Jacki C King

 Psalm 115:1 Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory,
for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!

So things have been incredibly busy lately. A good busy, but still having to cram semester tests in with packing, moving, starting a new job, and a new church has left me running on adrenaline for the past couple days.

Yesterday on the way to church I was talking to Josh and I used a new word that I had learned from the news earlier in the week. Narcissist. Many of the broadcasters in the news had been calling the murderer in the Virginia Tech shooting a narcissist as explaining it to him being selfish. I thought it was kind of an odd title to put on someone, but hey the news is the news.

So I decided to do some further research into it today as that seems to be the theme running around in my head here lately.

Wikopedia’s Write up says this:

Narcissism describes the character trait of self love.

The word is derived from a Greek myth. Narcissus was a handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus pined away and changed into the flower that bears his name, the narcissus.

Freud believed that some narcissism is an essential part of all of us from birth and was the first to use the term in the reference to psychology.^[1].

Andrew Morrison claims that, in adults, a reasonable amount of healthy narcissism allows the individual’s perception of his needs to be balanced in relation to others^[2].

In psychology and psychiatry, excessive narcissism is recognized as a severe personality dysfunction or personality disorder, most characteristically Narcissistic Personality Disorder, also referred to as NPD.

The terms “narcissism”, “narcissistic” and “narcissist” are often used as pejoratives, denoting vanity, conceit, egotism or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others.

It seems that we are branding a state of mind on this man when in all actuality we can trace many laws that are broken, lives that are lost, feelings that are hurt, to the vary same thing, self love. I can’t help but think about Solomon and his love for gaining more and more and he in the end counts it all as vanity.

I don’t know why I have let this get to me, but it seems like most of others actions, including my own are those based off of circumstances. For some reason people act one way one second and when presented with a different circumstance result in acting the complete opposite way.

Our love and our actions are conditional to our circumstances and to those involved. In sunday school yesterday we were talking about the unconditional love from the Father and how we are to be known by that same love. This narcissism is the exact opposite of the love the father has for us. Not a circumstance-based love that says I will love you in these stipulations. This narcissist mind set shows more that when actions are changed so quickly based on surface qualities that love was not what was motivating, but instead selfishness and hypocrisy.

I fear that those of us that make up the church are nothing more than modern day Greek myths that have fallen in love with the reflection in the pool and we live our lives with a conditional love towards others and trying nothing more than to get certain things out of people instead of giving everything that we have to them.

The world is throwing at us that what we want matters, and in all actuality it doesn’t. It seems that most of us if we look down deep should call ourselves a narcissistic person, and maybe when we come the realization how full of ourselves that we are, we will step away from the pool and instead of looking at a reflection of ouselves, we look at the faces of those that are desperately wanting the unconditional love that we tuck away.

On my way out for lunch I was listening to First Dallas’ easter services that they do all week long. Today they had Warren Samuels as the guest speaker. He started to talk about the question that a lot of people ask when it comes to this time of the year, Easter.

Why would one week before the people be singing Hosannah and throwing down palm leaves and then  a week later be screaming crucify Him. He compared it to a football game. The Saints and the Giants. The only way I remembered that was thinking of David and Goliath for some reason. Anyway, he set up the story to where if the Saints were to win they would go on to play in the NFL playoffs. He said before the game that the Saints fans were screaming and excited and in full support of their football team. Within minutes of the game the Giants had already scored their first touchdown and ultimately lost the game.

The fans attitudes had changed based on what Samuels says, the Saints performance.  They turned for esteeming to belittleing, faithful to unfaithful, confident to defeated all because of the performance of the team.

Now back to Jesus terms: The Jews wanted Christ to be someone else. They thought a man wo was strong and powerful would help them with the Roman power that was over them, but there was a different plan than what they thought was suitable.

How often do we just as the jews back in the day, base our christianity and our beliefs and whether we love Christ that day or not as subject to the performance and the circumstances around us. As much as it is an inward struggle for me to not make church, or really my life about me, I constantly see how God’s children whine and complain because they haven’t seen things played out the way we want to see them played out.

Ultimately, despite the want for the Jews to have this reigning military lord of a messiah God worked out His plan so that we despite being stuck on ourselves could have an opportunity through grace to have a unconditional relationship with our Heavenly Father.

How pathetic we are, to treat life, to treat God like a football game.