The world is bigger than I

I have realized lately how narrow my vision has been. I think back to my years of "service" in the church and have to admit I had certain ulterior motives to my actions.

I call it a "high-school mentality". That is, worrying primarily about who likes me and who doesn't and how I can get more people, or more important people, to like me. It's all about me me me. It's about how much stuff I have and how much stuff I have that is better stuff than the people around me, so people will like me more. It's about dressing acceptably and behaving a appropriately for the company I keep, so that people won't think less of me.

I understand this is the result of certain life experiences. I will measure my worth by the standards that people around me measure my worth.

In high school, the obsession with "value" manifests itself in things like cars, clothes, where you live, what kind of vacations you take, how attractive you are (attractiveness being arbitrarily decided by the upper social echelon) and what kind of fashion you wear. For girls, even what brands of makeup you use.

In the church this manifests differently, but is still a different facet of the same animal. The "vaule" does come up as financial - how much you "give" to the church and to support different "ministries". But it also shows as the measure of your "spiritual gifts", and in many churches there is also wealth in the measure of personal relationships you might have with "leadership". I'm not saying these things are in and of themselves are wrong, but to place value in them is wrong.

I served in the church in order to be recognized as possessing the gift of "service". I was involved in several ministries, quite highly involved in some. Was my motivation entirely pure? Not really. It was about recognition and having a sense of pride for it. It was still about placing my value in my spiritual "wealth". I was performing so I can be told how "gifted" I was. This doesn't mean I "faked" my gifts, but I made effort to draw attention to them so that others would notice how "gifted" I was.

That's pretty nasty if you ask me, and pretty tough to admit. But if I'm really honest, even my humility was, in essence, exaggerated...working to act more humble so people would praise my humility.

None of this was conscious at the time. I never realized until this last year or so how contrived my ministry years really were. However, in the last 18 months since I left, I have been unable to rely on my "giftedness" as a measure of my worth. I have had to look for new ways to feel value. I know there is a fine line between self-deprecation and conceitedness, and I know that some say Christians should not be concerned for their "value", yet I don’t believe God either wants us to feel badly about ourselves. So we do have to find value, and that's not the problem. The problem is where we go looking for it.

A good friend just e-mailed me and said something I really liked:

"I think selfishness isn't so much about not caring for others as it is not knowing how to love yourself. So we go through life trying to fill the emptiness with this or that, which can turn into an obsession because were seeking outside ourselves something that needs to take place on the inside. If we do not value ourselves, no amount of reassurance outside will be enough. We can't receive it because we don't believe it for ourselves."

That's really what it comes down to. Most of us were at our most selfish when we were in high school. We were like little universes, believing everything revolves around us, concentrating on the amount of gravity we could produce and how many people we could attract to revolve around us. I think most of us grow out of that in stages, maybe starting with college and having to enter the working world, having to answer to someone other than ourselves or our parents. Then we might marry and have to answer to someone else still. Then we have children and I don't need to even explain how that changes the balance. These examples are taken from my personal experience. I understand that everyone's outgrowing of selfishness takes a different path, yet I think for most of us it comes in stages, one step at a time.

So how do we begin to believe it for ouselves? I think as we learn to give up our selfishness, we will begin to see the light of our value as a human being. If we don't learn that the world is bigger than ourselves, we won't learn to love ourselves. Trying to find ways to feel good about ourselves won't ever work. Taking classes or praying for healing may not work. In fact, I don't know anyone it HAS worked for.

We only feel good inside ourselves in the measure of how much we think about others outside ourselves. This is different than seeking our value in the things we can gain or posess outside of ourselves. Instead it is seeking our value in the things we can GIVE AWAY outside of ourselves.

Maybe this is something Jesus wanted us to learn. That giving away (our money, our time, our effort, our compassion) isn't a duty that we must fill as Christians, and it isn't done so that others can recognize us. It's not something Jesus said to do just because it's "good for us" to learn to be selfless. It isn't because He wants us to be more like Him.

Instead, it's Jesus saying it's the only way we will learn how important we are to Him. When we give freely of ourselves, we will find our value. He made us to meet the needs of others, when we are not doing that to our full potential, we will feel that something is missing in life. When we are free with ourselves, meeting needs as we see needs we can meet, we find that there is more to life than our own satisfaction. We find that we are fulfilling our purpose and we realize we love to love.

We do need to be careful that we don't measure people's value by the amount they "serve others". We must only serve in the capacity that the Spirit guides us. For some that may be highly effective ministry with the homeless. For some it means overseas missions. But for most of us, our sphere of love begins with our families, our spouses and children. Then it expands to our friends and community, then to those we don't know and would not normally come in contact with.

Look for ways you can bless people beyond what they would normally expect of you. That's all there is to it.

Last night my husband and kids went to the video store to rent a couple of movies and a video game. I guess the cost of video game rental just increased like 50 cents, and the guy who was in line in front of them had just brought exactly enough money to pay for a game rental at the old price. So my husband offered to pay the difference for him, so he could get his game. When my husband's turn came up, the cashier saw that we had a late fee on our account (we had loaned a rented movie to a friend who had returned it late) and she said because my husband did something nice for the guy before him, she would be nice and waive the late fee.

This not only was a lesson for my kids about seeing a need we could fill and filling it. I understand not everyone would have had the extra 50 cents, but we did and we could spare it. So we could fill that need.

My kids got a great sense of love from this experience, but they also learned that this goes both ways. The cashier saw a need she could fill, so she filled it. She didn't have to waive our late fee, we wouldn't have asked or expected her to do that. It was a legitimate charge on our account, and we were responsible for it. But she was in a place where she could do something nice for us, so she did.

It's that simple.