“With almost 7 billion people in the world, maybe that’s proof it isn’t about me?”
I am selfish.
I can prove my selfishness, because if I were to tally all the thoughts I had in yesterday alone, the column labeled “JASON” would heavily outweigh the column “EVERYBODY ELSE.”
Thinking of others is great in theory, but so much harder to do when the calendar page turns, and there’s a new month of rent checks and Comcast bills. For me, being the ambitious twenty-something seeking the perfect “career,” “house,” “wife,” I get lost often in the translation of God’s will and my own subtle agendas.
This week God has really been revealing “humility” to me, in the form of sleeping on the couch because we had a bug breakout in the top floor of my house. Humility also looks like sending out 50 emails with resumes attached trying to sound qualified for a job I so desperately need the money for. The irony in being young and ambitious is that those with experience most always beat you to the jobs, leaving you a bit jaded.
Humility for me is a lesson I’ve learned many times, and then swiftly forgotten as if I could mark a check next to it on some life to-do list.
Humility also looks like a friend calling me on the phone and letting me ramble on about the trials and tribulations of a one-week freak out. Her gentleness as I was in pity-party mode hit me like the freshest thing: it’s not the allure of money, the career, or status titles, but rather the people that speak the truth into my life.
It’s not about me, because I am merely a vessel. I am reading this excerpt to you this morning so that hopefully it may ignite the flame of humility inside some of you. But a vessel’s job, I’m learning, is to be simply that. To find what you love, connect it with wisdom of the Holy Spirit, and consistently seek God for what is greater.
We hear the number 7 billion and some look at it as competition; but with the right eyesight we may see it as an opportunity to do something no other collection of people have ever done. 7 billion vessels making up what ultimately represents the body of Christ. The Kingdom of God.
Selah.
Amen.
-Jason O’Toole
(Source: memoir.jasonotoole.com)
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