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Monday, October 4, 2010

Selfish Rehabilitation

I’m not exactly sure why it happens, but no matter how you try to look at it, human beings have innate tendencies of a selfish nature. Even the best behaved and most mildly mannered of children want what they want and with no exceptions. It might be prompted by the want of a specific toy or a desire to watch a certain movie or play a particular game, but whatever its origin, selfishness is palpable. For some reason we are not born with the capacity to think about the other people. We don’t consider their feelings or the desires or opinions they might have, we simply try our best to get it, have it or do it our own way.

Now, as we grow up, we learn to overcome these tendencies. If we’re fortunate, we have people around us that teach us the virtues of sharing and compromise. As we grow up we learn to get along with others and actually take to heart the old adage that it is better to give than to receive. We learn to love unconditionally which breeds the gift of forgiveness and we’re able to be truly happy when someone else succeeds in their pursuits.

So, as adults, have we rehabilitated our selfish ways and become perfectly giving individuals? Unfortunately, no. While we learned to be altruistic, to a degree, there is nothing we can do to abolish the traits and qualities with which we were born. Sure, we can learn to control them, try to overcome them, but the bottom line is, if we’ve got it, we’ve got it.

So, if we’re born selfish, we’re always going to have an underlying desire to think about ourselves before we think about others. The difference, however, between childlike selfishness and adult self-interest is that as adults we use our selfish tendencies to ‘protect’ the ones we love.
That may seem a little upside down and backwards, but let’s consider what it means.

Have you ever had issues that you thought were specific to you and declared that no one else would understand what you were going through or dealing with? You kept your feelings inside and tucked them away so that no one would be affected by what you were going through. To explain what you were feeling would be too complicated and you didn’t want anyone to have to take the tyme to listen, so you store it in the back of your mind and you go on. By doing so, you committed one of the most selfish acts there is to commit. You prevented those that love you from helping.

Here’s a news flash you might have missed along the way: life is not easy! You are going to have troubles, problems and issues that you simply will not know how to handle. You’re going to have questions and situations that are beyond you and …now make sure you’re sitting down for this one, because it might pack a bit of a punch… from tyme to tyme, you’re going to need some H-E-L-P!

All humor aside, for the moment, God is perfect and He knows everything. From the name of every star in every galaxy to the number of sand grains on each and every shore, God knows it all. You can always talk to God about any and everything that is going on in your life and be assured that He will understand, but, being the all understanding God that He is, He gets that sometymes we need something tangible in front of us in order to understand what He wants us to know.

You might wonder what that has to do with our selfish tendencies. Well, a lot of tyme those tangible things that God gives us are not so much things, but people, people that God puts in our lives to help us along the way. Sometymes these people are friends who have overcome their selfish dispositions and truly have your best interests at heart. Sometymes these people are friends who are dealing with their own set of problems and need to know that there is someone out there that’s dealing with similar issues.

The truth of the matter is, God puts the right people in the right places to accomplish His will and to hide from such is selfish. To conceal your feelings and not let people help you, to not let God help you is selfish and it doesn’t do you a bit of good.

Life is a tough, two-way street, but the good thing is, God is the Master of all intersections and He knows when to change the light to put the right people in front of each other. So, if you have an issue let someone you trust help you because you never know who is going through a selfish tyme and your problem just might be someone else’s solution. ~LDK~

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