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The Unselfishness of Selfishness

Imagine this scenario. You live out in the middle of nowhere with no neighbor within fifty miles. It's three AM and you hear a loud crash outside your door. You rush outside to find a crumpled car and a man badly bleeding and wounded. He needs prompt medical care that only a trained surgeon can give, but there's only you. You have no medical training whatsoever and no medical instruments with you even if you did have the proper knowledge required to heal that man. You would want to save him, but your desires wouldn't amount to anything. All you could accomplish would be to sit there with him as he died.

How many of us are in that situation of trying to help, wanting to help, but feeling next to useless because we don't honestly know what we're doing. And to become a competent surgeon would require more time and effort than we have, or that we are willing to give. It would take a minimum of eight years of medical school to even begin to think about being able to give the help required to save a life. And in all of that time, we would have to ignore several hundreds of similar disasters going on around us while we separated ourselves from the world to hide in some library, or dorm room, or medical lab and studied.

It sounds selfish, doesn't it? Walk away from the people who need help the most? How could that be of God?

Well, this too can be taken out of context. I'm not advocating the absolute and complete removal from anyone and everyone that needs your help. But yes, I do think we need to be a little more selfish with our time and energy if we want to do any real good in this world instead of just placing a Band-aid on a heart attack victim and acting like our tears are what really makes the difference. There are always people you can help at any level. A Band-aid works for a child with a skinned knee. But there are so many people that we are called to help that we are completely unable to reach because we didn't want to take the time to find out how.

I shared this with a friend and she automatically assumed that I was advocating that more people attend a college, get their degree, and get ordained as an officially licensed minister, counselor, whatever. That's the assumption that many people are going to make, but that's not it at all. Lack of worldly credentials is not the problem. The problem is that we're not seeking a deeper, more intimate walk with our Savior and Lord. We're not seeking him with all of our hearts. We're not trying to hear His voice and see Him with our own eyes.

How many of us wonder if God is still the healer, then why aren't we seeing more people healed? If God is still the maker of miracles, then where are they? The truth is that they're right where we put them. God has chosen to work through us and most of us, for various reasons, have decided not to work that way. If we decide not to go that route, then He won't make us.

There are many reasons why we won't put in the time and effort to do so. This essay is to encourage those of you who think that separating yourself in order to spend more time seeking the giver, the healer, the lover, is going to hamper your own giving, healing, and loving. It's so hard to turn a blind eye to the grieving going on around you in order to find the one who can stop their grieving. It's not selfish to allow yourself to be completely led by Him as the head of His body. But if it feels selfish to you to say no to others in order to say yes to Jesus, then by all means be selfish. You were not designed to take on the world by yourself. Jesus alone did that and it is Jesus alone who can do it now. If you truly do want to be any good to those you care about, you first need to let Him show you how.

At whatever level you know Him right now, there are tasks for you to accomplish. I'm not discouraging you from obeying in these. What I'm saying is that we are all, myself included, meant for so much more than what we are right now, yet very few of us, myself again included, are even desiring the greater part much less seeking it.

I'll cut this one short. I only wanted to encourage you as I have before to make Him your priority, not in knowing about Him, but in knowing Him personally. You can't go where He tells you to until you can hear Him. You can't follow where He leads until you can see Him. Don't take the wrong path any longer because you're trying to trying to lead others to Him without knowing where He is.

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