Being kind to ourselves

At Hilton Church this morning.  Duncan touched on the three lectionary passages – Matthew 5:1-12 (the ‘Beatitudes’); 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, with its focus on Jesus in whom our deepest needs are met; and Micah 6:1-8.) Duncan’s theme was the centrality of Jesus, and the challenge to live lives focussed on Jesus. There is a great freedom in realising that in Jesus, all our needs are met. 

From the Beatitudes, Duncan drew out three aspects of Christ-focussed living. The call to humility (Matthew 5:3-5); the call to a passionate embrace of righteousness and justice (6, 8); the call to show love to others (v7, 9), principles which are summed up in Micah 6:8:

He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

This was powerful, but what spoke to me most at the service were some words in Duncan’s opening prayer, asking that we might learn not just to be kind to others, but ‘to be kind to ourselves without being selfish’, and a later comment in the sermon that ‘God wants us to be happy.’ (The ‘blessed’ of the beatitudes means simply, ‘Happy’)

It seems to me that some of us, myself included, find it difficult to be ‘kind to ourselves.’ We don’t rest, and take time to unwind because we have an insistent sense that we should always be doing, always be active, and it seems to us that there is always more to do.  Often this is linked with a sense of our own worthlessness – we cover up our inner emptiness with activism, and delude ourselves that the way to find fulfilment is through achieving. And some of us occasionally torture ourselves with thoughts of our guilt and inadequacy. Why do we say we know how to be kind to others, but treat ourselves so atrociously?

It’s good to be reminded that we are valued, precious, treasured because God has set his heart on us. We don’t need to persuade God to like us – God already likes us more than we will ever know. What we need to learn is to like ourselves, despite all the mess in our lives. And as we learn that God likes us despite it all, so we learn to like ourselves, and as we learn to like ourselves so we realise all the more that God likes us.

To be truly happy is to know that God likes us, that nothing is beyond God’s willingness to forgive, and that we can depend utterly on God. And in that happiness, that blessedness we find the freedom to be kind to ourselves – to think well of ourselves while not denying our failings; to set aside time for reflection and reading and leisure and fun; to identify the things we are called to do and leave the rest to other people.

(Of course none of this is easy. The need to be ‘kind to ourselves’ can become an excuse for selfishness. In the course of a busy day it’s hard to differentiate the essential from the peripheral. And that’s why this being kind to ourselves stuff, like all our living, must be done in partnership with the Wisdom of Christ.)

And the lovely thing is that as we are kind to ourselves, so we become the kind of people who are able to be truly kind to others, focussing on them, and not on our own agendas. 

Perhaps at times we are so busy doing things for others, that we don’t realise that what they want more than anything else is for us to stop, and listen, and share ourselves, and journey with them on our mutual pilgrimage of justice, and mercy and Christ-focussed humility