Blessed are the thick-skinned

Once there was an unjust judge who didn't care about what the public thought of him. He wasn't afraid of God either. He did what he pleased. 

In his city there was a widow. She approached the nasty judge, complained to him about a man who was ill-treating her, and asked for justice. The judge just ignored her. She kept going back to him with the same plea and the judge kept turning her away. Finally, he said to himself, “I am tired of this woman. Even though I don't care about God or public opinion, I will see that she gets justice. I want to stop her from being a nuisance.” The widow gets what she wants.

After narrating this story (chapter 18:1-8, Gospel according to Saint Luke), Jesus asks his audience, “If this is what an unjust judge does, won’t God give justice to his children who cry out to him day and night?” 

I don’t know enough about God’s ways to answer this question with any certainty. But I do know that persistence pays with folks on earth. In fact, a thick skin is often more persuasive than an eloquent tongue when you have no power over your target.

If you want to be persuasive, you need some kind of power to bolster your persuasion attempts. The power could be that of muscle or money. Good looks can be as powerful as fertile brains. If you have popularity, tradition, or the law or on your side, that gives you power, too. If you have no power of any kind over your target, you cannot persuade him because he has nothing to lose by not complying.

In such contexts, a thick skin is the best bet. If we are thin-skinned, there are many disadvantages. First of all, we will hold ourselves back from making many potentially successful persuasion attempts. We are so worried about possible failures that we don’t even want to try. If we pick up enough courage to make a feeble attempt, we give it up as soon as we sense a snub. There are millions of men and women who would have been happy boyfriends and girlfriends or even devoted husbands and wives if they hadn’t taken their first rebuff too seriously and abandoned their wooing efforts.

There are two reasons why persistence backed by a thick skin is persuasive even when we have no power over the target. First, the target would like to avoid the embarrassment or nuisance that persistence generates. The unjust judge didn’t care about what happened to the widow or about what the public thought of him, but he didn’t want her to keep coming to him. He wanted to get rid of that nuisance.

Second, a persuader’s persistence is usually a sign of deep conviction and passion. Even if the target is unwilling to invest time and effort to examine whether the request is reasonable, he may readily come to the conclusion that if the persuader is so persistent, so convinced, and so passionate, he must be right and his request must be accepted.

Perhaps a thin skin is hurting many of us. The good news is that with a little bit of determined practice we can make it thicker.