Selfishly Devoted To Me

I recently had a run in with a selfish nelly...
Dramatically, they proclaimed their ill-fated choices to have provoked disasterous consequences. Upon closer inspection, her choices, though terrible, had not really produced the disasterous outcome she proclaimed....

In other words...she was seeking negative attention...

If I need people, because I make terrible decisions, I'll get attention...

Oh.
Em.
Gee.

"People like this bother me so much!!" (thats what I mumbled to myself, wanna hear the rest?) "I mean, to make stupid decisions is one thing, to need help out of poorly chosen circumstances is another thing, but to make bad decisions, and over dramatize the consequence all in the name of seeking attention!!...Thats RIDICULOUS!"



my grumbling mumbling lasted a while until i realized...that which annoys us, is within us.

Matthew 16:25...For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

I never completely understood this verse, I'll be honest. Lately I've been sticking to my 4 main points of belief and not really holding fast to anything more complicated...

But by the time I broke the news to myself that I live the life that annoys me so much: overdramatizing, self-sabotaging for attention, being truly needy...That verse came to my head. Maybe it just means this for me, maybe it means something different for you...but I am completely selfish most of the time. Most of the time I want the conversation to be about me, most of the time I want my wishes to come true before anyone elses, most of the time I find it hard to be happy for other people when they find new happiness because I feel like mine has grown stale...
and most of the time, I'm wrong.

To me, in this stage of life, with all the people I know around me shaping my views of humanity, my day to day friends, my acquaintences, my students, my missionary friends, my ministry friends, my non christian music friends, my random internet friends...I'm realizing...To lose one's life is sure difficult. To forget about yourself for a while...to stop grumbling, to stop seeking attention, to stop searching for a soul mate, to stop begrudging the red lights, to stop boasting about your own hardship for the attention/respect/or sympathy of others...My goodness its hard.

But I'm gonna try now. And I invite you to try. Maybe even inspect your own motives, your own facebook statuses, your own daily objectives and interactions...Inspect them for self-serving lyrics. Inspect them for the selfish, inspect them for the ME...

If I could change my perspective long enough to truly see other people, and forget about me altogether, I would imagine to find that I have everything I need in abundance. And really need little attention at all.

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