How Quaint

A Story by Manuel Samo

Awakening unconditional love in the hearts of believers

Millions of Christians, in harmony with their faith, hope for the salvation of the entire human race. Yet, chagrined, look how few of them, one in every thousand, sincerely and honestly joins the cause. Although I be the author, I must embarrassingly accept the truth that I am of no exemption.

Incongruous to our faith, we pass souls by, each and every day, interacting with them on hourly basis, without the slightest of care or merely an interest in them;

The drug addict prowling our streets receives instant, defenceless and ruthless judgements from the sacred courts of our hearts,

The lady purported to be a hooker or the one identified as promiscuous is repelled by disapproving non-verbal expressions of contempt and pity from our mannerisms and demeanour.

The idle, jobless and wretched youngster is despised and looked down upon with so much disdain that is nearly palpable.

The next door neighbour who decides to rest at home or perform their important household chores every Sunday receives hostile and demeaning glances from us on our way to God’s House.

Those of different beliefs or no faith in God at all are simply tagged miserable and hopeless forgetting the scandal of grace, unmerited favour or even the plausibility of being used by the Maker as a mirror to reflect His unconditional and radical love and as a window for His glorious light to shine through to reach them.

Oh see the innumerable “holier than thou” Christians who have out rightly condemned the cab driver when he tuned the radio to a secular music or the band of reckless idlers who gather at the pub down the street to drink and gamble.

Yet, the Master whom we ardently follow and strive to emulate called an adulteress lady to himself, saying to her affectionately, “….I do not condemn you….” Years a back, during the era when he lived, he was seen in the company of the boozers, the hopeless and the fraudsters. Even at the cusp of his doom he redeemed the wasted life of a scoundrel, a villain, a criminal. As it were, one who did not deserve even the “dirtiest” part of heaven.

I strongly believe that by doing this He proves to us that the glorious kingdom will not comprise only saints but all those who screwed up one way or the other but later accepted the pardon granted by His blood.

If that be the case, which it is, then a change must be abruptly effected in our selfish hearts. We need the love of God to be shared abroad in our hearts and manifested in our daily deeds. “…By so doing all men may know that you are my disciples”.

Of how many of us can it be said that as we pass people in the streets we pray for them, or that as we enter a home or a church we remember the congregation in prayer to God? The best answer, most certainly is that we simply do forget.

The explanation of our thoughtlessness and forgetfulness as E.M Bounds rightly puts it lies in the fact that prayer, with so many of us, is simply a form of selfishness; it means asking for something for ourselves- that and nothing more.

Let the pure truth be told without any adulterations. Among our churches and among the denominations we realize self-made rifts and breaches that have torn the universal church of Christ apart. We tend to disparage other denominations and for that matter the possibility of saying a word of prayer to God that souls ultimately would be saved there remains a beclouded figment of the imagination.

Sir Thomas Brown, the beloved physician who lived in Norwich, England, in 1605, and was the author of a very remarkable book of wide circulation, Religio Medicio, scribbled in a journal found among his private papers after his death,

“….I purpose to take occasion of praying upon the sight of any church that I may pass, that God may be worshipped there in spirit, and that souls may be saved there. I purpose to pray daily for my sick patients and for the patients of other physicians; to say at my entrance to any home, ‘May the peace of God abide here’; to pray, after hearing a sermon, for a blessing on God’s truth and upon the messenger; to bless God, upon the sight of a beautiful person, for His creatures, and to pray for the beauty of such a soul, that God may enrich her with inward graces, and that the outward and inward may correspond; to pray God, upon the sight of a deformed person, to give them wholeness of soul, and by and by to give them the beauty of the resurrection”

I humbly pray that such an attitude and prayer which parallels God’s will for humanity will be found with all believers so that the Almighty One will be permitted to encounter unsaved souls miraculously on their way to Damascus.

© 2013 Manuel Samo

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Daniel Sala

Hi there, you have a heathen (!) athiest before you, no matter, we are all God's creatures, me included in an abstract, metaphorical way.
Your writing is lucid, flows well, and is a pleasure to read on more than one level; you express observations of all humans' everyday hypocrisies and fears turned into labelling and hurting others, or ignoring the needs of their fellow humans. A nice piece of well-composed prose which gives one something to reflect upon.