Self-Love?

For a while now one of my friends--Steve from Harvestboston.net--has been thinking and writing about this concept of self-love (check it out here and here). He brings up a good question: if the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves then do we need to better understand what it means to love ourselves? I think we do. Perhaps the best thing I can do to love myself is to observe Sabbath. In taking some time out of my week having fun, relaxing, worshiping, reading, being with God and Jennie and friends, or by spending time doing whatever else would truly be rest I will better experience God as present and real. And really, who am I to think that without God's help and presence that I could truly help or bless anyone else? All blessings originate from Him.

I was reading through C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters this morning and found the following quote. (If you're unfamiliar with the premice of the Screwtape Letters then please click here first.)

To anticipate the Enemy’s [God’s] strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love–-a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our enemy; he really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.

–Screwtape (C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, letter 14, pp 71f)

For the Computer Nerds

Several months ago Jen and I purchased a new television. I also convinced my lovely wife that she'd appreciate my having a TV tuner card for my computer. (I convinced her that we would no longer need a VCR and could therefore save a bit of space during the move.) I encountered a problem though, I couldn't get the video signal from my computer to the television. Over the past month or so I've tried everything I could think of without success. But a couple nights ago it occurred to me that I haven't updated my video card drivers for quite some time. I updated and within a half hour I had everything running like I had hoped it would for so long. I was so proud of myself for finally getting it to work.

The next day I was cleaning up and it occurred to me that I really wasn't personally responsible for most of the work that made my system work. Most of the credit should really go to the programmers and computer engineers who have spent years of their lives to develop the products and software. All I did was purchase, put together, download, and install--all comparatively small tasks. However, without my having participated in the process my computer and television would still have significant communication issues. So, even though I didn't do much I still had to do something.

Isn't that like spiritual growth? All we're really responsible for is trusting, accepting, and obeying God--He's done all the real work. I think the temptation is to focus on one extreme to the exclusion of the other. For instance, Calvinism insits that God determines everything and I have not input at all whereas Arminianism focuses on my free will to either accept or reject God almost to the exclulsion of God's having any part of it. I'd claim that neither (and both) are correct. God's responsible for almost everything concerning my salvation--He's created the world and me, He's revealed who He is and what He wants, He humiliated Himself and completely rejected His rightful dignity as God and became human, He chose to sacrifice Himself just so that it'd be possible for me to be near Him. So much. However, He's left me the final decision. I can either reach out my hand or lift a finger and truly touch Him or I can turn around and ignore His very real and near presence. It's up to me. I don't have to do much, but I do have to do something. And everyday I try to consciously make that decision to reach out to God and invite Him to join me in my life as I try to join Him in His. And I think that that--practicing the presence of God--is spiritual growth.