The Only Real Enemy

Selfishness is the only real enemy.

Brenda and I have the honor this week of teaching at Confirmation Camp.  This is an experience for young people that focuses on their lives as adult Christians in a beautiful outdoor setting.  Our teaching times are filled with activities, games, snacks and good questions.

One of the great benefits of this setting is access to "Co-op" activities.  These are exercises facilitated by camp counselors.  The exercises focus on team building and win/win solutions.  Many of us have played these games over the years.  They never go out of style.

Co-op games are difficult for thirteen and fourteen year olds.  The challenges of identity formation compete with the need to overcome selfishness.  Much of the time, selfishness wins.  

And yet, selfishness is the enemy of authentic living--hope, joy, humility, compassion, sobriety and love.  As my friends in AA would remind all of us, the fundamental problem is "self-will run riot."  We Christians regularly confess that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.  These are two statements of the same problem.

Selfishness wrecks marriages that might otherwise work.  Selfishness ruins companies when a few staff make themselves more important than the good of the whole.  Selfishness takes richly-talented sports teams and turns them into mediocre collections of whiners and excuse-makers.  Selfishness turns churches from communities of compassion into callous clubs for the com

fortable.

Selfishness expresses itself in blame, shame and personal shut-down.  Selfishness turns good, solid communities into emotional battlefields where it is the war of each against each and all against all.  Selfishness makes being right more important than being in relationship.  Selfishness makes me the director of the only drama that matters and all of you must serve as bit players.  Selfishness insists that my perspective is THE perspective, and your life will be better when you get with the program.

Selfishness is the only real enemy.  Selfishness is the Destroyer of Hope.  Selfishness is the Suppressor of Faith.  Selfishness is the Denier of Love.

A former teacher of mine said it often: "Self-absorption is the root of all pathology."  It is simply a paraphrase of good old St. Augustine--that the root problem is curvatus en se, being curved in on ourselves.

In such a twisted position,we die to the person God made us to be.  Selfishness is the only real enemy.