- Introduce series: The Original Selfies. Everyone is taking selfies these days to show us who they are and what they have been doing. But we’re all savvy enough now to know that selfies don’t tell the whole picture. They are a small, staged snapshot of our complicated lives. Selfies tend to show to others what we wish our life to be, but what our lives have not yet become. In order for us to develop a spiritually mature and full life, there are three much more serious selfies we need to develop. That is what we are going to explore over the next three weeks: Self-awareness, self-reliance and self-advocacy. If we can learn the three selfies as Christians, we will develop into the kind of sons and daughters of God that our Heavenly Father wishes us to be.
- Today, we begin with self-awareness.
- In the opening scene of the classic baseball movie Bull Durham, Annie Savoy, who is played by Susan Sarandon, says famously, “The world was made for those who are not cursed with self-awareness.” She is referring to a clueless, playboy minor league hot-shot pitcher named Nuke LaLoosh, who is played by Tim Robbins. LaLoosh is a gifted pitcher, poised for the Major Leagues, but he is so clueless to how he is wasting his life, because he has no self-awareness. There is a scene where Crash Davis, a aging Minor League catcher, played by Kevin Costner, who confront the clueless LaLoosh, who is throwing his life away. I’ve cleaned up the language a bit to make it Sunday morning appropriate:
- LaLoosh: How come you don’t like me?
Crash Davis: Because you don’t respect yourself, which is your problem. But you don’t respect the game, and that’s my problem. You got a gift.
LaLoosh: I got a what?
Crash Davis: You got a gift. When you were a baby, the Gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you’re giving it away.
LaLoosh: I ain’t giving nothing away. I got a Porsche already; a 911 with a quadrophonic Blaupunkt.
Crash Davis: Lord, you don’t need a quadrophonic Blaupunkt! What you need is a curveball! - A lot of people you meet have a quadraphonic Blaupunkt, but what they need is a curveball. They seem to be firing on all cylinders in life, making lots of money and successful. They are going your life playing the game, but they have no idea what they are doing or where they are going. They make a lot of noise, put on a good show, but they do not know who they are inside. If you are estranged from yourself, you will be estranged from happiness.
- Greek aphorism “Know thyself.” How much of our lives we spend learning about other people, things and events, but we spend so little time learning who we are. A little secret: Did you know that in your life you will spend more hours each day with yourself than anyone else? In fact, you will spend every single second of your life with you. But so many of us don’t get to know ourselves. We spend more time critiquing and judging others than we do examining our own thoughts, words and deeds.
- The result is that we go through life a thoughtless combination of our DNA and the indoctrination of our childhoods. You live out a life prepared for you by others and by your inherited genes. If you never pull the plank out of your eye ad take a serious inventory of the good, the bad and ugly in your life, you may never learn who God wants you to be and what God wants you to do with the life you have been given. To do that requires a very holy, sobering enterprise…self-awareness.
- If we are to grow and develop, we must learn to turn our gaze inward, toward ourselves, and take a look, evaluate and make adjustments based on what we find there. This is called self-awareness. This process is akin to removing the plank lodged within our eye, so that we can see clearly who we are and our place in the world.
- Self-awareness is an awareness of the self, that within you which makes you unique, which makes you who you are. When you are self-aware you are a conscious evaluator of yourself.
- Daniel Goldman in his book “Emotional Intelligence,” equated self-awareness with “knowing one’s internal states, preference, resources, and intuitions.”
- In self-awareness there is an emphasis on our ability to monitor our inner world, our thoughts and emotions as they arise.
- So, fundamentally, self-awareness involves judgment. We evaluate ourselves objectively – how we are thinking, feeling and acting– and we make judgments on those things. You respond to your evaluations with “I should or should not have thought that, said that or done that.” And you grow from those observations, judgments and adjustments made as a result of that critique.
- In addition, self-aware people tend to act consciously (rather than react passively), and tend to be in good psychological health and to have a positive outlook on life. They also have a greater depth of life experience and are more likely to be more compassionate.
- In a study undertaken by Green Peak Partners and Cornell University, 72 executives at public and private companies were studied. They all had revenues from $50 million to $5 billion, and it was found that “a high self-awareness score was the strongest predictor of overall success.
- If it is so helpful and beneficial to our well-being and even our pocketbook, why do we not learn and practice self-awareness?
- We operate on “automatic pilot”, unconscious of what we are doing. Our minds just wander from one thing to the next without any discipline. No one ever taught us self-awareness.
- Also, we all tend toward confirmation bias. Early in life we tend to make up our minds on things, accept them as the gospel truth, and then operate from these biases, sometimes our whole lives.
- We also tend to be averse to receiving feedback. It takes a certain level of maturity, bravery and vulnerability to ask, “What am I doing that could be done differently?”
- We are
afraid of what we will find.
- Tennessee Williams, who wrote such powerful plays as “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” said darkly, “There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”
- But Mr. Williams overlooked a third possibility, the one that will propel you to joy, happiness, and greater accomplishments. You will find that there is something – Someone – within you who is holding you up, empowering you, who loves you. The Christ Within. This Christ reveals to us that we “are fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).
- When Jesus tells us to pull the plank out of our own eye before we begin judging the other for the speck in his eye, he is telling us to learn self-awareness.
- This morning let’s you briefly at five ways to cultivate self-awareness.
- Create
some space for yourself.
- Go into your prayer closet.
- Leave yourself some time and space every day, maybe first thing in the morning and at some point in the evening, to sit with God and be aware of your thoughts and feelings, acknowledge them, turn them over to God, and pray that God use you for the day ahead or that you rest in him in the night ahead for renewed strength and fresh start the next day.
- Practice
mindfulness.
- Praying without ceasing.
- The ability to monitor our emotions and thoughts from moment to moment is key to understanding ourselves better, being at peace with who we are and proactively managing our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
- Keep a
journal.
- This is the Psalmist way of cultivating self-awareness.
- Write down what you think and feel. You will be amazed at what you find – the good, the bad and the ugly.
- But having put in on paper, having given your thoughts and feelings a physical reality, you can begin to learn from them.
- Practice
being a good listener.
- He who has ears let him hear.
- As we learn to listen to others – their words, body language, expressed emotions – we also learn to listen to ourselves and to the still-small voice within.
- James 1:19 “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger;”
- Seek
feedback. 360-degree feedback. Not just from your fan base, but
from your critics, too. Rebuking one another in love is a characteristic
of Christian community.
- Luke 17:3 “Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him,”
- Proverbs 15:31-32: “The ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise. Whoever ignores instruction despises himself, but he who listens to reproof gains intelligence.”
- Conclusion: If your life is just one fast ball down the middle after another, hoping the batter of life doesn’t connect for a homer against you and shut you down, maybe you need a curve ball. A little beauty, nuance, creativity, art, calmness, a subtle break right at the last moment. That’s who we are in the Spirit. Not just out of control fastballs but calm, cheerful souls, self-assured because we took the time to take inventory of our lives and makes changes necessary to become the children of God our Father wants us to be.
Bottom of Form
Email this post