Secrets and Selfishness

I live in a little bitty house right off the campus of Abilene Christian University. It is really only 2 rooms with a bathroom shooting off one and a kitchen shooting off the other. For a single guy like me, it is perfect. I love my house. The only real problem is that I do not have a washer and dryer, so I am forced to either go to the laundromat (which can run upwards of $10 every time I do laundry) or bum off friends.

Needless to say, I bum off friends a lot.

So here is how is normally happens. 9 times out of 10 I will go to Heather MacLeod and Elizabeth Canarsky’s house. They are really cool to let me use their stuff. I even keep my detergent and bleach over at their house. And while I am there I get to catch up on the latest drama and share a little of my own. I have come to really enjoy those times a great deal. They have been good friends to me.

One time when I came over to their house Heather was reading Post Secret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives. She immediately got me hooked. If you haven’t heard of it, you really should check it out. It is a compilation book in which an editor (Frank Warren) placed photocopies of actual postcards sent in to him by people bearing secrets they have kept from everyone in their lives. It is truly remarkable what people have said in these postcards.

Some are funny—like the one person who fantasizes about eating the skittle that has been on the floor at work for a few weeks. Some are happy—like that girl who wrote in saying that when she is with “him” she feels like she can do anything. Some are sad—like the guy who says that he never got over “her.” And some are just scary—like the doctor who admits to fantasizing about cutting him/herself.

If nothing else, this book has really helped me to see that there is a whole world of people out there that are dealing with a multiplicity of things. There are goofy, funny, sad, and depressed people with whom we come into contact everyday. There is no telling what someone close to you is going through.

There is life, good and bad, outside of my own. Why do I have trouble seeing that?

I guess that seems so trivial and shouldn’t need to be said. But I need it. I really do. I need to be reminded that I am not the center of the universe. I need to see that other people are living their lives, and are struggling just as much (if not more) as I am. Isn’t that what Jesus intended all along?

Anne Lamott, in her wonderful book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (102), puts is quite well:

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

Perhaps that would do me/us a lot of good to remember. In fact, I know it would.