the most selfish thing you can do

Happiness = consume less, give more.


“The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people.”

content

I think few things make God happier than an attitude of resilient faith, hope, and joy, when all seems lost.

Perfect peace.

priorities and hypocrisies

You can tell a lot about a person by examining his priorities; it speaks a great deal if a man puts his own pleasure over the needs of others. The same goes with countries as a whole.

The Super Bowl ad controversy highlights the twisted priorities in this country. Click here for a very well-written article articulating the problem.

Most people who are against abortion are against it because they consider it murder. But I think the problem goes much deeper than (merely) taking a life. The death of the fetus is the fruit of the evil, but at its root it is not murder. The root of it is the backwardness our priorities as a people. We have placed our own pleasures--our sexual freedom--above that of another human life. We have placed sexual liberation beyond the reach of personal responsibility. At its core, it is selfishness and lack of personal accountability fueled by lustful passion and justified by "privacy" & "freedom".

The hypocrisy of the whole thing is even more enraging. A classic "bleeding heart liberal" makes it his life purpose to fight for the rights of the underprivileged and those without a voice. But for some reason, that heart doesn't bleed for unborn children--those who literally don't have a voice. The same liberal will fight strenuously with all passion for 1st Amendment free speech, yet when that speech is in disagreement with his ideals, it is "inappropriate" and "tasteless".

This isn't an issue of right v. left politics--this is an issue of our country's moral priorities, which every day seem to be giving in to selfish desires.

attacked for loosing chains

History has a way of repeating itself, changing only slightly so that the unwary won't notice.

In the book of Acts, we encounter a slave girl who makes a profit for her masters by fortune-telling. St. Paul runs into this demon-possessed slave girl and finds her constantly praising him. Annoyed, he orders the demon to leave her--a good thing, except she loses her fortune-telling ability. The masters, realizing that their profits were vanishing, take the missionaries to the authorities. They basically accuse St. Paul and Silas of teaching "customs which are not lawful", a totally irrelevant attack. The masters pretend like they actually care about the unlawful customs, when in reality they're just upset that they're losing profits.

I couldn't help but think of corporate America when I read this today. Almost every successful corporation uses the power of the media in an attempt to enslave us to something--a product, an image, our own desires. As long as we become enslaved to something, we generate profits. We have value. As soon as we break free from our materialistic slavery, our profit-producing value ceases. When God steps in to break us free, He gets attacked--for totally irrelevant reasons.

It's interesting to note how the masters turn to the law to justify their anger at St. Paul and Silas. Yet it's painfully obvious that they couldn't care less about the law. The only reason they use the law as an argument against the apostles is because it's the only way they could justify being angry at such a good thing--a girl freed from slavery to her demons. They use the law not because they believe it is moral or just, but because it temporarily aligns with their own corrupt motives.

Isn't it amazing (and sad) how relevant this is today?