LETTING GO OF THE EGOS

We men, or perhaps I should speak only for myself but I sincerely doubt that I do, have this seemingly innate need to want to fix everything that goes wrong or at least believe we can do so with just a little help from our friends. We think that there is simply no problem that is beyond our ability to resolve or solve. And even if we cannot resolve the issue at hand because it is beyond our own or combined capabilities, we will give it our very best shot.

If we take the time to look at some of the messes we have gotten ourselves into, we will discover that what we did sometimes was head down the road where no sane person would venture, where even angels themselves would not dare to tread. We knew this beforehand, of course, yet we foolishly placed ourselves in positions we should have avoided with the proverbial ten-foot pole. But we did not.

Perhaps this daring-do attitude stems from a macho gene that we men seem to be born with or at least somehow think we should possess even if we know deep within our head and heart that a wide yellow streak runs up and down our spines – speaking only for myself here, of course. Sometimes that yellow streak does save me from myself, but not always and not often enough.

This foolishness to act all on our own may be understandable and even forgivable, men being men, humanity itself being what it is. And what it is, and we men have no claim to it simply because we are men, women are just as guilty – what it is is our inability, certainly our unwillingness as human beings to trust in God rather than in ourselves alone.

The truth is that we will never fully place our trust in God until and unless we let go of our egos. Yes, we trust, even believe that God walks with us in our journey through this life, that the Holy Spirit guides us and that Jesus gives us the strength for the journey; but there is something in us that wants to believe that we can solve and resolve everything that comes our way. When we cannot, and it seems only when we cannot, do we hand the situation over to God.

None of this means that we do not do our very best to solve the problems that come our way, that come to every human being, problems like sickness, disease, loss of any kind: physical, mental, material. We do try to do our very best. What it does mean is that we often take too long to trust that God will help us, wait too long to put the situation in God’s hands, to acknowledge that we are not God. Doing so, we somehow believe, would be a blow to our ego.

Yet the fact is that we have to let go of our egos if we want God to do what only God can do. That does not mean that we do not do our part. God will not do for us what we can do for ourselves. It simply means that we sometimes have to realize that we cannot resolve the problem at hand without God being part of the solution from the get go. And for that to happen, we have let go of our ego from the get go.                                             

CAN’T BUY ME LOVE

In 1964 The Beatles recorded Can’t Buy Me love. It was a mega seller. When pressed by American journalists in 1966 to reveal the song's "true" meaning, Paul McCartney said, "The idea behind it was that all these material possessions are all very well, but they won't buy me what I really want." There are lots of things money can buy, and that is well and good. But there is much more that money cannot buy, as McCartney said.

We all know what money can buy. All we have to do is look around at all our possessions. We worked long and hard to pay for them; and if some of them have been given to us as gifts, those who gave them worked long and hard to earn the money to purchase them so that they could give those gifts to us. Material possessions all come at a financial cost and we know it.

So it is good that, at least every once in a while, we do take pause to admire what our hard work and dedication has enabled us to purchase. We can be justly proud of our possessions while at the same time giving thanks to God for whatever gifts and talents with which we have been blessed that enabled us to achieve what we have. Even more, we need to remember while we are rejoicing in all that we have that we will take none of it with us when we die. All possessions are temporary and temporal.

On the other hand, as McCartney’s song reminds, there are some things money cannot buy, love being first and foremost. Sometimes we have been seduced into believing that we can buy another’s love and affection if we simply bestow on the other gift after gift, the more expensive the better. What we have painfully learned in the process is that that love was not only fleeting but was not real.

The danger in our pursuit of more and more is that we can lose that which money cannot buy. Marriages have been broken apart because one or both have spent so much time climbing the corporate ladder that they have grown apart. The bigger house and better cars and all the possessions their increased income enabled them to buy did not bring them closer together. The time apart only drove them apart.

Money can’t buy love. Money can’t buy happiness. Money can’t buy peace of mind. A member of our family was so obsessed with accumulating money that he truly never found happiness and drove away all those who could bring joy and certainly could bring some love into his life. I don’t think he ever knew until the very end of his life what he was missing, if he even did then, and then it was too late.

His was and is a very sad story and it is one that, in this material world of ours, is easy to repeat. We can all fall victim, as he did, to the belief that material wealth can purchase what we truly want and need the most: the love of others. It can’t. It never could and it never will. His story and McCartney’s song are reminders to me, and I hope to you, that while it is good and important to recognize how materially blessed we are, we must, at the same time, take time to make sure we have not lost, in our pursuit and accumulation of the material, the things that are most important and that money can’t buy.

PROOF POSITIVE

Juries want proof, usually beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt, that a person is guilty before they will come to such a verdict. Yet we do not have to serve on a jury to demand proof that something is true. When there is doubt on our mind, we want that doubt erased before we will believe that what we are asked to so believe is, in fact, true. Otherwise we will hold onto our doubts.

Sometimes, of course, we will never know for certain whether what is said is actually the truth or only partially true or simple a lie. We give the person asking us to believe in him or believe her a little and sometimes a lot of slack. Life would be too complicated and we would be stuck in a rut if we had to know for certain that everything and everyone we are asked to believe is true and truthful.

Who we believe and what we believe are always open to challenge until proof is proffered. That is a fact of life. We can give deep and profound explanations and reasons why something is so and that is often enough. Not always, however. T. S. Eliot, in commenting on how we prove our faith not only to others but, more importantly, to ourselves said this: “The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.”

We can all talk a good fight and we sometimes do and we sometimes even win. There are others times when our words fool no one. There are times when they do not even fool ourselves. We know we are bluffing even if our bluff sounds so logical, so believable, so true. There are other times, however, when we have so convinced ourselves that what we claim to be true is true that we deny the truth when confronted with the facts.

As Eliot noted, simply asserting that “I am a Christian” does not make one a Christian. Simply being convinced that following Jesus is the absolute right way to live does not mean that we will in fact actually follow Jesus in the way Jesus would want us to follow. We are known and convicted not by the words that come from our mouths but the deeds that come from our lives – when confronted with the fact that we are unable or unwilling to put into practice what we profess.

That is often a hard and very harsh lesson to learn especially when it comes to our faith. Again, sometimes it is only when what we profess to believe, even knowing deep in our hearts and heads that it is true, is challenged in a real-life situation that we learn whether or not we are indeed true believers or have simply deceived ourselves because we are good at professing such a belief.

Faith is an intellectual assent to be sure. What we profess to believe has to make sense, a whole lot of sense, even if some of what we believe cannot be proved, like the existence of God, for instance. But what we believe is put to the test, is proved, by the way we do or do not live out that profession. What is important here is not so much that we prove our faith to others as we prove it to ourselves. That is accomplished by the way we live.

BELIEVING WHEN IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE

Sometimes things happen to us that make us, force us, to step back and examine our beliefs. Those events can be both good and bad. For the unbeliever, the agnostic, the atheist, the unexpected observance of the magnificence of creation can force one to stop and think: is this all by chance? Is there not, might there not be a creative intelligence behind what I am observing?

One would think one would think such thoughts. Maybe not. Perhaps the unbeliever is so secure in his ways that nothing and no one will ever convince him that there is a God, a personal God, a loving God. Perhaps the evils of this world, man’s inhumanity to man, the unjust sufferings that innocent people undergo when an all-powerful God could put a stop to it – perhaps that is what inures some to any thought of God, any temptation to actually believe in God.

While the wonders and goodness of creation may not convince a person to think thoughts of a personal God, certainly the opposite is true. When one is suffering unjustly, when nature wreaks havoc on the innocent, when it seems that the world is going to hell in a handcart, one’s belief in God can be sorely tried and tested. In fact, if it is not tested, one has to wonder how strongly one’s faith really is.

When World War II ended in Europe and the Allies were combing through the rubble of what was left in the war zones, they came across an inscription on the wall of a cellar in Cologne where Jews hid from the Nazis. It read: “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when he is silent.” If anyone’s, any people’s faith was tested, it was that of the Jewish people during that war.

Perhaps there were some, but I have never read or heard an interview where the Jewish people gave up their deep faith in God because of what happened to them during that War. Of course, that is also the story of the Old Testament. The faith of the people was tried and tested over and over again, And while they moaned and groaned to God when things were not going well – as we all do, they never lost their faith, never believed that God had abandoned them much less that God never existed in the first place, such was their faith.

The reality is that it is easy to point out examples of people who remained steadfast in their belief and trust in God while, at the same time, also had serious doubts as to why they should keep believing. The truth is that everyone’s faith is tested, sometimes very seriously tested. Only those who have immunized themselves to the horrors of life in this world ask no questions.

We are not of that sort. Thus, there are times in our lives when the suffering of others and especially when our own suffering forces us to ask the God question. Sometimes we wonder why we still believe when what is happening screams at us that there is no God. But we hold on, thanks be to…well, thanks be to God!