All the love that she had was just wood that she burned...

So, in my normal routine, I am reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, and, with a bit of time on my hands last night, I dived right through two and half chapters, waiting at an auto-place to pay $130 to replace my car battery.

One of the things that Miller makes it a point of saying is how broken humanity is. And you know, he's right. Highlighting that we can't change what's wrong with the world without recognizing that the problem is us... as in me, I am the problem. And you, you too are the problem... but this is my blog. You deal with you on your time, buddy.

Anyway... yeah, how selfish are we? CS Lewis wrote a poem that Miller highlights that contains this line: I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

Neither have I. Not really, but pretty much. I mean, how often do we do good things, not because it truly delights us to do something good for someone else, but because of the recognition we will get out of it?

As I am reading this book, and examining my own broken spirituality and broken Christianity and the mess that my heart/mind is in, I was thinking about how I have changed, and how I had changed. The thing is, though I may not feel "lead" by God, or driven by the spirit, or whatever jumped-up mumbo-jumbo voodoo that you want to claim is how it works... the thing is, despite my distance from that, I still think I do a halfway decent job of not being selfish all the time. I bend over backwards for people. Too many friends have told me that, sometimes, I just have to do what's right for me.

I've had relationships destroyed because I was bent until I broke, and left broken, feeling used. I get stressed and frustrated at work because I help and help, and sometimes no one helps me. I won't yell at my roommates when they don't pay their share of the bills on time, and I end up in the hole in the bank, or running out of money and having to live off of a credit card.

I'm not pointing out I can be selfless for recognition purposes. What I am saying is, it strikes me as odd that though I may not being the perfect model of Christianity (which I never would be anyway) and while currently my spirituality is pretty dead (that, then, is the part I truly worry about), I still apply the lessons of selflessness - ultimately, of love - throughout my life.

Love may be the wood that I burn up for myself, but at least I don't let it get all stacked up, moldy, bug ridden and wasted. Or something like that.

More on this later...