Runny Eggs and Ketchup

Late one night a while back I found myself sitting with a friend of mine eating breakfast for dinner at George Webb, (the waffle house of the upper midwest). I began by complaining about a bunch of people who rubbed me the wrong way that day. I talked about how I had been wronged and how they were so self-centered and egotistical. And while I was complaining about them to my friend, I began to notice that he was dipping his over easy eggs, with the centers all runny into a huge pile of ketchup. “Gross!” I thought to myself, “What’s wrong with this guy? How can he live like that? Who raised him so wrongly that he would feel that this behavior was socially acceptable? And I began to think of Bible verses that I might show him to prove that what he was doing was ungodly. And then it hit me – maybe the people around me aren’t the problem at all. Maybe my attitude is the problem.

The Apostle Paul says we should take on the same attitude that Jesus took on – that being God he did not consider equality with God something to be exploited but that he took on the nature of a servant. But I struggle with this because I want others to perform at high levels around me. But maybe I need to let go of this.
Lately I've been struggling with being highly critical of people around me. This is one of the least attractive things a person can do. Not only do you look like a huge jerk, you begin to look for faults in people and then make lists of these faults. In the final analysis, you begin to define people by whatever you perceive their weaknesses to be. This is what social workers call a "deficit model." It is incredibly destructive to our personal relationships and according to my calculations there is only one person that can stand up to such critique and I ain’t Him. I’ve been asking God to remove this flawed thinking and he sent me some comfort from a 600 year old dead guy.

I've been reading the Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis, and he says that judging others like this is never very fruitful. Instead he sees great spiritual value in taking the effort which we normally employ to criticize others and use that energy to judge ourselves.

This is not a popular approach in our culture. We tend to think of being critical of ourselves as having low self-esteem. I don’t think this is exactly the case. It takes a certain level of courage to honestly take a look at our lives. And this level of courage seems to come from the Holy Spirit. So that we aren’t trying to wallow in self-inflicted guilt but rather to ask God how we can change in order to love others like Jesus does. It is positive movement rather than negative – it is looking at our lives and asking God to build us up into his image. And it is a normal part of the Christian life. The good news is that God is all about change. He loves us where we are and he loves us into movement toward Him. Perhaps you might take a moment today to inventory how you are treating others and ask God to give you a vision of how you might love them like Jesus – even the ones who dip runny eggs into ketchup.