Debt Collection

January 15, 2010 at 9:57 am (Thoughts on Living Life)

In our society, we have these phrases. Things like:

“You deserve better”

“I don’t deserve this”

“Don’t you get what you deserve?”

I’ve comet to conclude that these kinds of things are poisonous to our living.

Granted, depending on your worldview, there are certain things that we deserve simply by existing, such as food, water, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness; but let me ask you this:

Who told you that you deserved such things? Rather, who told you that you deserved anything at all?

How does the world work like that? If you’re a Christian, how does God even work like that?

If you don’t believe in God, where did you get the idea that everything has to “balance out” somehow? Certainly can’t be personal experience; if you take a tally of “bad” and “good” things that happened to people (and were somehow able to assign a quantifiable value of “badness” and “goodness” to them), you wound find that it does not balance out perfectly or even close to perfectly. Maybe with a few people, but those few people certainly don’t justify the system of “karma”. The truth is, bad things and good things happen to people in “unfair” ways. There’s no way around this.

If you do believe in God, then where do you get the idea that you deserve anything at all? If you’re a Christian, you likely believe we were once sinners, deserving of nothing but death. You likely also believe that Jesus came and took on that punishment for our sinfulness all upon himself, since He was completely blameless and could totally do that. Therefore, we’re now justified by God’s mercy and grace and forgiveness because He saw fit to send His son to pave the way for us.

Figuring that, where do you get that idea that you deserve anything at all?

As a side note, Pat Robertson, a well-renowned “Christian”, is known for making comments about natural disasters being God’s direct punishment upon the sections of the world they hit, directly saying or not-so-subtly implying that they “deserved it and I told you so” (the most recent of which are his comments on the Haiti situation). I’d like to take this time to say that Mr. Robertson is an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and is actually doing more harm to God’s Kingdom than help. In essence, I’m not with this guy.

The way I see it:

Asking for things from God is completely ok and even encouraged; He’s a great, merciful, and loving God who loves giving gifts and other things to His children who ask for them. He loves blessing us because He loves seeing us happy. (He doesn’t always give us good things because He values our growth more than that…that’s an entirely different discussion).

Therefore, asking for blessings and gifts is good and healthy.

But this whole attitude that we deserve anything is (in my humble opinion) absolutely ridiculous.

What’s the solution to this problem?

Through thinking on this topic and going through the process of realizing that I didn’t deserve anything, what came out of that was a severe and abounding sense of gratitude. I became more and more grateful for the things that I had and that God had blessed me with.

This doesn’t have to be the same exact way for you, but I think adopting a sense of gratitude easily dispels any sense of entitlement you may have to anything.

I suppose if I had more time I could elaborate on why the sense of entitlement is so “very, very bad”, but I have to go to work now and can’t. Boo hoo 😦