" I" in the sky

Have you ever tried to get through the day, or even just 30 minutes without saying "I " , or "me" or "mine" or "my"? It is literally impossible. "I" have some thoughts on that...and of course, being the human being that I am, I think that what I have to say, you need to hear (shameless)

I guess since we live inside ourselves and no one else resides with us from the start, it bcomes very easy to let the world revolve around numero uno. We think we have it right, we think we know it all, we want what we want, when we want it, we think everyone should conform to what we say, do, ask for, and think. And I am saying "we" hear because it is really too painful to admit that I am guilty of doing these things and thinking this way.
God is intimately familiar with our selfishness.
There is a story about a rich young man who came to Jesus and wanted to know how to enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus tells him that he needs to follow the commandments...in other words, do the right thing. I think Jesus tells him this because he is fully aware of what the young man"s answer is going to be. And, the young man delivers when he says he has followed the law, all of his life (sure he has) Anyway, Jesus says good, then. Go out and sell all you have and give the proceeds to the poor and take care of them for the rest of your life. And the young man turned and walked away. See, here is where the selfishness part comes in. I do not think the young man was so attached to his stuff that he could not part with it. I think that Jesus was really saying, "Let go of yourself and all you hope to do and accomplish and let me take over...let me live in you..." Selfishness is a very very powerful thing. Apparently, the cost of heaven was too high.
Here is the way I see it. We do reside here alone inside ourselves UNLESS we allow Jesus in. He is the only one capable of entering and changing us from the inside out...changing us from selfish to selfless. It is fairly simple to understand, but incredibly hard to carry out because, like I said, we cannot go thirty minutes without a reference to ourselves. The rich young man had mastered righteousness in the sense the he was capable of doing the right thing, but "right" is not the same as real righteousness. If we make ourselves "right", then who needs Jesus?

The letting go of self, the grasping of the Holy Spirit....

The opposite of love is selfishness. 1 Cor. 13...look it up.

(and for those of you who are very observant, you will realize that I did not use contractions at all in this blog...not because I was attempting to make some great literary statement, but because my apostrophe key is not cooperating. Selfish thing.)

And the photo above is of a rat. Draw your own conclusions as to why I included a photo of a rat.