on self-pity and showers

When I woke up this morning, I swear something was staring me down.  Gorged as all get out and terribly lethargic, self-pity’s tear drop eyes steadily gazed at me.  I squirmed in my bed and I could just feel it.  Yup, today was going to be a battle.  Like any good soldier, I drilled in preparation, reading the Bible and praying, but my heart wasn’t engaged.  The enemy was staring me down from his dark corner in my heart and my soul trembled.

Why such a heaping dose of self-pity?  No reason, no reason at all.  It was just sprinkled in my day like sugar in coffee.

As if my life were a crossword puzzle, I peered around, looking backwards, sideways, diagonal, upside down, searching for all those little “mistakes,” the things that ticked me off.  Once found, I circled them with bright red complaining.  To my trained eye, the day was beginning to look as red as a traffic light.  And self-pity, sitting in his corner, smiled.

I’m a professional pity-partier, and as such, I know better than to voice my woes.  If you voice them, one of two things can happen: an optimist will come and point out all the little rainbows and daisies and hearts and completely ignore your incredibly legitimate sorrows, or a better pity-partier will come and steal the show.  Either way, your pity party is ruined.  So I let my gloomy thoughts chase their tales in my head and self-pity take a light snooze as I did the work for him.

In the afternoon, my pity party reached a high-point as I extolled my virtues and pondered why my greatness wasn’t more widely recognized.  In fact, I even began planning this blog post as a sarcastic piece on that very subject that I could either try to redeem at the end with some sort of something about how Jesus is better, or I could entirely give up and let the piece stand as a full fledged pity party (the latter being the preferred option).

Then, the most amazing thing happened.

I took a shower.

Yes, you read that right.  I took a shower.  It was a profound theological moment as I realized my self-centeredness and Christ’s cleansing work on the cross that has the power to wash away my self-pity.

No, just kidding.  It was simply a shower.  It wasn’t even a nice long shower, it was a military shower.  But by the time it was over, I didn’t want to complain any more.  I sat down to right this blog post, and all the perfectly witty quips about my self-pity fled.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been trying to understand why my self-pity disappeared.  I can’t say that it was shame over revealing my sin; my family knows that I have no problem doing that.  It definitely wasn’t an epiphany.  I think it was gratefulness.

I couldn’t find anything wrong with my shower.  It was perfectly refreshing.  The only “complaint” I can think of was that it was making me take a break from my hard core pity partying, but even that was perfectly refreshing.  Once I found that thing that made me truly thankful, I didn’t want to ruin that beautiful feeling of thankfulness with a pity party.  I just wanted to revel in it.

God, in his kindness, sent me that shower.  I wasn’t looking to be delighted; I was grasping for shadows of discontentment, yet God chose to delight me anyway.  How perfectly loving he is.

In their unexaggerated forms, all of those less-than-perfect things are still present in my life, but I don’t want to focus on them.  I want to spend my time rejoicing in the only perfect thing, my God, and treasuring every gift he sends.