What about Bob?
In the great movie What About Bob?, radical self-centredness is made marvellously humorous. Bob (Bill Murray) plagues the psychiatrists. He drives one out of business or out of town or both and then latches on to another one; the luckless Richard Dreyfus. The patient cleverly traces the doctor to his holiday spot, confronts him in the street and when he is rebuked for what he has done he whimpers, "I need, I need, I need!" No wonder the psychiatrist ends up a basket case.
I love the movie (have watched it four times—three times with my grandkids, who laughed themselves silly) and good humour is good for the soul. But beyond the movie there's the serious side of self-centredness, which in some cases is outright illness and in other cases appears to be sheer selfishness.
Mark tells us that a huge crowd walked along with and hemmed Jesus in (5:24-34). One of them was a poor soul who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve long years and added to that trouble she had suffered from a "medical fraternity" that took all her money and left her worse off. She gallantly believed if she just got near Jesus—not to bother him, you understand, just to touch his clothes—she believed that she would be healed. And so she was!
We're told that Jesus felt power leaving him (5:30, Luke 8:46). I don't know that he always felt that, and I've often wondered if healing people drained him of strength and if he ended the day weary to the bone. I tend to think so though I'm certain of this: working with people all the time is a burden; even if it's a burden we gladly take on.
I'm stating only the obvious when I say that if we wish to truly help people we must be prepared to feel power going from us; we need to know up front that there's a price to pay and be prepared to pay it.
I don't remember who it was but someone divided people into givers and takers. The takers are forever saying, "Here I am; here I am!" and the givers are constantly saying, "Ah, there you are!" Talk like this can become too sugary before we know it, and life and the people in it simply can't be divided neatly into two groups like that. But having recognised the truth of that, we can't help confessing that we think we know some who are just plain takers! Always wanting and never giving; constantly asking to be understood but never anxious to understand; wanting to be attended to but they know nothing—or precious little—about putting themselves out for others. They wish to be "friends" but the benefits are to flow only in one direction—toward them. They don't experience what Jesus felt in that crowd—power going out of them.
But there's no "friendship" (no friendship) if the relationship isn't a mutual thing. There's something cheap about our wanting someone's heart while, in every way that giving is expressed, we refuse to give him/her our heart. Whatever else that approach is, it's unlike the way of Jesus Christ.
We can't be everyone's friend; we simply aren't capable of it, but we are able if we allow or even encourage someone to be a friend to us to give them our friendship. Forget some exceptional circumstances in which this might not be true: it's surely wrong to take someone's heart while refusing to give our own.
We must feel power going out of us.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.