The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

Lately, I’ve been stressed and feeling quite down. I’ve been thinking a lot about myself – how I need to find a graduate job, how I need to find more time to read, how I need to use my time more productively. It feels like my focus has been restricted to only me and my own problems. All these thoughts have made me feel quite overwhelmed and have consumed my mind. I feel like I no longer have the energy for other things outside of myself.

Let me ask you the questions I’ve been asking myself:

How many times do you think about yourself in a day?

How often do you relate things back to yourself?

For many of us, the answer is countless. From when we wake up to when we go to sleep. Even when we are dreaming, we are constantly thinking about ourselves. This can be study, work, or relationships, we are constantly turning it back to ourselves and how it will affect us - our pride, our ego, our self-image and our self-esteem in life. We always seem to have a ‘me’ variable in every equation we do – whether it be which movie to watch, which person to talk to, or which person to follow on social media. When we really think about it. We are very self-centric people, driven by the motivation for oneself.

Have you ever had a moment when you feel like decisions are easier to make, behaviors are easier to change, and attitudes are easier to adjust if we can just take the ‘me’ factor out of the equation? How you can easily talk to your parents with respect if you take your pride out of the equation, or how you can easily make a new friend if you take your self-image out. It seems more often than not, putting yourself into the equation just makes things more complicated than it needs to be. Our ego and pride acts as a barricade.

Then how can we change it? We need to adopt a mindset of humility and self-forgetfulness. We need to take ourselves out of the equation. As Timothy Keller explains:

True gospel-humility means I stop connecting every experience, every conversation, with myself. In fact, I stop thinking about myself. The freedom of self-forgetfulness. The blessed rest that only self-forgetfulness brings. - Keller, Timothy. The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness (Kindle Locations 236-238). 10Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Just imagine the freedom it can bring if we can stop thinking and worrying about ourselves all the time. You can start enjoying and doing things for what they are.  No longer are they just for your self-image or ego.

Self-forgetfulness does not mean you need to stop caring for yourself. Of course, you need to provide for yourself as well – in food, housing, career, friendship etc. These are things we must think about. What self-forgetfulness teaches us is to abandon those that are sinful – pride, ego, self-importance, and self-sufficiency out of our decision-making process and replace it with a gospel-humility. As John Piper wrote in his Letter to an Incomplete, insecure Teenager:

I marvelled, and I prayed that I would stop wasting so much time and so much emotional energy thinking about myself. Yuck, I thought. What am I doing? Why should I care what people think about me? I am loved by God Almighty, and he is making a bona fide high-hopping frog out of me.

This journey to self-forgetfulness is long. It requires us to take it one step out a time. I encourage you, the next time you make a decision, let's take yourself out of the equation and replace it with God. 

This blog is inspired by Timothy Keller's The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. If you are interested in this topic and like to learn more, you can purchase an eBook version of his book for $1.99 on Amazon.