“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.” (Psalm 139:14-18 NIV)
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31 NIV)
It seems that we live in a society that is very ego-centric. This has been increasingly more obvious with the advent of social media. Social media has basically given everyone with access to the internet a platform to indulge their need to be noticed. I include myself in that category. To be egocentric means to be more concerned with the self than society, or taking the ego as the starting point in all our interpretations of life.
The expression “15 minutes of fame” was inspired by Andy Warhol’s words, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”, which appeared in the program for a 1968 exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. Photographer Nat Finkelstein claims credit for the expression, stating that he was photographing Warhol in 1966 for a proposed book. A crowd gathered trying to get into the pictures and Warhol supposedly remarked that everyone wants to be famous, to which Finkelstein replied, “Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.”
Granted, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and all the other forms of social media that people currently use are not really making everyone famous, but in a sense, they do give people the feeling that they can be noticed by the world at large, in some capacity. I guess for some, the illusion of being noticed is as satisfying as the real thing.
We have all probably known people that have a knack for commandeering conversations and bringing any and every topic of discussion back to themselves, and their experiences. To be honest, I find people who behave this way to be terribly annoying. The people who behave this way are usually not very good listeners. They are not interested in understanding the speaker’s perspective. They are looking for the pause so they can jump in and steer the dialogue back to themselves.
All of us probably tend to do this a little bit, but for the ego-maniac this is an exaggerated behavior. There are a lot of societal influences that feed into this behavior, social media being only one of many.
Another factor is our society’s exaggerated emphasis on what is referred to as “self-esteem”. We are told that, in order to build up our children’s confidence, we need to build their self-esteem. While I do not argue that there is a degree of value in helping our children to feel confident, in my opinion, the whole issue of building self-esteem is over-rated. One of the ways this is played out in our school systems is the excessive giving out of awards to everyone for everything that can be imagined. I saw this played out in one of the end of year awards ceremonies when my son finished middle school. The two hour plus long awards ceremony was torture-some to sit through in in a stifling non-air-conditioned gymnasium in early June heat. In the school’s effort to make every child feel important, it seemed that every single child present received an award for something.
Not to sound mean or non-caring, but when I was in school, mediocrity was not rewarded. In our efforts to tip-toe around our children’s fragile egos, we are not preparing them for the real world, in which no one is concerned over whether they get their feelings hurt or not. When we cater to our children’s self-centeredness, we are not preparing them for reality, because real life does not work that way. Mediocrity is not rewarded in the work force where everything is driven by profit and productivity. News flash: This world’s system doesn’t give a damn about your self-esteem, but you have a life to live, and you have to do the best with what you have, so get over yourself, and start living.
Having said that, the Scripture does advocate a certain kind of healthy self-love that is not based on our ego-centered self-esteem, but rather on our appreciation for the wonder and beauty of God’s creation. David says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Notice that David is speaking to his Creator. “I praise YOU” (God). He puts the credit in its rightful place. There is nothing ego-centric is this declaration. This is a humble acknowledgement of God’s wonderful creativity and perfection. Think with me for a moment of the incredible complexity in which our physical bodies operate. My wife is a Registered Nurse, and she spends a lot of time studying the human anatomy simply because she finds it fascinating, as I do also, although I do not understand the technical aspects of it to the degree that she does. The contemplation of this staggers my mind.
Take a moment and just look at your hand. Move it around. Make it do what you want. Then think with me for a moment about how your brain is sending signals to your hand to make it effortlessly do what you desire. (While I do acknowledge that damage to the physical body may impede this process for some people, this does not negate the wonder of the process itself, and the way that process was generated via God’s creative power.) Think of the ways your eyes work, allowing you to see the splendor and beauty of God’s created order. Think of the ways in which your body’s immune system sets processes in place to heal itself. The list can go on and on.
I will say, unashamedly that we have been lied to by those who promote the theory of evolution to explain our existence. Random chaos does not produce the beauty, complexity and order we see in our own bodies, and all the created order on the earth, in the animal kingdom and in our cosmos. It is an insult to the Creator to credit nothingness with the creation of everything.
Jesus understands that this kind of healthy, reverent self-love is the basis for our being able to love others as God desires for us to: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ We see ourselves, and others, as marvels of God’s creation, and because of that, we cannot help but love others. That is what it means to see others through God’s eyes. God saw all that He created, and He declared that it is “Good”.
Genuine, humble, reverent love of self as an act of worship is it totally the opposite of the false self-love that is manifest through ego-centric behavior, which is really based on insecurity, because the ego-centric, narcissistic person always has to work to prove to himself/herself that they are better than others.
There is no fear in perfect love, for perfect love casts out fear. Where there is no fear, there is no need to “prove” anything
Danny's Stump 