y=mx+c

y=mx+c.

1 Samuel 2:22-36

"And the child Samuel grew in stature, and in favour both with the Lord and men... Then I will raise up for Myself a faithful priest who shall do according to what is in My heart and in My mind. I will build him a sure house, and he shall walk before My anointed forever."

- 1 Samuel 2:26,35

I wonder what the author of 1 Samuel meant when he recounted how Samuel grew in stature and in favour with God and men. To understand better perhaps, that which is on God’s heart and on His mind – and to see that expressed through our work, and the way in which we go about “loving” our neighbours as ourselves?

Needless to say, we will find it difficult to love our neighbours if we hardly know ourselves – and my greatest fear often, is the fear that that I will find myself quite unlovable when I do find out about the real me. And no wonder we find it hard to love our neighbours when we find out that we sometimes can’t even seem to get past the first hurdle of loving ourselves.

Two factors remain in the Equation of Love at any one time:

me + my neighbour

It has been observed that God seeks to bring about change in us from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of our conduct under the "new standard" - a standard based on the type of life that Christ had come to model for us.

In C.S. Lewis’ wickedly brilliant book, The Screwtape Letters, the worldly-wise old devil advices his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man on the topic of spiritual growth and prayer:

“Keep his mind on the inner life… Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate the most human useful characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which we can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with or worked in the same office.” (pp.11-2)

me > my neighbour

I don’t for a moment think the most unlovable parts of us have anything to do with our weaknesses. Rather, it is a lofty and puffed up self-centredness that makes the me outweigh our neighbour in the balance of life as we fail to recognise the parts of us which have been found most wanting, and as we esteem ourselves better than our neighbours.

me = my neighbour

The truth of the matter is: we share more in common with our neighbour than we think. It would shock many a snob in us with our ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude, that our neighbour has in fact, been made in the image of God just as we have been, regardless of whether we are Christian or not, black or white, queer or straight.

In other words, they are as lovable as we are, or put another way, we are as unlovable as they are. Cracked pots we all are, and the one who has learnt to love has found that the formula is none other than Patience added to Humility and Grace – esteeming others better than ourselves.

Screwtape instructs Wormwood:

“It is no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayer innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual’, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself.” (p.12)

Perhaps we can refer to this as the spotting-the-plank-in-your-own-eye principle. We find our neighbours unlovable because we find them inconvenient to the Self that demands his own way and stakes His own right, and we find our neighbour unlovable because they irritate Self by poking him where his ego is most insecure, where he is found most weak and most vulnerable to embarrassment.

We find our neighbour so unlovable, because we have failed to hear their story, the tragedies and the hardships which have suffered them ill, and so we leave those burdens that God meant us to carry for them by the wayside, and walk blissfully ignorant on the opposite side of the road.

Maybe the Love Equation is none so complicated after all. Maybe we can finally learn to love our neighbour. I think we may have a good chance of grasping the ins and outs of this equation when we practice and work with them like we used to do in our classrooms once upon a time, chewing on our pencil stumps and scratching our heads, and raising our hands occasionally when we dared to ask our Teacher what we failed to comprehend. I think the foibles and careless mistakes that we incur would, on the last analysis, only seek to point out where we have gone wrong, and where our equations have failed to balance.

To do according to what is in God’s heart and mind is to understand the Kingdom principles and heavenly formulas that undergird this equation. If we may use y=mx+c to calculate the gradient of a slope, then it follows that we must use God’s Equation of Love to work out the problems of us and our neighbour, no matter how un-intuitive they may come across to us at first. Such, is the law of practise.

May I constantly be aware of the plank in my own eye as I spot the plank in my neighbour’s eye – and so learn to love my neighbour even though this love may feel undeserved, for that is exactly what it is: For we love and are loved in return not because anyone of us deserve it, but because we have known and tasted grace, that we are love-able because of the love of Christ that covers a multitude of sin, the blood of Christ that has covered and blanketed the red crosses scattered abroad all over our examination papers, that have pinned judgement upon each one of us on the numerous problems and equations we have made a blunder of over the course of our lives.

May I grow in stature in and favour both with God and man – to not just love God with all my heart, my soul and my strength, but to also love my neighbour as they are, and I am. Amen.