What does being too nice to ourselves look like? Vanity, selfishness, rudeness, and a lack of self control. That’s quite the collection, isn’t it? Let’s get into it.
One of the most self absorbed and prideful things we can think is “Everyone is looking at me,” and almost everyone does it. Any questions like “What does everyone think about me?” is vanity. What’s a healthier thought? “Is everyone okay? Does anyone need anything even a smile?” By putting others before ourselves we can reduce anxiety for ourselves and others. Where love helps, vanity always makes things worse. It’s the same as any time we feel low and can use encouragement, the best thing we can do is offer encouragement to someone else. We are encouraged, as we encourage others. By looking beyond ourselves, we can find what we need. As a Christian, once in awhile I should also be asking: “Can people see God through me?” or “What do people think of God because of me?” As His representative, I need to remember it’s not about me, and hopefully that can inspire me to be better… sometimes it does. I need to work on that more. As Darth Vader would say: “The vanity is strong with this one,” or something like that.
What’s the best evidence for how selfish we’ve become as a society? Good question. When I do pre-marriage counselling I ask a couple, “In your vows you’re promising ‘For better and for worse’; what does ‘For better’ look like? When are you at your happiest together? Couples getting married always say something like “We’re happy as long as we’re together.” Ahhh. If I ask this to the couples I see for marriage therapy? Yea, it’s a very different answer. In pre-marriage counselling I then ask, “And what’s the line between ‘For worse’ and ‘For divorce’?” The typical answer is cheating. I then point out, as a therapist I’ve seen many couples end up thriving after one of them has had an affair if they both humbly pursue re-establishing their relationship together. Next, I point out: “The main reason I see for divorce as a therapist is simply someone’s not happy.” That’s it. We have an epidemic of divorce and it’s mostly because someone isn’t happy. Sure, there are exceptions, and sometimes people should get divorced, but most families are torn apart and debts are accumulated (divorce is incredibly expensive) because at the root of the situation is someone wasn’t happy. Not being happy typically leads to suppressing and/or resentment and wandering eyes and hearts. Getting divorced because we’re not happy is basically saying: “My happiness is more important than the greater good of the family and the community,” because the world is better (and there’s less of a housing shortage) when we can make marriages work. Unfortunately, we live in a world that encourages everyone to pursue what makes them happy, which is the same as encouraging us to be too nice to ourselves: “You deserve [blank].” Unfortunately, this is a very dangerous lie.
As far as rudeness goes, being too nice to ourselves means we don’t push ourselves to be better. We don’t push ourselves to say hi to strangers, check in with friends we haven’t seen in awhile, or to try harder to be kind to our families after a long day, which ties into the next category, a lack of self control.
Most of the time, being too nice to ourselves looks a lot like a lack of self control and doing things that hurt ourselves: “It’s been a tough day; I should have an extra cookie.” “It’s been a good day; I’m going to treat myself to a cookie.” “Today’s been normal, but I need a pick-me-up. I’m going to have an extra cookie.” Replace the word cookie (my addiction) with any addiction choice like drinking, flirting, sleeping in, calling in sick, and playing on our phone, and that’s how addictions grow and flourish – we’re too nice to ourselves. The problem is when we’re too nice to our present self, we typically screw over our future self. It’s a lot easier saying no to something before you’ve tried it. I remember a young person in my youth group saying he tried cocaine and it was great. He was surprised when my response was, “Obviously. Why do you think people end up losing everything for it?” Why try something that will tempt you to do it more in the future. I dated my wife for nine years and was married at 35, and we were able to wait until marriage for sex. If my wife tragically dies one day, when I start dating again, it’ll be way harder to wait until marriage because I’ll know what I’m missing. Thus, we need to be careful what we let ourselves do once because it’s a lot more likely for us to do it twice. To make it worse, our world encourages us to do what “feels” like the best for us even at the expense of others. But where does this come from? It could be a spinoff of survival of the fittest, but I think it’s deeper than that.
Just over 2000 years ago Jesus changed the world with His message: You matter. You are a child of God. Even if the world claims you are an outcast like a widow, an orphan, someone with a disease or handicap, or even if you end up in prison, you are loved by the one who created you. In the Roman world where life was cheap and weakness could mean death, that message was revolutionary. Jesus essentially flipped what people knew on its head whether it was the survival of the fittest mentality or the righteous are superior. Jesus taught that the first shall be last and blessed are the poor and those who mourn. It was a message of hope… unless you liked killing people, you were rich, and/or you felt you were morally superior because then His message put your lifestyle in jeopardy and was worthy of death (apparently). And what have we done to this beautiful message? We messed it up because we want to justify being too nice to ourselves.
Side Thought: The recent American election opened my eyes to have a better understanding of how controversial Jesus was when He was alive. I’m not saying Trump is like Jesus as a person (they clearly have their differences… even beyond their hair choices), but it’s interesting to see how much some people love Trump while others absolutely despise him to the point of their being an article in the newspaper with tips for dealing with the mental health damage of him winning – what? It’s an election. He’s not marrying your mom (although that would have its fun benefits). Whatever you think about him, Trump as a man and leader has a way of causing serious division. As a Christian my main goal should be praying for him and his team, but I find it interesting how careful I have to be when mentioning him around others. There is so much passion for and against him, it’s nothing like I’ve experienced before. In sports you have teams you “hate,” but it makes for fun teasing or in the 90s when the Backstreet Boys were popular, I could say, “I’ve been to three concerts,” (true story), and people were like “You’re weird,” but they didn’t really care. They’d make fun of me and we’d laugh. There’s no laughing in this situation. Being on the wrong side with your opinion about Trump can be scary because it can change how others see you, yet Jesus would have taken this to an even greater level. We tend to see Jesus as this simple, good man, who made everyone happy with His miracles, but that was far from the case. Some people believed His extreme claim that He was the Messiah while others haaaaaaaattttted him, and I don’t mean “It’s not right a convicted felon can become President.” Groups formed with the sole intention of coming up with ways to kill him. It wasn’t some dude with a sniper rifle okay with being taken out by a security team. People collectively hated Jesus so much it climaxed with a crowd cheering “Crucify him!” At least chanting “Off with their head!” or “Let him hang!” was cheering for a quick death. To want Jesus to be crucified was saying “We want Him to be naked and hung on a cross in order for him to die a slow, humiliating, and agonizing death we publicly watch over most of the day.” It’s believed Jesus hung on the cross for six hours (symbolic of the story of Creation in Genesis), which meant from 9am to 3pm he would have to push on the nails hammered into his feet and hands to lift himself up enough to breathe, but that also meant scraping his bludgeoned, whipped back against the rough wooden cross. Eventually a body can’t do it anymore and you die of suffocation (i.e. the breath of God was taken from Him). I’m afraid of drowning, which is suffocation in less than a minute. Six hours of suffocation is insane! Not only that, the people who hated Him were there the whole time mocking him while He hung dying – that’s messed up. When I say Jesus was hated, I don’t think we can fully comprehend how much he was hated because even cyber bullies prefer not to see how the burger was made let alone watch a human be brutally murdered. At the same time, I also don’t think we can grasp how powerful His message of love was to people who had never been told they were worth loving: You matter.
The religious elite used the Romans to kill Jesus, but we use our selfishness and pride to kill His message. We took something beautiful and messed it up. Why? Because that’s what people are good at – messing things up. “Hey, Chad, why do you believe in a God?” (me) “Because people suck.” Since I find people are inherently selfish, there has to be a God because otherwise how could humanity create anything like morality and charity? We need a reason to limit our self focus and consider how others are doing. We need something good and holy to teach us how to be good and holy. We need to be taught things like the Golden Rule because otherwise selfishness will win. Selfishness is easier. Selfishness feels better… at first.
Even when we’re given healthy messages like “Love your neighbor,” we twist it to end up with sayings like “There’s no room for hate here.” Um, that’s ironically a message of hate – genius. Our Western culture promotes a message of “tolerance” for all. Um, that’s not very inspiring. Tolerance? That sounds a lot like “Suppress your feelings if you don’t like something.” This follows the message I often hear in my head from others: “You’re allowed your opinion… if it’s the same as mine.” A lot of “no room for hate” thinkers are very close minded, but we accuse others of what we do ourselves. Ironically, the group that first preached love and equality, Christians, is typically hated by those who preach the modern godless message of equity. How does that work? (equity teachers) “We believe in equality… unless you’re from the group that helped build the foundation of our country. We sing ‘God keep our land…’ but you’ll be fired if you talk about believing in Him.” Doesn’t that seem foolish? But what can you expect from a culture that promotes statements like “You do you,” rather than considering what’s the greater good or how they can be a benefit to the community? Our world has twisted Jesus’ beautiful message of we all matter into “You matter… more than anyone else.” Instead of Jesus’ teaching of serving one another, which encourages love and community, our culture encourages entitlement and getting a label in order to use it to demand special treatment – it’s tragic. Fortunately, there’s always hope we can return to the healthy message: You matter; I matter; we all matter because we are all a child of God.
This week may you consider what it means to be too nice to yourself.
Rev. Chad David, ChadDavid.ca, learning to love dumb people (like me)
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