Love the One You're With

Bill Brown ... Xiamen University
Love the One You're With

"Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly." Leviticus 19:15.

"Behave toward everyone as if receiving a great guest." Confucius

During my first semester at XMU, I visited the dean of the MBA Center late one evening about a problem. He warmly welcomed me, fixed tea, listened patiently as if he had not a care in the world. I later learned from someone else that he had to stay up almost the entire night to finish the report that I had interrupted, but while I was with him, I was his priority.

Whether a dean, a mayor, or a peasant fixing bicycles, Chinese are hospitable hosts, and will stop everything to fix tea for a guest. They may very subtly hint they have things to do, but if you're too dense to take the hint, they would never make you loose face by showing you the door. And I've seen leaders treat peasants as patiently as the dense foreign professor. Chinese are, of course, not perfect, but on the whole they are certainly a lot farther along the path to impartiality than I am, and after 20 years I'm still trying to learn from them.

Favoritism is Fatal As I teach in Organizational Behavior, few things are more demotivating in the workplace than favoritism, but the same goes for life in general. When Joseph's brothers "saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him, and could not speak a kind word to him." (Gen. 37:4 NIV).

Favoritism is Unwise Favoritism is not just wrong but unwise because we cannot tell a person's worth from their bank account or even their appearance. "But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." 1 Sam. 16:7

God shows no favoritism (Rom. 2:11) because, regardless of our status, or lack of it, in the long run we are but dust (Psalm 103:14). "He bears in mind that we are dust"). A century ago, John D. Rockefeller owned the world. Today, he is no richer than I am, and a century from now I'll have as much in the bank as Bill Gates. Whether Rockefeller, Gates and I are ever more than mere dust depends not upon how we invest our money but upon how we invest our lives.

Earthdust or Stardust? If we were but the dust of the earth, we would be poorer than paupers, but we are dust animated by the very breath of God (Gen. 2:7). Our life is His life, our breath is His breath--an average of 4.2 billion breaths from God for each life. If we waste this precious gift of life, we are paupers indeed, but if we invest our life wisely, we are more than princes--we are stardust, created a little lower than the angels (Heb. 2:7).

Love the One You're With. In 1970, Stephen Stills sang, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." Of course, he did not mean "love" but "making love" ("She's a girl and you're a boy..."), but if we take it to mean reallove instead, the song has a point. We should love as ourselves (Luke 10:27) all whom our Father allows to cross our paths, whether they appear to be princes or paupers.

James, the most straightforward of NT authors, wrote, "Dear brothers, how can you claim that you belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, if you show favoritism to rich people and look down on poor people? If a man comes into your church dressed in expensive clothes and with valuable gold rings on his fingers, and at the same moment another man comes in who is poor and dressed in threadbare clothes, and you make a lot of fuss over the rich man and give him the best seat in the house and say to the poor man, 'You can stand over there if you like, or else sit on the floor'—well, judging a man by his wealth shows that you are guided by wrong motives." James 2:1-4 TLB

Treat a prince like a pauper, and a pauper like a prince, for in the end we are all both paupers and princes. We are simply the dust of the earth if we waste our life. But if we steward well our 4.2 billion breaths, we are star dust

"Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it." Confucius

Stephen Stills
If you're down and confused
And you don't remember who
You're talking to
Concentration slips away
Cos your baby is so far away

[Chorus]
And there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one
You love honey
Love the one you're with...
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