Selfish

It’s a funny trait for an extrovert… or maybe it is because I am an extrovert that it is crucial that I get hours of quiet each day… hours of the waking part of my day in which there is no one around, no one talking to me or even needing me… If my children are at home and awake, my mother’s heart knows that they need me. My mind is always so cluttered. It seems I am always preparing to birth some truth the Lord has given me or chewing on something deep within my soul as I go about the task of cooking, cleaning, teaching, accounting… mothering.

It is like my husband says: I am never where I appear to be.

I wrestle with that, ya know. I go from being resentful that my life circumstance does not allow me to operate at the deep all throughout my day, to rejoicing that I have a full life with many beautiful people to discover the world with. I wonder just how much of the deep is good for me. If I am always at the Well… always on the mountain top where will I impact anyone for Christ? Where is the access point of influence? The influence I asked the Lord to give me over the lost and despairing.

I know I am like a spoiled child most of the time. If people really knew what went through my head day in and day out, they would undoubtedly be disappointed in me. I want the people in my life to care about what I care about. I want them to care what is in my head. Ask about it… desire to extract it.

But alas, I am not the center of the universe.

So begins my season of learning to be selfless.

I am really a selfish person. I have tried to discover why, but that is truly a pointless venture. It is the carnal, the veil of sin over my good heart that I seek to circumcise. I am the most selfish with the ones that are closest to me, especially my husband.

I have said for years that media sets us up for failure in this department. According to what we are taught, we are supposed to seek out the perfect mate for ourselves. That means the person who gives us exactly what we desire. I believe God gives us the person we need.

I heard once that love is most evident when it is sacrificial. If you think about it, love is not a feeling, it is an action. Love is a verb. If we are loving someone, we are looking out for that person’s interests above our own. True love requires that we sacrifice our own desires to give the object of our love what they desire.

That is not what I do most of the time.

At first I gave my husband a list of everything he wasn’t doing for me. Then I decided to stop asking for what I want and I started pouting because he didn’t seem to have a desire to please me. Boy I can be a champion pouter. I can sit and sulk with record breaking endurance. I am not a pleasant person to be around during this season.

Self awareness helps me recognize what I am doing. Spiritual maturity warrants that I make some changes. This is not like my other mile markers that were confessed publically. This one is not a coming-out. This is a going-in.

I have chased after my husband and asked him to hear my heart. I have cried and manipulated and pouted and thrown tantrums. I have not been graceful. I did work in that wretched season and he participated. He held my hand, held my head, comforted me, consoled me… he also yelled at me, ignored me, withdrew from me, forced me to maintain the role he wanted me in… He was not always a saint, but he stayed with me. In his unwavering devotion to me, he remains true.

And I am woefully undeserving of his devotion, just as I am undeserving of the gift of eternal life my savior bestowed on me at the cross. I know my husband would lay down his life for me and yet I suppose that may be where I get hung up.

My husband is not Christ. He will never anticipate my heart’s desire because he was never meant to be my sufficiency. He will never sit on the edge of the bed in the morning waiting to hear what is on my heart because it is not solely his responsibility to care for my heart. Sure there are things that have been entrusted to him as my husband but Keeper of my Heart is a job too big for any mortal man to hold.

It may be my personality, my gender, or maybe my gifting, but I seem to have an unusually large amount of words to share each day. I want to share them with my husband, but after ten years of marriage, I think he is a little tired. I feel the Lord impressing upon me that I still tend to set my husband up as lord of my life. I want to pour my cares out on him, rather than my God. So I am reluctantly trudging up this part of the path… the path to pour my cares out on my God alone. It is tempting pour my cares out on my girlfriends instead but I strangely find myself in a season without friends really close to me. They have moved away or are in a season of tireless business.

I suppose it is not a coincidence.

My Lord desires that I put my trust in him alone.

I pour my heart out to the Lord through my journal. Some times I flip back a few pages to see where I have been recently. Yesterday in church I flipped back and noticed it has been almost a week since I have surrendered my cares to the Lord. Is it because I have not had cares? No. It is because I have been pouting. I have been waiting at my husband’s feet for him to ask me to speak to him.

I have not been sitting at my Lord’s feet.

And so I have suffered.

I have agonized and grumped that my husband seemingly cares nothing for my heart, when my Lord sits on the edge of my bed every morning, waiting for me to talk to him. I have cried that my girlfriends are too busy or too far away to hear me when my Lord is closer to me than any human being will ever be.

I have been in seasons before where I cried out to the Lord and there was deafening silence. This is not that season. This is the season where I have forsaken the still small voice and hopelessly yearned for the mortal voice. I have sought my own interests and forgotten to love. Love is not self-seeking.

It’s funny how I can give my obedience to the Lord and do it with such a rotten attitude. I don’t think that is what the Lord wants.

Lord help me to follow you… to listen for your voice….knowing that you long to hear mine… to commune with me… to hold me… to hold me close to your side.