TFD: Holding Serve

It’s been quite awhile since my last post – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gone quite this long without disgorging something. In that time I’ve had ample opportunity to think about my favorite subjects, including of course me.

While I was pretty busy in the intervening weeks – including all my annual tasks connected to my fantasy baseball league; the beginning of both major league and Little League baseball; Holy Week; and the yearly Income Tax Ordeal – I don’t know that I was honestly too busy to write. In some ways it felt mostly like I didn’t have that much to say… maybe that’s an indication that I’ve already said everything worthwhile (I have been at this for more than five years!), or maybe at a deeper level I’m just not all that interesting.

There is for sure one aspect of my cosmopolitan, jet-set, on-the-go existence that I ponder quite often; I’ve hesitated to write about it because there are so many ways it can come out badly, but maybe if I can cross it off the list, something else will take its place.

I think that, constitutionally, I’m as selfish as the average person. I can confess – since my family never reads this – that if I bring an especially delicious treat in the house, I tend to store it in the most inconspicuous spot I can find. I’m not saying hide, exactly – OK, I did hide that 3.5 lb bag of peanut M&Ms… but I swear that was for everyone else’s protection… sort of. But I’m big enough to admit that I don’t usually call attention to such items either. In fact, I’m big enough to do most anything, since I quite often eat all the treats myself.

So what I’m getting at is that I certainly don’t see myself as Gandhi or Mother Teresa or anything. But there is no getting around the fact that in the structure of my daily life, I take on the role of a servant as much as any other role.

I have written about this before, and I’m sure it looks from some angles like I’m sitting here faux-modestly and stretching up my neck to receive a reassuring pat on the head. Hey, I wouldn’t put it past me to be a trifle mixed in my motivations. But I think mostly I’m just holding it up to the light and turning it around and trying to understand what it is. If it’s an ego issue at all, it’s probably more related to thinking that I can make it interesting to anyone else.

In fact, I think that if anything I’m finally starting to understand just how not-applause-worthy it all is. If I sort of cross-reference my life with Scripture, what I think I understand is that far from being up for the Nobel Prize in the husband/father category, it may be that I’m just meeting basic expectations (if that, even). After all, it says in Ephesians that husbands and wives are to submit themselves to one another; while that passage is often taken to mean something more like “obey”, I wonder if it’s not closer to the idea that in a marriage each partner may at times, or frequently, need to put aside individual ambitions for the good of the other.

So when I get right down to it, I understand that when I defer -- or even extinguish, so to speak -- following my more immediate desires, I don't get to take a bow. I have to say, I find that... really annoying. I like getting credit for stuff, and I love looking like the good guy. Instead I'm supposed to pull a Joe Friday -- "Just doing my job, ma'am."

Carrying it a little further, of course, I run smack into Philippians 2:

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

⁶ Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant...

So I apparently don't win the prize; all I get is the home version of the game...