Who Is Looking Out For You?

I wrote this in my personal journal and wanted to share it here. I am going to redact the name of the book I was reading because this isn't a criticism of the book. I made a note of the book for my own future reference. It's also not about the book as I've read some good things in there and I'm only on page 27 or so. The thing is that I have heard stuff along these lines from pastors and others in the church. For me, this usually sounds like: put others before you and ignore yourself and your needs. As I share the Bible verses below, we are told to love our neighbor as ourselves. 

 I left to go and read and was making notes on some things as in one instance, I made a note on the side that suppression is not good; lack of ease of expression is dis-ease as she was saying not to vent emotion.  but there is something I disagreed with so strongly that I wrote “I disagree…” before the rest of the stuff  and wanted to write here:

God wants us to be sensitive to the feelings and needs of others and less sensitive to our own feelings and needs. 

[redacted], Page 26.

My notes just below it:

I disagree. That is self-neglect. 

We are responsible for our own lives and all aspects of it. We aren't to ignore ourselves. 

Love your neighbor AS Yourself.

This is on the side as I ran out of space:

Not only your needs but also…. 

We aren’t to ignore ourselves.

I have spoken up on these verses when they’ve come up in our group. I like to point out that in my opinion, the Bible doesn’t teach self-neglect. I feel this is what got me in some of the hot waters I’ve found myself in: Self-neglect. Being taught to ignore the self and acknowledge others so that I ignored my needs, feelings, wants and what not. 

The question is: if we are to give an account of our lives, how do we do so when we ignore ourselves and focus on the feelings and needs of others? 

Are we even responsible for other people’s feelings since it is their body, their lives and we don’t even know what God is doing in their lives or what purpose he created them for?

Isn’t that a huge burden to be responsible for another person’s feelings?

Are we even able to respond to that? I mean, do we have the ability to respond to that? So then do we have a responsibility for the feelings of others?

If we neglect ourselves and our needs, what do we say before God? That we focused on the feelings and needs of others? I mean Adam and Eve and the serpent were all judged for what they did. Does that not teach us to mind our own lives, and what we do, so that we don’t get led astray? After all, Jesus said to see to it that no one deceives you (Matthew 24:4).

Do we not pay attention to our lives knowing that we will account for what we do? Do we have the ability to control what we do? Why then sign up to be responsible for the feelings and needs of others and usually, this is done at the expense of the self. The very self we have been entrusted with is ignored and neglected. 

A lot of times, people throw out the word “sacrificially” and tend to point out the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to say that we should also offer ourselves for others. First of all, Christ was without sin. The sheep and animals used for offerings by those priests were without blemish. We are sinners saved by grace. I don’t even think we are sacrificial material. Also know that Paul asked us to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God (Romans 12:1). It wasn’t the kind of sacrifice meant to have someone burden and kill themselves for the predatory needs and demands of another. Despots and demagogues thrive on these. They realize that there are people who are willing to give themselves sacrificially and what they do is take. 

On the previous page of the book, as I read 

It is not a matter of just thinking, “I shouldn’t be feeling this…”

[redacted] Page 25

I made a note there that:

Cain felt jealous and angry. It’s what he did that was sin – murder.

“In your anger do not sin”

Feel but don’t sin. 

It’s also the page where I wrote that Suppression isn’t good. My focus here is on the self-neglect preached and advocated by some christians. If we are to give an account for our lives, shouldn’t we guard it with all due diligence (Proverbs 4:23)? Paul tells us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling ( Philippians 2:12)

If we aren’t concerning ourselves with our lives and are looking out for the needs and feelings of others, who is looking out for our needs and feelings? 

Well, the book goes on to say,

He wants us to deposit ourselves into His hands and let him take care of us while we are practicing being kind and compassionate and sensitive to other people.

Page 27

Now that I write it out, my question is:

If we are to deposit ourselves in His hands and let Him take care of us…, does it not follow that others should also deposit themselves into His hands so he takes care of them? 

How do we know who falls on which side? I mean who falls on the side where they deposit themselves into the hands of God and who falls on the side where others are responsible for them? How do we determine who gets what?

Why is what is good for the goose not also good for the gander? 

Since we are to deposit ourselves in His hands, doesn’t it follow that others also need to do the same thing and some of us aren’t to deposit ourselves and then take on the burden and responsibility of others? I mean Christ came to set us free from bondage so isn’t this burden something of a voluntary slavery and therefore bondage of sorts?

If Christ tells us to see to it that no one deceives us, who is seeing to it for us if we are focused on others? Oh wait, We deposit ourselves into his hands but then for others, we are looking out for them. Meanwhile, an earlier portion of the book points out correctly that God doesn’t do everything for us and we have a part to play. So if we neglect ourselves and focus on others, especially for the feelings of others, who is looking out for us? Yes, I know God looks over me but the Bible also lets me understand that God looks and sees everything so that I believe he’s looking over others as well. I read Psalm 145 a few days ago and highlighted this:

The LORD is good to all,

And His tender mercies are over all His works [the entirety of things crated].

Psalm 145:9 AMP

I believe God watches over all his creations including the animals. I don’t want to digress and give examples here. So if we believe we can entrust our lives to God, does it not follow that others can also entrust themselves to Him?

The thing is: Love your neighbor as yourself.

It doesn’t say to love your neighbor and ignore yourself so that in the way that it’s written, it seems to me that you need to love yourself so you can love your neighbor as yourself. If you neglect yourself and your needs and seek out the needs of another, you are being a hypocrite. 

The other verse I think of is the one I partially quoted above:

Let each of you look not only  to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

Philippians 2:4 ESV

To me, it doesn’t say to ignore your needs. Rather, what I read is to look at your own interests and also the interests of others. When the plane is going down, your first focus isn’t securing the mask on another; do yours and also the other person if they haven’t done theirs and need help. Now if your first priority is to put the mask on another, what is the other person doing? For there are some who take advantage of this and expect others to do for them while they do nothing. They have relinquished the responsibility for their lives on others while they live freely without worry or any sort of burden while another worries about them and feels burdened by what they have to do for them. 

Some of us were taught self-neglect from the beginning and we have neglected ourselves in so many ways we don’t even know who we are. We don’t know what we value, what we like or dislike, what we want, what we desire because the focus has been on “others, others, others” at the expense of ourselves. Are those others looking out for you? Because what I’ve come to discover is that people are inherently selfish. Most people, that is. The verse in Philippians 2 makes more sense because as opposed to the natural tendency to consider only your needs, the Apostle encourages them to also consider the interests of others. 

The bottom line is that we have to give an account for our lives. If you take a piece of unripe  orange entrusted to you and put it in a storage locker at the gym and you don’t go there for 6 months, can you give an account for what the orange went through before looking moldy as it does when you look at it 6 months later? Can you say that it went from green to orange and then the skin started to wilt and then it started to smell and the mold started on one end and now, you can’t even tell it’s an orange? In the same way, how can we account for a life we are to ignore and neglect while we focus on the needs and feelings of others? Can we even manage another person’s feelings when they are their own autonomous person? Do we have the ability to do that? Hasn’t that put undue burdens on people who are walking on eggshells around those they don’t want to “provoke” or “agitate” because they fear the kind of emotional response that might come out? 

The question is: Which person is looking out for you?

I have already mentioned that God looks over all of us so my point is that if you are looking out for the needs and feelings of another human, which human is looking out for your needs and feelings?

Yesterday, I was reading the beginning parts of Boundaries, I really wasn’t paying attention and didn’t get anywhere but writing this reminds me of something I read before stopping so I’ll look for it now and share below. Henry Cloud talks about the parable of the Good Samaritan and then shares this modification:

Let’s depart from the familiar story here. Suppose the injured man wakes up at this point in the story and says: “What? You’re leaving?” “Yes, I am. I have some business in Jericho I have to attend to,” the Samaritan replies. “Don’t you think you’re being selfish? I’m in pretty bad shape here. I’m going to need someone to talk to. How is Jesus going to use you as an example? You’re not even acting like a Christian, abandoning me like this in my time of need! Whatever happened to ‘Deny yourself’?”

“Why, I guess you’re right,” the Samaritan says. “That would be uncaring of me to leave you here alone. I should do more. I will postpone my trip for a few days.” So he stays with the man for three days, talking to him and making sure that he is happy and content.

On the afternoon of the third day, there’s a knock at the door and a messenger comes in. He hands the Samaritan a message from his business contacts in Jericho: “Waited as long as we could. Have decided to sell camels to another party. Our next herd will be here in six months.” “How could you do this to me?” the Samaritan screams at the recovering man, waving the message in the air. “Look what you’ve done now! You’ve caused me to lose those camels that I needed for my business. Now I can’t deliver my goods. This may put me out of business! How could you do this to me?”

David Seabury book was the first to help me see this back in 2016. What was helpful was how he used the Bible verse like Love your neighbor as yourself to point it out. In one instance, he pointed out this:

Self-neglect is a form of suicide, a first step in the destruction of one’s nature.

David Seabury (TAOS page 168).

I noticed the verse from the Philippians as I was reading it sometime ago. There have been other books I’ve encountered like The Disowned Self and others like it that have helped me see how individuals neglect themselves. Now that I read what Cloud wrote after copying it here, I realize that it asks the same question I’ve written at the end of this in the sense that who is looking out for the Samaritan’s needs? Was he not responsible for tending to his business? Was he to neglect himself? Or take care of another at the expense of himself? 

My point isn’t that you ignore others; my point is that we have a responsibility to ourselves in that we aren’t to ignore ourselves for we would have to give an account of our lives. Ourselves include not just our body but all that comprises who we are and that includes not just our souls but also our feelings and needs just as our actions are also important. Each single person in the garden was judged. 

The way I have come to see things, my first responsibility is to God and walking in obedience to his commands, the second is to myself and living in a way that honors God so that I can give a good account for my life and then comes others. Some have it backwards. I don’t think we are to uphold others and their feelings at the expense of ourselves. King Saul sacrificed before Samuel  got there because he "Saul realized that his troops were rapidly slipping away (1 Samuel 13:8 NLT). Saul’s focus was on others and what they were doing that he forgot to obey the LORD. 

And Jesus answered them, “See that no one leads you astray.”

Matthew 24:4 ESV

I believe the command is to us, we are the ones responsible for seeing to it that no one leads us astray. Now if we are focused on others and trying to respond to their needs and feelings, who is seeing to it for us that no one leads us astray? Aren’t we responsible for obeying this command? We have been given our lives and we will need to give an account for it. If we are looking to others and ignoring the self, how can we give an account for ourselves? 

So I ask again: who is looking out for you?