Week 11—Thursday 1 Corinthians 12:31; 14:1
Week 11—THURSDAY
LOVE WAS THE KEY
When Dr. Menninger gained this new insight, he called his staff together and said in essence: These people are here because they haven’t loved or been loved. That is their disease. All else is symptom. So we will have to love them into loving, will have to make all our contacts with the patients love contacts, from the top psychiatrist to the caretaker. If you go in to change an electric light bulb in a patient’s room, you must make your contacts love contacts. They tried it for six months, and found at the end of that time that the period of hospitalization had been cut in half. The patients were getting well in half the time it took under the old insight technique. Love was the key. And that was important for our quest. For insight is the Word become word, but love is the Word became flesh. You cannot take love as a word; you must take it as an attitude and an act, or you haven’t got it. Love makes itself into arms and hands and feet or it isn’t love.
When someone asked Dr. Menninger in a forum in Tucson, Arizona: “Doctor, what are you to do if you find a nervous breakdown coming on?” You would have thought that the great psychiatrist would say, “See a psychiatrist,” but he didn’t. He said instead: “Go to the front door, turn the key in the lock, go across the railway tracks, find someone who needs you and do something for him.” For a nervous breakdown is caused by being interested in yourself and no one else. Love breaks that tyranny of self-preoccupation and makes you free.
Another book entitled Love or Perish, by another psychiatrist, Dr. Smiley Blanton, emphasizes the same thing. If you don’t love, you perish—not in hell necessarily, but now as a personality. Nothing will hold the personality together except love. So the title means what it says, “Love or Perish”—now.
O God, we thank you that you have made it so that we cannot violate the law of love without violating the law of our own beings. Give me the sense to love and love lavishly upon the worthy and the unworthy. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Love will be the key to every situation I shall meet today.