Sensitivity to Other
People’s Feelings
Jesus replied,
“The most important commandment is this: ‘….you must love the Lord your God
with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’*
31 The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’* No
other commandment is greater than these.”
Matt. 12:29-31
When the writer was very young – under the age of 10
years, he saw his home as the only home in the world i.e. best in everything,
particularly as far as love is concerned. The next door’s neighbours, as far as
he was concerned could not have been as nice as the people in his own home
were. The day he was asked for the first
time in his primary school days to pair with a girl was a sad day for him
simply because a very dark, robust and promising girl from an entirely different
background had the misfortune of being paired with him. He hated her to his bone marrows and the
charcoal black complexion she wore only worsened the matter. He had to sit dis-comfortably far away from the
fine by God but ‘ugly’ by him promising and innocent girl. He had to demarcate the internal locker so
her books would not touch his! When he
looks back today he is full of apologies for the unlucky girl in absentia while
asking God for forgiveness for he knew not what he was doing then. He thanks God for that compulsory opportunity
to ‘forcefully’ mix with other people, otherwise he probably would have
continued with his negative belief that every other home is a strange place
till his adulthood! He was only
sensitive to his immediate environment. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been happily married
as he is today.
Again, it was only after he had come of age, after he
had interacted with other families as well as people from all walks of life
especially fellow students in various schools, colleagues in the office,
members of his spiritual family in the churches he had attended, members of
professional and social clubs, etc or those he met in various parts of Nigeria
and abroad, that he understood that there are many other families as loving as
his.
Even after surmounting the home front, be graduated to
the ‘tribe’ setting where he felt it was only his own Tribe that was the best
and no more. Indeed as a result of this
but for ‘let me give it a trial’ syndrome, he would have lost an opportunity to
live with one of the persons who contributed immensely to his success in
life. Why? Simply because his friend, as far as he was
concerned, was a ‘foreigner’ so he did not believe that anything good could
come from any other tribe other than his own!
(for full details of this: please click
here (Chapter 17 – I meet Mr. ...Tombri”). Thank God, he took ‘the risk’ and he discovered
that there are other tribes that are as good as his.
