A statement jumped out as I was reading a reflection on a Bible passage last week.

“The crowd signifies fellow believers who walk with Christ and yet sometimes hinder our progress in the spiritual life. We must strive, like the blind man, to overcome their discouragement ...”

Our fellow believers — the people we pray with at church, work with at parish fundraisers and mingle with in parish groups — are people just like everybody else. They get distracted, overworked, sick, bored, irritated or outright angry, and experience all the other emotions of life, positive and negative.

They go spiritually dry sometimes, are flooded with over-enthusiasm other times and may become enamored with particular faith practices overmuch to the neglect of other, maybe even more important, faith traditions.

We’re all in the same church “boat,” and sometimes we trip over each other, tromp one another’s toes or eat someone else’s fish. Given human nature and normal levels of klutziness, I suspect those out-of-sync times happen more often than the everyone-rows-together times. Nature seems to flow in the path of least resistance, and schlepping through parish life is easier than deliberate, step-by-step, straight-line movement together toward Jesus.

And so, we do, indeed, find ourselves needing to strive to overcome the discouragement of our crowds of fellow believers who perhaps are not as careful as they could be as they charge into church and forget to hold the door for us. Or maybe they don’t care like we do about saying the prayers correctly.

Some may be so distracting during Mass that we are tempted to move to the other side of the church.

That potential for discouragement is only greater when someone we once admired and who seemed, to us, to have their spiritual selves together is the one who messes up. Their perhaps-unique and momentary lack of good judgment may well cause everyone around them to wonder if their entire example of faith was fake. Some may cause an actual scandal and become a reason for great discouragement.

The only two people who have stolen money from me, for example, were fellow Catholics. One, I believe, thought our little faith community owed him something, and my cash was handy to swipe as he headed out on his way elsewhere. The other apparently just got greedy and absconded with money from several church members.

We expect such behaviors from people who don’t know the Lord, from seedy-looking strangers, or from persons whose younger years were filled with all-bad examples — not from those who sit in our church pews. But, weakness happens. The devil pounces. And some folks give in to temptation, and those cases can cause the rest of us to feel disappointed and discouraged.

Like the blind man in the Gospel, we each have to go to Jesus and deal with him directly, and not expect the faith of others to carry us through. We can’t sit on our laurels, figuring we’ll be swept along to heaven without any effort on our part to give our hearts and lives to God.

We certainly can, and must, help each other. But good people are still people. Our Savior is God. He’s the one we rely on completely, even as we learn from one another about ourselves and about Him.

We also must take His gifts and graces and use them well, without allowing our fellow sojourners to unduly steer our decisions. A great many saints had to butt heads with fellow churchgoers in order to do God’s will when the others preferred to go the easy, the usual, or the flashy route.

When the blind man heard that Jesus was near, he drew on what he had heard from his friends and his community to make his decision to cry out to Jesus. He did so even though those same others tried to hush him, tried to discourage him from seeking Christ.

Like the blind man, we can learn about Jesus from each other. But let’s also remember his clear focus on Christ ... in spite of those who tried to discourage him.