Self Pity – Sunday, August 15, 1982
We recognize many things in life as self-indulgent. A piece of pie when we are on a diet; fifteen minutes extra sleep after the alarm rings; blowing our budget on a vacation; a TV remote control unit so we don’t have to move to change the channel.
Life is full of self-indulgences, and oh, how we like them. At least we like them until we run up against their consequences. When the pie adds poundage, the extra sleep adds pressure to be on time, or the blown budget means the bills go unpaid. We usually learn in the long run that self-indulgences are very dear.
But perhaps the most costly indulgence is one we can hardly recognize as an indulgence at all. It is the one we call self-pity. It is that caving into pain which makes us think it is uniquely ours as if no one else had walked a thorny path. It is shaking our fist at the universe saying, “I don’t deserve this” as if others do deserve their anguished moments.
If one thing is certain about this mortal life, it is that pain and frustration goes with the territory. George MacDonald took a fairly optimistic view of all when he wrote, “No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in a wilderness. Most of the epistles were written in prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have learned in suffering what they taught in song…Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make preeminent use of a man, He puts him in a fire.”1
The peril in life, then, is not the fire, for we can be assured that everyone has his moments when he is twisting in the flames. The real peril is what we let the fire do to us. In the face of frustration of failure, do we curl up in self-pity, do we flinch and hide, do we think that we can hide from it all?
If we do, we have given in to an indulgence that will weaken us. Self-pity is no friend. It teaches us to bow down before the power of pain, instead of testing the power of the human spirit. It teaches us to say. “What’s the use? instead of “I can win.” It prevents us from being of service to others which is the greatest antidote to life’s troubles.
We usually think carefully before we indulge ourselves in something that will eventually bear unpleasant consequences. We must be just as thoughtful when we are tempted to succumb to the loving arms of self-pity.
1 As quoted in Leaved of Gold, ed. Clyde Frances Lytle, The Cosslett Publishing Company, pg. 17.
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August 15, 1982
Broadcast Number 2,765