Imagine a world where a homeless man, out of food and out of work, can walk up to a woman's door in the middle of the afternoon and tell her, "Ma'am, I ain't had a bite to eat for some time, and I sure could use a warm, dry place to sleep." Imagine a world where that woman responds, "Come right on in. I have some soup, and there's a spare bedroom down the hall in which you can catch some shuteye." Imagine a world where that same stranger then joins the family for family dinner and laughs and eats and prays with decent folk. Hard to imagine? That's the way this world once was.
Times have changed. Why? We are first of all not allowed to love our neighbor and secondly afraid to do so. I have had my share of people take advantage of my kindness, but I have stopped alongside the road frequently myself and given assistance or a kind word to strangers without so much as a thought of any reward or recompense.
Jesus told us this was a sign preceeding his second coming. To his disciples at passover, he told them, "and because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold (Matthew 24:12)".
People all around us are looking for love. I observed on the way to work this morning not less than five very young couples holding hands and walking arm in arm. I spoke this weekend about and with several couples who believe they are in love only because what they take for love is a bastardized and incomplete picture thereof. People yearn for compassion, they yearn for companionship, and they yearn for connections, at a time when it has become, by virtue of a combination of technology, crime, and politics, more difficult than ever to connect with other people.
It is a hallmark of a society that waxes cold in iniquity that there is less love therein. We have become paranoid and fear fraternization and familiarity. We have been hurt. We live near enough to people that we fear that we do not trust anyone and jealously hold to what we have. In November at the HOA meeting, one woman was very agitated because she thought her own neighbors, who are renters, had broken into her house. Last night, I heard gunshots from my back yard, and I live in a relatively affluent part of town. We do not know our neighbors because we fear them. How then can we possibly love them? We do not love our fellows because we have been betrayed in the past. Without trust, without faith, and without love, sometimes we do unto others before they do unto us and thereby shoot ourselves in the foot.
Sometimes we are not allowed to care for others. Friends of mine laugh at me when they drop by work, because I will prop the door to my office open when there are visitors. I explain to them that I simply cannot abide to risk the chance that someone will accuse me of inappropriate behavior behind closed doors. I am concerned about the laboratory classrooms whose windows are completely obscured, because who knows what might happen in them? We are afraid. We fear liabilities, and so we don't offer to help repair homes or bind up wounds or invite friends over, because we don't want them to sue us for being injured on our properties. We fear the police, and so even good people flee when they arrive, even if they have nothing actually to hide. I have been pulled over once when I wasn't doing anything wrong, but because they wanted to make sure my temporary tag was legitimate. Yesterday, I was approached by cops while sitting in my car outside my own parents' house because it is known that there is someone suspicious loitering in the neighborhood. Some groups that used to feed the homeless no longer do because if there's a fight or something, the cops might come, and they are afraid. We fear other legal consequences, and so people like me do not get close to students for fear of fraternization or too familiar of associations. In general, we fear strangers, and so, among other things, we take our candy over after halloween to the hospital so they can X-ray it.
People commit suicide every day because they do not feel that anybody cares. That's probably at least partly why most people are so desperate to be in relationships- because it at least gives them the semblance that someone else cares about them, even if they don't care for them at all. We want to feel love even if other people just go through the motions towards us. we don't want to be alone. We write off people who tell us things that are hard to bear, forgetting that true friends tell you what you need to know, not just what you want to know. Too many people I know do not hold such courageous conversations because they know they might lose the friend, however temporarily, as a consequence.
The Savior commanded us to "Love one another as I have loved you". It is the second great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. While many of us do not love ourselves, we are afraid and paranoid, which has curtailed compassion to a great degree and sent people off "looking for love in all the wrong places". This great utopian society everyone hopes we can have will not come until people trust that there is goodness in other people. CS Lewis wrote that "If you take away all that is good in man, you are not left with a bad man, you are left with nothing at all". There is weakness and evil in man, true, but there is also greatness and strength. To find it, you sometimes have to be looking for it.
However Pollyanna of me this may sound, I testify to you that there is goodness in men. I challenge you to look for the good in men, and I promise you that if you look for goodness you will find it.
1 comment:
I think one of my saddest moments came when the church put out the new policy (now a few years back) that if a male is a teacher, he has to have a male co-teacher or his spouse -- and that the classroom door has to be propped open if there is only one male teacher in the class. I understand completely that it's protection for both the children and the teachers, but it still made me sad that it was necessary.
I wish we could all be more like the Savior and treat people the way He did. (and would still if He was here). Great thoughts.
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