Do you ever have one of those days
where you are walking around thinking that you just look awesome?
Your internal mirror shows this picture of a girl with that perfectly
effortless messy hair, glowing complexion and perfect outfit. But
then you get home and look in a mirror, or catch your reflection in a
window, or worse, see a picture several days later, and realize your
hair is actually doing some weird crinkly thing, there is a pimple on
your chin the size of Texas, and oh look, your t-shirt has been on
inside out all day. For me, there is no worse blow to my self esteem
than having my internal mirror and the the real mirror show me two
different pictures; and the more exaggerated my imagination improves
the reality of my image, the worse the reality check feels when it
plunges your self esteem level into the ground.
Have you ever had a day like that? Its
not a good feeling is it? The other day though, I experienced this
same feeling in a spiritual way. My own internal compass has been
telling me one thing, and the reality has turned out to be
drastically and painfully different.
Perceived grievances may be one of the
most dangerous attacks on a relationship. When your selfishness and
insistence on your own way causes you to see the other person as
purposefully keeping you from what you want, it causes you to feel
like the victim while projecting your own selfishness on the other
person. Lately, I have been masking my own selfishness in this idea
that I am actually being incredibly selfless. I imagine that by
giving up the things I want, that I am being this great martyr for
all the things that I deserve. But that mentality was actually one of
the most selfish things that I could have been thinking. Who am I to
think that I deserve anything? Why is it that I am the one who thinks
I have to be right, that I am the one who ought to have my way, have
things that I want? But I have been pushing down this feeling of
victimization and letting it build up and up until a wake up call
brought my “selfless” ego crashing down.
That wake up call came in the pained
look on the face of the man I love when I so maturely confronted him
about his selfishness. The
more I talked and the more pained he looked, the louder this little
voice got in my head, 'are you sure that you aren't the selfish one,
Lex?' All of a sudden, it was like this movie reel started playing in
my head, watching all these situations that I had previously seen as
times when I had been hurt or ignored or blown off, and saw them not
only from the other side, but from an objective, or even heavenward,
perspective and the shattering realization was that I had been the
perpetrator of pain, and not the victim of it. I had been the one
passive-aggressively giving up one thing to get another, playing on
the guilt and selflessness of another, and ultimately feeling more
and more like a martyr when in fact, I hadn't sacrificed anything.
When that mirror got switched on me, and I finally saw how I was
truly acting and not how I thought I was acting, I was devastated. I
had been walking around thinking that there was this halo over my
head, when in fact I had dropped my halo on the ground and stomped on
it a few months back.
I
never realized the connection to selfishness and pride before this
experience. Selfishness, though, is only thinking that you are the
most deserving person in whatever given situation, and that my
friends, is pride. My ability to always think that I know best,that I
have all the answers, and that I should get what I want, is a nasty
concoction of selfishness and pride, and it is seriously damaging to
relationships. That pride has also gotten in the way of me realizing
that there is something I need to change. It made me turn all my
selfishness onto someone else, because it takes so much less humility
to point the finger at some one else than to admit that you are the
one at fault. But the longer you allow that to be your mentality the
more its going to hurt when you realize that you are the one causing
problems, and it might be too late to fix them at that point.
The
higher you think you are, the more painful the fall back to reality,
no?
In 1
Corinthians 13, there is this one little gem in the packed passage,
that I always seem to miss, and when I see it again, it always
astounds me. Love does not insist on its own way.
Love is not only not selfish, it is truly selfless and truly humble.
Love does not think it knows the right way to do things and insist
that it is always right, love does not think that it knows all the
answers, that it deserves to have the things it wants. Love is
gracious, and love does not hold on to that feeling of being wronged,
especially when it hasn't been wronged. In love, there is no
grievance, perceived or otherwise. And if I can learn to act like
that, maybe I will finally understand true selflessness.
