“When you say ‘I don’t want them to get hurt’ when talking about a close friend, what you really don’t want is the bad feeling that you get if that were to happen. If it were a total stranger across the world, you wouldn’t care as much if they got hurt because it doesn’t hurt you.”
This is a small excerpt from a conversation I had with my roommates earlier this evening. One of them said the above.
It made me think. It seems like one of those mind-blowing truths that you’ve never thought about before. Like “WOW, so true! I’m so selfish I even think about myself when others get hurt.”
But it begs the question, does anyone actually ever think about anyone else, or is everything everyone ever does only to serve themselves? I think it’s wise to realize that our motives are almost always driven out of selfish desires. I’ve written posts before about how you always do what you want to do. There’s never a time that we do something we don’t want to do. Even if it’s something we don’t like, we may do that because we prefer that thing we don’t like over the punishment for not doing it. Therefore, we want to do it.
I think it’s similar to this. We are so inside our own head that even the things we care about, we care about it because of how it makes us feel.
This may be sacrilegious, and I’m still forming my thoughts on it, but it seems even God acts in a similar way. Yes, it was a completely selfless love that He sent his only son to take our sins so that we could spend eternity with Him, but in the end, it was because it was what he wanted to do. It was because He rathered that than let all humans die and go to hell. The motivation was driven out of love, but nothing He does is outside of what he wills to happen.
I think the closer we come to Christ the more and more we can start becoming selfless with our decisions. Actually doing things because we genuinely love others.
Even this, though, is driven because we realize what a better life it is to live for God and pointing others to Him than it is to live a comfortable lifestyle away from him and proclaiming him.
In reality, every decision we make is a selfish one, but it seems sometimes the selfishness is a healthy one.
Healthy selfishness…does that actually exist?