1/12/21

 The Fall: Self-Absorbed

               Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.  He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”  “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  When the woman saw the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.  She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.  Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.    

Genesis 3:1-7

I have not met one person in my life who thinks that the world is perfect.  Everyone admits that there is something wrong…from there the disagreements begin.  “The world is broken because culture is too liberal and we have left God.” “The world is broken because culture is too conservative and judgmental.” “Everyone just needs to love more and stop letting hate win.”  I could talk with 20 people and get 25 different ideas about why the world is broken.

Here’s my own two cents.  In general, I do not believe that people are evil or stupid…they are self-absorbed.  It is easy to imagine those with whom we disagree sitting in a dimly lit room and cackling over their evil plans to ruin the world for good people.  What is closer to the truth is that most everyone is trying to do the best that they can with the information and resources that they have and what we are most aware of…what dominates our thoughts and colors our vision…is what we, individually, need.

Look at Eve.  She was not evil and hoping to call down curses upon herself and all of humanity.  She was not stupid…you could call her naïve, but not stupid.  She took what she had heard from God and what she heard from the serpent, filtered it through what she wanted and what she expected to be true, and made a choice.  She wanted more.  She wanted to be more.  She was not thinking about the ripple effect that sin would have on the world.  She was not thinking of war and poverty and cruelty and damnation.  She saw an opportunity to enhance her own life and she took it.  Self-absorbed.

Adam made the same choice.  He saw that he could either fight with his wife or he could do something forbidden.  He decided he would rather deal with whatever punishment God would dish out than face the prospect of his wife being angry at him and finding himself alone again.  Self-absorbed.

This is the root of sin; this is the core of the broken world.  We doggedly pursue our individual self-interest and in the process we drive away God and other humans.  The difficult insurance adjuster?  Just trying to do their job so that their family can be taken care of.  The teacher who has no interest in adapting their class to accommodate special needs?  They are trying to get through their day with their sanity intact.  The well-meaning church member who says that God would heal your child if you only had faith?  They are trying to find a system of belief that allows them to live at peace with a fallen world.

One of the great things about having children is that they force you to look beyond yourself.  You cannot be totally self-absorbed when there is a tiny person that is completely dependent on you.  Well, actually you can…lots of people manage to do it…but it always leads to really broken people and a lot of pain.  This is magnified even more when your child has special needs.  My life cannot be just about me.  It cannot.  If I choose my career or my recreation at the expense of my family, I stand in the same place as Adam and Eve.  Not evil.  Not stupid.  Just self-absorbed with impending major consequences.  Let me be clear: there are ways to still pursue a career, recreation and a life with kids on the spectrum, but those ways will probably look a lot different than if you had no children.  If my choices make my family’s life worse in order to make my life better then I am abusing the gifts that have been entrusted to me…just as they did in the garden.

A moment to reflect:

How have you become less self-absorbed and more compassionate since becoming a parent?  Thank God for that growth.

Refrigerator Art of the Day:

D age 9

2021 Update:

Not evil.  Not stupid.  Self-absorbed.  That makes our current political landscape a little easier to digest.  That makes it a little easier to understand how people that we know and respect can look at the same evidence and read the same scripture and come away with such different opinions.  They are not trying to destroy the world.  They are trying to survive, which I can have compassion for.  But in the process they are hurting those around them, which cannot be acceptable.