Favor

Let your servant find favor in your sight.

 - From I Samuel 1

Let's look at an attitude that God favors. This phrase: "Let your servant find favor in your sight," is rather frequently employed in the Old Testament. It's a very humble disposition. First: when you say this, you're making others more important than yourself; Second: you have made it your goal to make the other person happy. 

Your wish is that the other person approves of you. You want their happiness before your own. 

What if politicians in 2021 thought like that? What if married people did? What if news channels did? 

But wait . . . isn't that a little enabling? Aren't we opening the door to being used by a narcissist?

Maybe so . . . but I really don't believe narcissists are so common for this to be a problem. We do want healthy, functional relationships. We certainly don't want to enable wrong behavior. But at the same time . . . I think that it's unquestionable, that humility itself is too rare. We've puffed ourselves up so much, as a culture; that we don't see anything good in humility, at all. 

Is it possible that . . . in our overwhelming move to let every single individual do whatever they want,  even if it's to commit violent and destructive crime, we're actually dealing with forces we don't understand?

What if our responsibility as citizens, really, is to care (at least a little) what others think of us? What if the practical rollout of the biblical principle of seeking the favor of others, meant that we really should make adjustments, so that others could be comfortable?

We may be erecting a generation that is so self-focused, that we're missing the profound need for humans, to feel (once in a while) that other people really do care what we think . . . and that the need to be liked is a hard-wired need that we do not understand. 

A little more humility, please.