Question

My friend recently posed this question to me: 

If I had to choose to follow one rule in life, would it be "spirit of the law" or "letter of the law"?

     What a great question! My personal answer would be the spirit of the law, but I do believe that the "letter of the law" (the commandments, rules and guidelines we're given) are put in place to help us keep the spirit of law. So I wouldn't say that I would do without those either.
     On Sunday I watched a movie called States of Grace with a couple of friends. To get a quick idea, it's a church video on missionary work. 2 missionaries in San Diego are tracting daily; one of them has 3 weeks left to get home, while the other one is obviously a "greenie". Although church movies are fairly cheesy, this one broke the mold. I would highly recommend it! Anyways, in one part of the movie there is a hobo living behind a dumpster and the missionaries see that this man is sick. The older companion wants to help him so he thinks to take the hobo back to their apartment until he is healthy again. The younger companion wants to help, but he also knows that they can't have anyone spend the night in their apartment. So the older companion says "Look, you can either keep the commandments, or you can break the rules". Meaning, I think, you can either love your neighbor or you can ensure no one stays overnight in the apartment.
     Faced in that situation, what would I have done? I've thought about this since the first time I saw the movie almost a year ago and I still have no answer. How often in life are we faced with that same type of problem? Follow the Spirit of the Law, or follow the Letter of the Law?
     I hope that it doesn't sound like I have no intention on following the rules and commandments we've been given; I firmly do believe that by following those things we can better become people and more Christ-like. My brain was just sparked by this wonderful question and I had to spill out my thoughts onto some writing form.