7-7-11 Self View

My Self View

Some where in the back of my mind lingers a story I once heard about a Monk.  He spent many years in solitude and learning.  When he got out someone asked him, “What was the most important thing that you learned during all those years?”  The Monk answered something to the effect of, “That I am just the same as those murders and sinners that overcrowd the jail cells.”  Of course the man asking the question didn’t understand and asked, “What do you mean?”  The Monk said something like, “At any given moment if I were to choose a different choice I would be where they are.  I am no better than they.  I have just made different choices.”

I have been thinking a lot lately about our human tendency to view ourselves, and how that is often incongruent with truth or the way others actually see us.  As I begin this journey to share the journey with you, I invite you to see me (in the words of Richard and Linda Eyre) as I see myself: One in the struggle.  This is something I continually am reminded of through life’s experiences.  I am not superior, nor am I inferior, to other people who walk on two feet.  I am equal to each of them, placed in the same environment for the same purposes.  I am not righteous because of a self-elevated perspective that my choices make me better than anyone else.  I learned from Chauncey C. Riddle that righteousness is doing good to others.  There is no room for self-elevation in the responsibility to serve them. 

Through my journey in the 12 Step process, I have recognized fully and completely that I am held up from day to day by God’s sustaining hand.  Some days that support is removed so I can learn to be humble; and some days I feel Him carry me so I can be patient with my children to give them the love they need.  I can take no credit for who I am because He has made me all that I am, all that I know, all that I feel, think, and do: He gives me power to do.  The only thing I can take credit, and not even completely on that point, is the grit that I exhibit when I choose to get up every day at 5:00 am to study my scriptures- and even there I know He gives me the motivation to do that.  I know that on any given day, if I were to choose to be disobedient and sleep in that I would lose it, literally.  Without my determination to be obedient I am a raging selfish depressed woman, and that makes me a horrible mother.  I know that if I were aimed just two degrees to the right or the left that I too would be in that jail cell.  I am who I am because of God’s power, not mine.  I am no better than that person in the jail cell, I simply have made different choices and the rug could be ripped out from under my feet if I were to make a different choice on any given day.