Rule 10 from What It Takes reads
“People in a tough spot often focus on their own problems, when the answer usually lies in fixing someone else’s.”
This is a crafty statement. Its meant to cover a number of opportunities, but it loses a little something as a rule. It could have read “Do your job and everything personal will work out.” or “Fixing your counterparts problem will fix yours.” or even “Help those who need it more than you.” Maybe it aligns with this “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
This phrase form Mark 12 is the second part of Christ summarizing rules in two statements.
30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’a] 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’b] There is no commandment greater than these.”
This of course is similar to the Golden Rule
“Treat others as you would like others to treat you.”
However, there is a hierarchy tying the two rules together and a fundamental difference in the application of the commandment vs the rule.
The commandment to love your neighbor as yourself requires that you first love the Lord your God. In everything you do, the underlying reliance on God’s definition or right and wrong set the basis for comparisons. If I want my neighbor to leave me alone, and I leave him alone, is that really Golden? Ignoring our neighbors is not right. Christ calls us to be a light on a hill and not one hidden in an enclosed room. Christ calls on us to share the joy we have in known Him as Lord and Savior with everyone. We cannot love God and ignore our neighbor.
The second part of this is that we are to love our neighbors and ourselves. We can’t love our neighbors as ourselves and not love ourselves. We must see ourselves as Christ creations, as unique and purposeful. We then must treat ourselves as the temple of Christ as He lives in us through the Holy Spirit. We then must recognize that e=our neighbor is a unique creation of God’s formed to be indwelled by God and to be treated as if they were indeed Jesus who we could show our love to by treating our neighbor as Christ, loving them, feeding them, sheltering them, visiting them, etc.
It is in this that we can have our purpose met by meeting the needs of others. Everyone has problems to be fixed. Sometimes our problems seem insurmountable. Sometimes they are. Sometimes it takes an act of God to fix our problems. Sometimes he uses our neighbors. Sometimes we are the neighbor. Be the neighbor God has called you to be.