Jr. Highers & Personal Rights

Wednesday night at small group I began getting frustrated with my girls as they gleefully wrote notes to the incoming 6th grade girls and talked with one another. It wasn't the writing itself nor the topics that were so irritating, as the fact that 1) they constantly spoke over each other, and 2) they spoke over what someone was saying to *make sure* they got in information about themselves. Even if interrupting was somehow respectful, they did not interrupt to compliment, encourage, or add to the other's story - they simply had to bring the conversation back to themselves. Perhaps it's incorrect to post this in blogland (though I pointed it out to them that night), but it got under my skin and, eventually, made me ponder if this was a plank in my own eye.

I then began re-reading Lewis' "Great Divorce," as it's the final text I'm teaching in my Brit. Lit class. The first ghost (the general premise of the story is people from Hell travel in a bus to the fields before Heaven - Elysium fields, if you're a Greek Myth buff - and meet Saints who have come to greet them and convince them to enter Heaven and leave Hell behind. Yet each of these Hell occupants, "ghosts," is chained to a certain sin, so the text serves as an exploration of the sins that condemn us to Hell vs. the right Christian perspective/reaction to the same sins). Anyway, the first ghost is obsessed with his rights. He meets a Saint who was a murderer on Earth, but was forgiven and redeemed from that sin before he died and went to Heaven. The "personal rights ghost" refuses to accept a world of mercy, instead insisting on getting his due. He says, "I don't want charity. I'm a decent man, and if I had my rights I'd have been here long ago." (Of course he has gotten his due for being a 'decent man' - Hell). Yet it was the Saint's response that struck me.:

"I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder...that was how everything began."

I realized that, just like my girls and just like this Ghost, I always look at myself. I literally catch reflections as I walk by windows to make sure my hair looks okay. I over-analyze situations and people in terms of their relationship to *me* and what they think about *me.* Perhaps I'm more polished in terms of social convention and conversation, but the same heart is in me that wants to be noticed, wants to be appreciated, wants to be heard and valued. So the plank is in my own eye, and I apologize to my girls for being angry with them. Though, I encourage each to "give themselves up" and seek to serve others in ALL things, including conversation. I pray that God will turn me into a person who no longer looks at myself at all - as SKH might say - learns to look out windows instead of into mirrors.