It's All About Me The Pharisee

On most days God gives me enough grace to do one or two unselfish things. I feel everything else is all about me. My selfishness scares me; really it does. It’s difficult to see the depth of my own selfishness but easy to see it in others. Today at work we found out that the girlfriend of a member of nightcrew passed away so a condolence card was sent around. Walking into the Break Room I heard someone say that in the whole time (two or three decades) that they’d worked for The Company they’d had three or four people close to them die. They adamantly stated that they’d never received a card.

I sense that there was still hurt there for never getting consolation from The Company or from fellow employees as a group. Oddly it also seemed they were belittling the fact that a card was going to the nightcrew guy. It’s difficult to get past ourselves and love others. It’s near impossible to care more for another than for yourself. I know from experience.

That’s the tension we live in. That seems to be the point Christ makes in Matthew 18. It’s easy to make it about me. It’s easy also think I’m better than ‘those people,’ than the lady in the Break Room. Jesus spoke to that as well. He had no kind word for the Pharisee that gave thanks for not being “like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.”

You remember the rest of the story?

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Most days I’m all Pharisee. May God ever give me the grace to be humble.