CARBON MONOXIDE TO THE SOUL

Man has a strange and perplexing struggle.  We are expected to be ambitious but needed to be humble.  The call for knowledge is profound while the need to walk in meekness is essential.  The traps of ambition and knowledge are the same traps for a hundred other life-dimensions; the potential for ruinous pride.

Pride affects us like a person with bad breath; everyone but the guilty notices it.

Ever since the Fall in the Garden, every self has waged battle to be centered.  Life then shifted from being about the Creator to focusing upon the created.  Thus, in many ways both blatant as well as subtle, men and women have positioned ourselves to be the first to be considered in every circumstance and situation.

I can't say exactly when arrogance began to hit me.  I'm sure it was early for I wanted to be big from the time I was little.  This morning I reflect on my secret discovery as a young man of opening a package of large marshmallows and letting them set for about a week.  Exposed to air, marshmallows become hard like rocks.

When I took the field at our Little League games with a what-seemed-to-be a hefty chaw of obvious tobacco bulging from my eleven year old cheek, I felt I was sure to impress the fans in the stands.  They didn't say, but I felt certain my teammates as well as our coach were duly impressed with my accelerated maturity.  A one pound wad appearing on a fifty-seven pound body had to be nothing less than strikingly
B-I-G.

I was obviously ahead as none of the other guys on the team had begun to chew or smoke.

Just me.

I had basically reached my goal of being more important than others through the simple act of marshmallowing.  (They never did catch on.)

Pride drives us to be foolish, vain, and sometimes downright mean.  We want to be more than we are and if it isn't big marshmallows it's big talk or big purchases or big threats or big....well something bigger than a normal big.

We want lots.  We want things.  We want recognition.  We want more.

Pride stunts meekness.  It keeps humility at bay.  Simply regarding the hunger for owning material items Scott Bessinecker says that life is not measured by how much you own (Lk. 12:15)...Accumulating stuff is carbon monoxide to the soul.  It puts to sleep our spirit and then poisons it.

More.  The more we have...the more we want...the more we need which keeps the carbon monoxide flowing.

We are so saturated in the flesh that our self seems unsatisfiable.

The solution is increasing emphasis in the Spirit.  The transformation is modeled, of course, in Jesus.  Most famous; yet walking among the least with the least.  Accumulation of knowledge, money, position, and fans is vanity...unless such abundance would be totally availed to the kingdom life and not for the self one.

I would race with you to justify my pride of wanting/needing/desiring more...and more...and more.  Yet, I must join the rest of us in checking such a drive for it may be nothing more than experiencing contamination by carbon monoxide to my soul.

God calls us to be dependent upon Him.  And the good news is He will help us get there.  May we effectively find the center of our self nature has yielded to the Holy Spirit of God.