exploited by those who should have loved and cared for them. It was our long held dream to give each one of them the opportunity of a new start. But, as the house filled, I was in for a shock. There was rarely a ‘please’, a ‘thank you’, a smile or even eye contact from any of our residents. 
And that’s not all. To make the house a home, we’d kitted it out with wonderful artwork and a huge TV in the lounge. Yet, soon after our first residents’ arrival, everything had disappeared. All stolen and sold! Can you believe it? I was angry. What was wrong with these people? The problem, however, was mine – not theirs. I am ashamed to admit it, but because the profound disabilities of these young people were psychological rather than physical it was all too easy to misread their behaviours and, as a result, blame them rather than compensate for them. 
Having never stood in the ill-fitting shoes of those I sought so naively to support, the jump to my misconceived conclusions and hasty misjudgements was a simple step. Psychologists have identified a fascinating human trait where we tend to ‘attribute’ our shortcomings to our circumstances – ‘I was tired’, ‘I’d had a tough day’, ‘they don’t know what I’m trying to deal with right now’ etc. – but we’re prone to ignore all this when it comes to others, convinced that unlike us, they do bad things because they are bad people! I like to tell myself that I believe the counter-cultural words of the bible. “Love your neighbour as you love yourself…Love never fails.” So, the most frustrating question is why it took me so long to wake up to understanding and then applying these principles to my work; to finally realise that the world’s most powerful medicine is relentless love, that it works for everyone and that it’s impossible to prescribe too much!