As part of an education at Liberty University, each student is required to put in a certain number of hours of community service each semester. Part of my community service is to sit at the local public library each week and take people’s blood pressures. And I happen to wear a white lab coat while doing it. Which apparently qualifies me to answer questions on anything from blood pressure to parenting how-tos. It is incredible to me that simply donning a white lab coat instantly makes one a medical guru.

News flash: they sell white lab coats at Goodwill. I saw them there. So I know. And that means that anybody or his brother or his uncle’s cousin’s monkey could go and purchase a white lab coat for approximately $3.00. (They might charge the monkey more than that for coming in without shirt or shoes).

And people would assume upon the authority of the white lab coat that its occupant was somehow qualified to pass out medical information (or create large chemical explosions…people in white lab coats do that too, I think).

It sort of made me wonder about how much stock I personally put in appearances.

Am I more ready to take advice from the man behind the pulpit simply because he’s there, behind the pulpit, in a suit? Do I respect someone’s opinion more depending on the school he graduated from, the kind of clothes he’s dressed in, or the kind of car he drives?

Do I say I believe in absolute truth and live as though I believe it’s conditional, relative, and situational?

In my friendships, am I partial to those who dress better, talk smarter, and appear to have it all together? Do I look beyond what’s merely skin deep? Do I take the time to know the heart hidden beneath the suit? If not, shame on me. That makes me little different than the medically uneducated who religiously consult quack doctors and drink large amounts of snake oil. Or the Biblically illiterate “Christians” who naively accept as truth anything which proceeds from the pulpit. Or the annoying mosquitoes that refuse to be repelled by bug spray. Wait, maybe not that last one.

But you get the picture.

Christ says in Luke 6:45 that a man speaks “out of the abundance of his heart.” What we say reveals the content of our character, the depth of our thinking, and the motives of our heart.

It’s time to move beyond the immature fascination with the white lab coat and really listen to what people are saying…forget how they look. Is their character good, are their thought processes biblical, and are their motives honorable?

Life is too short to refuse to go deep in our relationships, dealing with the sometimes-ugly realities rather than our comfortable assumptions about people. May we all learn to listen…with our brains turned on and our hearts intensely compassionate.