Selfishness

There is a certain state of mood that I enter that makes me immediately think "I've got to go blog", which can occur even if I have absolutely nothing in mind.

But I have something in mind tonight.

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Tonight I was struck by the incredibly selfishness of people, including and especially myself. This is not a concept unexperienced or unfamiliar to me, yet never before have I been struck by its (selfishness) pervasiveness and unavoidable-ness. (OK, strange word usage, fine.) There isn't particularly much to this experience, as nothing incredible happened to me or around me; I merely had conversations with both old friends and newer friends and was left with an intense sadness over the futility of the actions of man, of people, that with each act that we take we hope to serve ourselves.

As often as I think about how I should not do things for myself and should instead do things for God, I find myself doing exactly the opposite. It is not the case of taking two steps forward and one step back, or even of taking one forward and two back. Each step is backward, and each step is a leap, a bound, a tumble. It is as Paul says in Romans 7 about his flesh, and yet, how is it that I who commands my flesh is not also my flesh itself? If I am not commanding my flesh, then who?

And as much as I know my own miscues and stutters, it is not just me. It is sinners; me, you, everybody. I'm not even talking about any particular sin or mistake. I'm talking about betrayal of God on a basic level, where every single fiber of a man's being yearns for Him yet at the same time makes every effort to run from Him. This is a multitude of nights sadly looking at my Bible on my nightstand there unopened, again, before turning out the lights. And yet, it is something that lies deeper than that routine refusal, something that constitutes our very core, something that continually leaves us with a feeling of guilt despite forgiveness; a feeling that we are better, a feeling that we should be something, a feeling that we deserve something. For how else could a man feel guilt for a failure that is already forgiven?

If I have found myself unable to serve God, I have found myself that much more incapable of serving my fellow man. How often have I seen opportunities to serve and instead preoccupied myself with other demands, justified what should not, could never be justified? And even when I do decide to act, I am ever relieved to find the work easy, or that my subsequent gain in self-worth outweighed the loss of time and effort spent - a net gain for me. Society tell us that merely showing the intent to help others is sufficient, that being motivated in the "right" direction is "right". Yet the only one really benefiting from this attitude is the one who has gone through the motions if not the successes for the sake of meeting a standard.

The development of this line of thinking in me has only led to an ever increasing respect and adoration of Jesus. Having seen my own failing compassion for suffering and inability to remain faithful to fairly simple concepts, it is incredible to me on a daily basis to think of a man having the attitude and actions that Jesus had. Many instances are commonly cited, but the most poignant to me is in Luke 19 when Jesus is said to have wept over the city of Jerusalem as he drew near because he knew that what he would do for the people would not be enough to save them because the choice to be saved would have to be made by themselves each individually. Think on this though: this man wept because he could not do any more than what he would eventually do: give his life for them.

Yet we who know of this man take our individual daily steps backward, leave our Bibles closed when they demand to be open, think about how we ought to be serving God instead of actually serving God. And the sadness is not in these actions themselves, but rather due to the continual denial of the Lord via the demands of selfishness and entitlement and preoccupation with ourselves.

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Sometimes the words that I manage to finally put down here are not the ones that I had imagined an hour or two ago when I began. Yet when I finish here, I am mostly satisfied with what has been slowly worked out. This seems to me to be some sort of strange process whereby my thoughts which are fraught with feeling and emotion are conformed to the output of my limited language skills and the hardness of words. It is very much like that particle which, in order to be located, by design is altered. Thus this writing process is part of the maturation process of my very thinking.