Be devoted to one another.
—Romans 12:10
In Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel, David Copperfield, Copperfield says to his friend James Steerforth at bedtime, “Good-bye, my dear Steerforth! I shall be gone before you wake in the morning.”
Putting a hand on each of Copperfield’s shoulders, Steerforth says, “Davy, if anything should ever separate us, you must think of me at my best, old boy. Come! Let us make that bargain. Think of me at my best, if circumstances should ever part us!”
Copperfield never saw Steerforth again until he saw his corpse—shipwrecked and washed ashore.
“Think of me at my best.” We all want that.
Few relationships are so perfect as to have no vexations. But let’s strive to think of others in the now as we will think of them when we have outlived them a dozen years.
Think as charitably of others
as you wish them to think of you.