You worry about yourself, let me worry about Peter.

This phrase, or something like it, was fairly common in the Hellmuth household. Peter was my young brother and that phrase, often times, was directed right at me. And rightfully so. I was pretty obsessed with making sure he wasn't ever doing anything wrong and, more than that, just making sure he was doing things my way. The way I thought was best or, more often than that, simply not annoying to me.

In the past couple years I have found myself coming back to this idea of worrying about myself. I had never thought about it much after I hit high school. But, I began to realize, after graduating from college, just how difficult it is to keep myself in check. Just little ol' me. I'm not talking about usual day to day kinds of things like paying the bills, or holding down a job. That stuff comes relatively easy. What I find more difficult is living a moral life. It seems that the more bad habits I do away with, the more aware of more bad things in myself I become. And the more aware I am that it was never really me who got rid of those bad habits of mine, it was God giving me the strength to do it in ways I have never thought possible. I begin to realize that it is almost all I can do in my life, just to make sure that I am living a somewhat moral life. It's really hard!

Just a quick note. I don't want to sound legalistic here. I know that I'll never be perfect. And I know that my salvation does not hinge on my attempts at morality. But, it's still the goal that God wants us to aim for.

Why this thought of worrying about myself instead of others? I have been noticing an ugly tendency within the church for Christians to worry about others, when they should be worrying about themselves. Shoot, I fall into it all the time, so I write this with much hesitation and humility (hopefully!). I think this idea of working out our own "salvation," so to speak, is extremely relevant for Christians today. I think that this could mean it's time we stop trying to make all the non-Christians in America stop acting like Christians. It could mean that we forgive people who wrong us in some way more quickly. It could mean that we stop trying to figure out the moral problem with other people, our church, or our country and start trying to figure out the problems within our own hearts. When I start looking at all the areas of imperfection in my life, I find I just don't have time to think about how to solve the problems in other people's lives.

So that's it.

My extremely ironic post.

Do you get the irony in this? It's me telling other people not to worry about wrong things other people are doing when they should just be worrying about themselves. Thus... becoming the very thing I hate.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!