Good morning, everyone. Most of us have had that bad breakup, like after a bad relationship blew up and ended. Maybe we had a bad period in a relationship which led to that bad breakup. We know what it’s like to have come up with some way to end it as gracefully as possible.
The song I picked for this morning is called “So Long Self”. It takes some of those cheesy breakup lines you might have heard, or even used, and plays with them. Instead of breaking up with someone else, it’s breaking up with ourselves for the love of God. It’s using these breakup lines to talk about giving up selfishness, the love for ourselves, and turning that love over to God, then giving of ourselves to others.
What the song is doing is show us how we can follow those two great commandments I talked yesterday. The two great commandments come from Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The true love of God leads to service. That’s why Our Lord connected these two great commandments: when we truly love God, we will truly desire to love our neighbor. This is probably one of the greatest challenges we have with the Gospel message. The message of the Gospel is that we are not to think of our needs or wants, but to place the needs of others and the love of God above our desires.
This flies in the face of human pride. Our human pride says that we want to be the greatest. We want to be the one who is better than anybody else in what ever it is we do. We want to be like the disciples in the Gospel of Mark, where they actually debated over who was the greatest, right after hearing from Our Lord that he would be sacrificed and die for our sins, and in response, the disciples debated who was the greatest. Our Lord answered, “If anyone would be the greatest, he must be the last of all and the servant of all.”
This is following the example of Our Lord Himself. As Mark also tells us, He came “not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” This is opposite of what our human pride would say. Our pride would say that the greatest are those who are being served, not those who serve.
To overcome this human pride, we need to give of ourselves out of love of God and love of neighbor. And we need to be willing to say, as the song says, so long self!
(Post reflection music: MercyMe – So Long Self)
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