I feel like I had a long and arduous weekend. I’m not really sure it was all that arduous, and when you consider the type of things that the word arduous usually is used for it really wasn’t that bad:
requiring great exertion; laborious; difficult: an arduous undertaking.
requiring or using much energy and vigor; strenuous: making an arduous effort.
hard to climb; steep: an arduous path up the hill.
hard to endure; full of hardships; severe: an arduous winter.
It seems to me that we, yes, we, have a way of over-exaggerating the negative… in anything! The vast majority of people in this world are self-optimists and other-pessimists, when it comes to our own pain. That sounds really stupid, but, follow me here:
Our own pain is the worst thing ever… our own waiting in a line is just as bad (or worse), seriously, as someone else losing a friendship.
Person 1: “Man, I messed up and hurt a friend… I don’t know if I’ll ever talk to them again.”
Person 2: ”Yeah, my day sucked too… I waited in line for hours behind this guy who kept asking for 1/2 a biscuit at KFC.”
Person 1: “… I hate you.”
Perhaps the term really should be over-exaggerators. There I said it, that’s what I am… maybe whiner too.
I’ve really noticed this in myself, as I try to one up people who tell me how bad their day was. Oh yeah, How about THIS?
Then I read this:
Philippians 2:4-8
4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
How arrogant and stupid I am…
Please help me stop.
If you don’t, I’ll tell you how bad my day was… 
I’m praying for God to help me stop, but I’m going to need your help as well. God works through his people also, and I need your help.
Thanks,
Isaiah
