I’ve been thinking lately about something that probably seems insignificant on the surface: the simple act of returning a phone call, answering a text, or responding to an email.
My schedule is pretty full. Between work, ministry, consulting, family, and everything else, there aren’t many days when I wonder what to do with my free time. I’m not claiming to be busier than anyone else. I know plenty of people whose schedules are just as demanding, if not more so. But somehow I generally manage to respond when people reach out to me.
Not always right away. Sometimes it takes a few hours, occasionally longer. I’ve overlooked messages, forgotten to return calls, and had to apologize for not following through. I’m far from perfect at it. But I make a deliberate effort, because I believe acknowledging people matters. And I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the explanation that someone is simply too busy to respond.
I understand being busy. I understand competing priorities, demanding schedules, and seasons that leave people physically or emotionally exhausted. People also have different capacities; what comes easily to one person may be genuinely hard for another. I’m willing to extend a lot of grace for those things. What I struggle to accept is busyness as a permanent explanation for not acknowledging people, especially when it becomes a pattern.
Sometimes an adequate response takes a few seconds: “Got your message. Let me get back to you tomorrow.” That’s it. You haven’t committed to a long conversation or rearranged your day. You’ve simply acknowledged that another human being reached out to you, and that small act communicates consideration.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized my frustration isn’t really about unanswered messages. It’s about what our willingness, or unwillingness, to acknowledge others says about our priorities and our character. I think it also points to a broader cultural problem worth talking about. So, if you’ve made it this far, buckle up and enjoy the ride. :)
We live in a time when people talk constantly about their need to be seen, heard, respected, accepted, and valued. We hear about protecting our peace, honoring our lived experience, setting boundaries, and living our truth. And listen, before anyone misunderstands me, I’m not dismissing those things. People deserve dignity and respect. There are good reasons to set boundaries, and emotional and mental health deserve serious attention. Some people spent years in places where their needs were ignored, their voices dismissed, and their boundaries repeatedly crossed. I understand why learning to speak up matters to them.
But I’ve begun to wonder whether our emphasis on what we need from other people has outpaced our willingness to consider what they need from us. We want to be heard, but are we listening? We want our time respected, but do we respect anyone else’s? We want people to understand our circumstances, but do we try to understand theirs? We want grace when we fall short, but how freely do we give it?
The most uncomfortable question may be whether we’ve become so preoccupied with our own needs that we’ve quietly (or even subconsciously) convinced ourselves consideration for others is optional. I don’t believe it is. I believe it’s a moral responsibility, not just a social courtesy, and that distinction matters.
If consideration is only a courtesy, I can offer it when it’s convenient: thoughtful when I have spare time, responsive when I feel like it, attentive when the relationship benefits me. If it’s a moral responsibility though, convenience and personal gain don’t decide whether I practice it. I shouldn’t treat someone respectfully because they might become a customer, a friend, or a useful connection. I should treat them respectfully because they’re a human being.
This applies to people I’ve known for decades and people I met five minutes ago. It applies to the person serving my coffee at Starbucks, the person who interrupts my day, the person asking for help, and the person I strongly disagree with in a broad or even a narrow sense. It applies when no one is watching. I suspect some of the clearest evidence of our character shows up in how we treat people who have nothing to offer us.
I’ve spent much of my life studying and teaching Scripture, and Jesus speaks to this directly. In Matthew 7:12 He gave us what we call the Golden Rule: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” Notice where He put the responsibility. He didn’t tell His followers to demand proper treatment from others. He told them to take responsibility for how they treated people.
In Luke 10, when He was asked about loving one’s neighbor, He told the story of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan came across a wounded man on the road. He had somewhere to be and responsibilities of his own. Helping a stranger would cost him time, effort, and money, and the man could give him nothing back. He stopped anyway. Two religious men had already seen the wounded man and kept going. Jesus doesn’t tell us why, and I don’t think we should invent motives for them, but the contrast is hard to miss. The Samaritan let another person’s need shape what he did. Then Jesus told His listener to go and do likewise.
Answering a text is hardly the same as rescuing a wounded stranger, and I’m not suggesting it is. But the question underneath is the same. When someone else’s needs run into my plans, am I willing to give that person real consideration? Or have I become so focused on my own affairs that other people’s concerns barely register?
Paul says something similar in Philippians 2:3-4. He tells believers to act with humility, to value others, and to look to the interests of others, not just their own. What strikes me is that Paul doesn’t say we shouldn’t have interests. He assumes we do. His concern is that they not consume us so completely that we lose sight of everyone else. That’s practical counsel, and it cuts against a lot of what our culture celebrates.
There’s a philosophical side to this I find interesting too. Aristotle, writing centuries before Jesus, argued in Book II of his Nicomachean Ethics that moral virtues are formed through habit and practice. Knowing what generosity is doesn’t make a person generous. Understanding justice doesn’t make someone just. We become those things through what we repeatedly choose to do. Aristotle never heard the phrase “virtue signaling,” but I think he would have recognized it immediately, because he understood that virtue is something you practice, not something you announce.
This is important to me right now, because we’ve become very sophisticated in how we talk about virtue. We know the language of compassion, kindness, empathy, and respect. We know which opinions we’re supposed to express and which causes we’re expected to support, and social media gives us a huge platform to announce our convictions. My concern is that we’ve started confusing the ability to describe virtue with actually practicing it.
It’s possible to speak passionately about kindness and still be inconsiderate. It’s possible to champion empathy while showing little interest in anyone else’s circumstances, or to insist that everyone deserves to be heard while ignoring the people trying to reach us. It’s possible to demand accountability from everyone else and get offended or “triggered” when someone asks us to examine our own behavior. That inconsistency is troubling to me.
We call this virtue signaling: publicly expressing moral positions in ways that show our values without necessarily requiring us to act on them. But I think the problem actually goes deeper than appearances. We can identify so closely with certain virtues that we assume holding the right convictions “proves” we have the matching character. Aristotle would challenge that, and so would the New Testament.
James saw a first-century version of virtue signaling. In James 2:14-17 he describes someone who meets a brother or sister without enough clothing or food and offers kind words but nothing else. The words sound right, but nothing changes for the person in need. James is addressing faith and works specifically, but the principle reaches further. Our convictions ought to produce conduct that matches them. Jesus made the same point in Luke 6:46 when He asked why people called Him Lord and didn’t do what He said. Apparently the gap between what we profess and what we practice isn’t a modern problem. Human nature hasn’t changed nearly as much over the centuries as our vocabulary has. We’ve simply become more sophisticated at describing, naming and labeling things; all while perpetuating the same issues.
I want to be careful here, because I don’t think this is only a problem among younger people. Many people today like to hate on the younger generation, Gen Z, Millennials, etc. It’s tired and boring and really illustrates nothing more than a lack of self-awareness. Granted, some of the current language around identity, emotional needs, and boundaries is especially common in today’s conversations among younger people, and social media has amplified it. But I’ve known plenty of older adults who demand respect without showing it, leaders who insist on accountability while dodging it, and Christians who talk warmly about loving people while treating others with real indifference. NO generation has a monopoly on selfishness or entitlement.
I’m also not saying every slow reply or unanswered message reveals poor character. Sometimes people really are overwhelmed. Some are carrying things we know nothing about. Others struggle with organization, anxiety, or the sheer volume of messages they get. We should be slow to assign motives when we don’t know someone’s situation. And there are legitimate reasons not to answer every request. Being considerate doesn’t mean being available around the clock, and respecting someone’s dignity doesn’t mean handing over control of your time.
Still, there’s a difference between a healthy boundary and using the therapeutic language of boundaries to avoid ordinary responsibilities and human consideration. There’s a difference between being unable to respond and being unwilling to make a reasonable effort, and between an occasional oversight and a steady pattern of disregarding people.
Over the years I’ve noticed that some people who are too busy to respond become remarkably available when they need something. They’re hard to reach when someone is waiting on a decision or has a real concern, but when their own circumstances change, their expectations about communication somehow suddenly change too. I find that hard to reconcile. If my time and needs deserve consideration, why wouldn’t yours? Selective responsiveness doesn’t always prove motive; people prioritize messages for all kinds of reasons, many of them perfectly fine. But repeated patterns can say something about how we view our obligations to others, and we don’t like admitting it.
We say we didn’t have time when the more honest answer is that we didn’t make time. I often say, people make time for what they want to make time for. To be sure, none of us has unlimited capacity, so we all decide what gets our attention. But, personal responsibility means being honest enough to admit that those choices reflect our priorities, whether we like it or not. And if we routinely expect consideration while refusing to give it, that’s a character issue worth looking at.
I’m not against self-care. Rest is necessary, boundaries are important, and people have real emotional and relational needs. But self-care and self-absorption aren’t the same thing. Taking care of ourselves should help us meet our responsibilities, not become a handy excuse for dropping them. Recognizing our own worth shouldn’t shrink our recognition of anyone else’s. I can believe my time is valuable and still recognize that yours is too. I can set boundaries without becoming indifferent, and I can protect my well-being while still treating people with patience and kindness. Those things can live together, and be true at the same time, and I think they should.
What bothers me most is the possibility that we’re slowly redefining goodness around what we believe, what we say, and how we expect to be treated, rather than how we actually behave. We’ve gotten very comfortable talking about what other people owe us. I’m not sure we’re as comfortable talking about what we owe them. I don’t mean financial or professional obligations, or some expectation that we spend our lives meeting everyone’s demands. I mean the ordinary responsibilities that come with being human: honesty, courtesy, dependability, respect, and a willingness to see that other people’s lives matter as much to them as ours do to us. Those things shouldn’t need an incentive. They shouldn’t be reserved for people we like, and they shouldn’t evaporate because we’re busy, or we like the person less than someone else.
This standard has to start with me. It’s easy to spot inconsiderate behavior in someone else. It’s a lot less comfortable to recognize the times I’ve been impatient, distracted, dismissive, or too wrapped up in my own responsibilities to notice someone else’s needs. And if consideration really is a moral responsibility, I don’t get to suspend it because someone else failed to extend it to me. That’s probably the hardest part.
Jesus addressed that, too. In Luke 6:32-36 He challenged the idea that loving people who love us back is enough. He calls us to a mercy and generosity that don’t depend on being treated the same in return. That doesn’t erase boundaries or require us to tolerate mistreatment, but it does push against the hyper-therapeutic and godless cultural view of making our conduct conditional on someone else’s.
I want to practice consideration because I believe it’s right and it’s the right way to live. I’ll fall short of that sometimes; we all will. But I don’t want my shortcomings to become the standard I use to excuse myself. I’d rather own them and try to do better.
I think we need to recover a more serious understanding of character. Being a good person takes more than holding admirable opinions, therapeutic speak, or knowing what to say. It means practicing the convictions we claim to believe, recognizing that our choices affect people in ways we may never see, and accepting that we owe others consideration even when it costs us time, interrupts our plans, or gives us nothing in return.
I don’t want to live in a society where everyone insists on being seen and heard but nobody feels responsible for seeing or hearing anyone else. I don’t want compassion to become something we advertise instead of something we practice, and I don’t want to confuse a good vocabulary about virtue with the actual practice and expression of virtue.
So before we demand that others recognize our worth, respect our time, understand our circumstances, or acknowledge our feelings, maybe we should ask whether we’re doing those things for them. The measure of our consideration shouldn’t be how important someone is to us, but what we believe about their inherent worth as a human being. If we really believe every person has dignity and value, it ought to show in how we treat them.
Even when we’re busy. Especially when we’re busy.