Johnny lingo was the name of a short film shown in Sunday School classes many years ago. Now a new version has been made on video. The new version was recently played again for us during a church meeting. I don’t believe that I will ever forget that very important message of being an eight cow woman, an eight cow man, an eight cow daughter or son. Anybody who is treated like they have value will usually behave as one who has value. We are all Mahannas to one extent or another. Mahanna was the browbeaten daughter of a very cruel and selfish father. Johnny Lingo was portrayed as a very shrewd and important trader in the islands. When it came time for him to select a wife, he chose Mahanna. Over the years, Johnny saw something in Mahanna that no one else was able to see. When it came time for Johnny Lingo to negotiate with Mahanna’s Father for her hand in marriage, the village gossipers thought for sure that Johnny Lingo would try to get Mahanna for as little as possible, maybe one or two cows at the very most. When it came time for the negotiation, Johnny sat down with Mahanna’s father with all the villagers standing by, and Johnny offered 8 cows for Mahanna’s hand in marriage. The villagers could not believe their ears and said he could probably have gotten her for nothing. No other woman on the island had been given in marriage for that many cows. The next morning here came Johnny Lingo driving eight cows before him for Mahanna. When Mahanna realized that Johnny Lingo was actually paying eight cows for her, she began to realize that she was more than a nothing as her father would have had her believe. To Johnny Lingo she had great value and began to behave accordingly. She was soon transformed into the most beautiful woman on the island. She became what Johnny Lingo knew she was all along, an eight cow woman.
Children brought up in an environment where they are demeaned and treated as if they were more trouble than they are worth will often carry that very feeling of low self worth into life and often have very unproductive lives. Another very important church film produced many years ago was called “The Cypher in the Snow.” It was about a young grade school boy whose father had passed away and the mother remarried. The stepfather treated him as Mahanna was treated, and his school grades started going down, and he started to fail health-wise. Finally, one day, he just asked the bus driver to let him off because he didn’t feel well, and he fell into a snowbank beside the road and died. There has to be a reason to live, to want to succeed, to be healthy, to want to try to “become,” and when our reason is taken from us, nothing really matters. We all, every human being needs to be valued, and that value has to be demonstrated in obvious ways so that there is no question in the person’s mind that they count.
Love is the key. By that I mean demonstrated love on a frequent basis. How can another not know they are loved and know of their value when they are hugged and kissed and cared for? Even told how much the other cares about them and of their importance to them on a daily basis. It can be difficult for a person brought up in a home where love has not been demonstrated for them to be transformed into a loving and caring person, one who is able to express the kind of love described above. It is hard for them to all of a sudden begin to behave in such a way. It is hard, but many people are transformed by a spouse who was brought up in such a way.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross expressed a different point of view, one where the loving and sensitivity is born out of suffering and struggle. She stated: “The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These people have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” That type of hardship experienced, much like the refiner’s fire, will make some as she stated sensitive, but I fear that that kind of harshness could just as well turn one the other direction to where they become insensitive. There is absolutely no substitute for a loving relationship, whether it be spouse to spouse, father or mother to child. It is the most important relationship that can ever be formed. I believe Ann Landers described it best when she said, “Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty thru good times and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses. Love is content with the present; it hopes for the future and it doesn’t brood over the past. It is the day-in and out chronicles of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and common goals. If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things that you lack. If you don’t have it, no matter what else is there, it isn’t enough.”
Johnny Lingo and Mahanna had forged such a relationship that made Mahanna grow and bloom into an altogether different person than she was being described at the beginning when she was in the abusive environment of her family.
Soren Kierkegaard said, “To be cheated out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.”
May God bless us all to be able to develop for ourselves the Johnny Lingo Philosophy, the philosophy of valuing people and treating all those in our lives as eight cow people. You may not think you have the capacity to do so, but you do. We were born with it.