day ten: selfless?

I am a selfish person. I know I am. Even as I am trying to “deny self” during this season of Lent, in the back of my mind, somewhere in a dark corner where I hope people don’t poke around, is selfishness. We all have it to some extent. And, in many cases (at least in my life), it gets camouflaged in “selfless” acts.

Of course, there is a selflessness in volunteering, giving, sharing, etc. But rarely are our motives pure. These things make us feel good. In fact, we sometimes do them to make us feel better about ourselves, to mask how selfish we are in every other aspect of our lives. But it still feels good and feeds my ego to get a pat on the back or a note of thanks for my good deeds.

Part of my journey this Lent is learning how to give without the get. If I don’t get anything for my giving—not one smile, acknowledgement, thanks, or warm fuzzy feeling—hopefully I can learn how to give up my selfishness, to turn my focus outward so much that I become self-less.

Today was a learning experience in this journey.

Dozens of senior adults gathered at our church this morning to hear from professionals about how to deal with the challenges of aging, and we had agreed to help with refreshments for today’s culinary care. We bought frozen mini-quiches from Costco, popped them in the oven for 15 minutes, and set them out in a line of refreshments.

It was easy, convenient, and required virtually no sacrifice of time or money on our part. Hardly anyone realized that we had even brought food. It didn’t really make me feel good to have done it, which bothered me.

But what bothered me even more was the fact that I realized I craved the acknowledgement (or at least the good feeling I got) for giving and serving. I had missed the point.

Lent is not about making ourselves feel good for giving (or giving up something). We don’t perform "selfless" acts in order to think more highly of ourselves. We do it to break ourselves of the desire for that kind of self-affirmation.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to perform a completely selfless act. Is there even such a thing? I don't think so, but that doesn't diminish the good that can we can do when we try to focus less on self and more on others, even when we don't succeed.

day two: baby steps

Day two, and I'm already wondering what I've gotten myself into.

Suzy and her mom spent the entire morning at Costco, stocking up for what we'll be doing these next couple of weeks. They brought home boxes and boxes of food, now stacked up in the back room of our house. Then...*drumroll*... she showed me the receipt.

Sweet. Lord.

Hundreds of dollars later, and we didn't even get everything that we would need for just the first couple weeks of Lent! (By the way, I'm going to keep track of how much we spend on this 40 day project and post the total at the end.) And I still had to stop by the grocery store to pick up goods to donate to the Eastside Crisis Center, today's culinary care recipient.

But what to donate? This blog is gonna get really old really quickly if every other day you read, "...And so we took some more canned goods to yet another food pantry." So I thought we'd do something a little different.

Our tiny pile of baby food (picture enlarged so as not to be so embarrassing)

Baby food.

I had interned at a similar non-profit for a couple of summers during college, and I remembered that people would sometimes come in and ask for baby food or baby formula. The sad part was, we hardly ever had any on hand because people usually didn't donate it. Most people, like me up until that point, think of the hungry person to whom they give to be a grown man, probably homeless. But a parent or family with a baby? A baby in America wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't be hungry...right?

Sadly, they can...and are. And these precious gifts from God didn't do anything to deserve to be hungry (of course, a homeless addict may not have either, but that's another sermon). As a new father, I can't imagine not being able to feed my baby when he's hungry, and it is unconscionable to me for someone else to have that kind of need.

But it happens...every day, even in our city. And as with most issues of poverty or hunger or injustice, I get overwhelmed. I never feel like I am doing enough. In fact, when I brought home a grocery bag filled with jars of baby food, I suggested that we give it all to the Crisis Center, and we could just buy more to give to other organizations. Suzy could tell that I was feeling the burden already. She reminded me that it's just day two. We've got thirty-eight more. We've got a lifetime, really.

What she said reminded me of a passage in The Message. Matthew 10:42 gets paraphrased like this:
     "This is a large work I've called you into, but don't be overwhelmed by it. It's best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who's thirsty, for instance."

A cool cup of water.
A little jar of baby food.
Baby steps on our journey.