why

Today was not a day for change. It was simply a day for observation. A day to take stock, to take a personal inventory. It was a day to ask myself, "why?"
I have been reading Francis Chan's book Crazy Love for my small group at church and though I normally read through things fairly quickly, I have forced myself to move at the pace of the group and so this week was chapter five. Last night I read it again and felt as though I had been punched in the gut. It's stuff I've wrestled with for a while and at times in the last month have tried to make changes that haven't really stuck. So today I decided that for this day I wasn't going to change anything. Here was my plan of action.

1. I was going to purposefully think about every action I took.

2. I was going to ask myself who I was serving with each action or to whose benefit I was doing that action.

Here's what I discovered (though I suspected it) about myself and my actions.

1. Most of my day was spent serving myself.

2. The actions I seemingly did for others had some kind of understanding that my helping or supporting them would benefit me in the future.

3. I am quite possibly the most self-absorbed, self-indulgent, selfish person I know.

Tomorrow I am going to do the same exercise, though this time I am going to simply change three selfish actions and turn them to unselfish actions. It's a small change, but I don't think I can handle the big ones right now.