Conventional wisdom: If you do good things for others, you will feel good. That's why God's Grace is foolproof, because He knows that if He lets us off the hook, we'll get addicted to doing the right thing because we enjoy it and not because we're required to.
Except that doesn't work. Not always. Sometimes you do the right thing, and you know that you did the right thing, and it feels awful. Someone close to you will tell you about how strong you were, but it doesn't make you feel better.
I'm a writer. Not published yet, but I see the world as a writer does, with all sorts of possibilities with people, their motivations, their decisions, their consequences, and so forth. I'm the person to ask when you want to think up of a situation where doing the right thing doesn't make you feel better.
Sometimes you have to let go of something, and you'll always feel sad without it. But it's the right thing.
Sometimes you have to forgive someone for doing something unforgivable, and even though justice won't make you happy, neither will forgiveness. So you're still unhappy.
Sometimes you have to compromise on something, because it's the only way to lose forward.
Sometimes you have to lay down your life for someone, and you especially won't be thinking to yourself about how good it feels.
Fact is, being selfless is against our nature. Only Jesus could be selfless, because He was the Son of God, and He was God. Only a triune deity, existing equally as three persons, could even begin to think outwardly. Otherwise, every human being identifies as "self," and therefore it would be a paradox for us to be "selfless." These words are opposites.
Except for when we take on the identity of Christ. Then we're one in body with our fellow believers, and we're truly connected to others.
Still, being selfless isn't always easy. We won't always be selfless, because we still have these sinful bodies. And it will always be tempting for us to turn away from selflessness, because it simply isn't always pleasant. Jesus Himself pleaded with the Father to lift the burden of His death from Him. And then He walked off to His trial anyway.
Not because this act of giving made Him feel good. It had reached a point where it didn't matter if He felt good about Himself, or about whether or not He could live with a guilty conscience. He was under enough temptation that He would have gladly shirked His duty and lived with that conscience. The pain of crucifixion and then death vs. a lifetime of guilt? Are you kidding me? I'm human, and so I have the credentials to admit that I do things because I believe that a lifetime of guilt is a reasonable price to pay to spare me from the pain of selflessness. I do it more often that I would like.But Jesus didn't do that. He walked the whole way, and He didn't do it because He was trying to avoid the guilt. He did it out of love.
Sometimes I do the right thing when I really don't want to, and so many times I do it because I'm afraid of feeling guilty. But there are times, mysterious enough as it is, that I think I might forsake my own happiness for a better reason. Could it be that because God became suffering, that I have become more Christlike?
Sincerely,
John Hooyer
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