Last week I was asked to be the speaker at a camp that was being run by my coworker. I didn't want to. I actually kind of like public speaking, but public speaking about the things of God has always been something I've avoided if I could. And so I had, at least up until then.
My wife, of course, has been saying I should do something like this for nearly as long as we've been married. And then my boss suggested to my coworker that maybe I would be a good speaker for his camp. And then it turns out there's no money in the budget to hire a speaker anyway and I'm already on the payroll and nobody else really wants to do it either and, well, there's this little part of me that actually kind of wants to do it to and so it was just a matter of time. I pretended to be "considering" it for as long as I could so at least I didn't have to feel committed and then gave in.
It went well. It went really well, actually. And, after I had pushed through the agonizing torture of preparing a talk (someone once likened it to birth pains and while I won't know those personally I think its a good analogy), I even kind of enjoyed it.
I bring this up because yesterday I read Donald Miller's blog and the article was entitled "The Best Writing Advice I’ve Ever Received". You should read it for yourself because its as well written as any of Don's stuff, but I'll sum it up for you now: Love your reader.
Now if I had read that a month ago, I think I would have thought it was a great piece of advice and stuck it in my Reservoir of Wise Things I Heard Someone Say One Time. But it was yesterday, and it hit me a little differently. See, those talks I did for that camp were on the topic of Love being the greatest commandment. And I took the opportunity to go into detail about what it actually means to love and how hard it is to love. I'll sum up my talks for you too: Love means dying to yourself.
So this idea has been simmering in my mind for nearly 24 hours now. To be a good writer (or speaker) I need to die to myself if it means my readers and listeners will benefit. Which is true. I never actually want to write, I only want to have written. And those 2 days spent preparing my talks in earnest were torture. There were so many things I wanted to do besides locking myself in an empty meeting room and hashing my way through what is a much more difficult topic that you'd expect and making it relevant to people 20 years younger than myself. It may sound a little melodramatic, but for those two days I felt like a part of me was dying. The part that didn't want to work this hard, the part that didn't want to be embarrassed if I messed up, the part that remembered the critical comments I received on my sermons back in college, the part that always harbors that flicker of doubt that I actually know anything about anything.
Like I said, the talks went very well. The kids went home after the final talk and actually shared their hearts with each other in a way that their leaders were still in awe over at breakfast the next morning. I have to be honest when I say that I was a little surprised by the results of it. I only share it here because it still seems like something that happened to someone else rather than to me. But maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. Isn't it written somewhere that love never fails? And that what greater love can there be than that someone dies for someone else?
And so I come to the reason I started writing this particular piece in the first place. I was contentedly reading my book, drinking my tea and waiting for my wife to come home. But in the back of my mind I just kept remembering my mother calling me nearly every time she reads my blog to tell me how much it meant to her. How Jesse comments on nearly every post and has always been an encouragement to me. How I hardly ever write anymore even though it seems like it brings other people such joy. How all I really wanted to do right then was just read my book and drink my tea. Getting up and turning on the computer felt just a little like death.
So I shall leave you with this question. It is actually the same question I posed to my campers just last week, though I am only just now realizing that I have been asking it of myself ever since then. What is it that stands between you and being a loving person? What part of you needs to die so that you can bring joy to someone else?
I haven't fully nailed it down for myself just yet, but I am confident in this: that there is One who will not fail to complete my transformation from the selfish person I am now to the loving person I was meant to be. Even if he has to do it one small little death at a time.