Week 11—Friday John 4:7-11
John 4:7-11
THE DEEPEST THING IN HUMAN NATURE—
TO LOVE AND BE LOVED
Dr. Smiley Blanton, mentioned yesterday, says that “after sitting for forty years in my office and dealing with disrupted people I’ve come to the conclusion that they are disrupted because they haven’t loved or been loved.”
When I asked Dr. John Plokker, head of a large mental hospital in Holland, what was the deepest necessity in human nature, he answered without hesitation, “To love and be loved.” He said that in his hospital they put on extra nurses to have what they call “Petting Hours”—hours when they give the babies not merely service, but love. In the Bellevue Hospital in New York they found that babies, though given scientific care and feeding, died to the tune of 32 percent the first year of a minor ailment. They decided that the babies were getting everything except love. So they sent out a call for “Love Volunteers”—women who would come in and love babies so many hours a day. Hundreds of women volunteered not only for the sake of the babies but for their own selves. For with their own children gone from the home they wanted and needed someone to love. The superintendent reporting on results said, “We could no more do without these ‘love volunteers’ than we could do without penicillin. Here is a vitamin, love, without which babies die to the tune of 32 percent the first year of a minor ailment and 22 percent are so damaged that they must be classed as idiots.”
An abandoned child, now in a hospital, didn’t grow, was underdeveloped. A nurse in her spare time began to love it. The child began to blossom and bloom. On the instruction sheets many doctors write as instruction to nurses: “T.L.C.”—“Tender loving care.” Chiropractors have as their motto “L.L.L.”—“Lather love lavishly.” From various angles necessity is taking us by the hand and is leading us to life’s deepest necessity—love!
My Gracious Lord, how can I thank you enough that the highest is pulling us—pulling us to love, and to accept love? We thank you for this transforming pull. We yield ourselves to it and in so doing we find ourselves different. We thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My chief occupation today—to accept love and to give love.