Outside Ourselves

THEM > (part two)

I want to commence with a story you may have heard before. If you’ve heard it, great, it is worth reading twice. If this is the first time you’ve ever heard this story, I hope your heart is open to it, and I pray God speaks to you through it.

It’s the 1970s. A 30-something man makes his way across the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s passed by pedestrians and cyclists, and steps around tourists taking pictures of Alcatraz, Angel Island, and the channel of water below that runs between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. He gazes up at the reddish-orange towers soaring above, and then climbs over the bridge’s four-foot safety railing. He steps out onto a 32-inch wide beam known as “the chord,” pauses, takes one last long look out at the bay, and then jumps. His body plummets 220 feet and violently hits the water at 75 mph. The impact breaks his ribs, snaps his vertebrae, and pulverizes his internal organs and brain. The Coast Guard soon arrives to recover his limp, lifeless body.

When the medical examiner later located and searched the jumper’s sparse apartment, he found a note the man had written and left on his bureau. It read:

“I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.”

–The Art of Manliness

Only one smile. Just one.

If you ever begin to think that you can’t change the world, or that your life doesn’t matter, think back to this story where one smile had the power to save a life. One smile had the power to change someone’s entire world.

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “If I was on that bridge, I definitely would’ve smiled. If only I would’ve been there.” And you know, maybe you would have smiled. I like to think that I would’ve smiled too. But the reality of this story is that out of everyone he passed on his way to the bridge that day, not one smiled.

I wonder if anyone on the bridge that day read this story. Even if they ever stumbled across this story, I bet you they would also think, “If only I was on that bridge, I definitely would’ve smiled. If only I would’ve been there.”

When we center our lives around ourselves, we miss the people who are about to jump. We become trapped inside ourselves. It is time for us to get outside ourselves instead of being obsessed with ourselves.

Philippians 2:1-11:

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours Jesus Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

The reality is that you are a “self,” but selfishness is a choice. We can choose to let go of ourselves and be selfless. It’s certainly not an easy choice to be selfless, but it is a choice.

So, wonder if we decide this is a choice we want to make? How do we do it? How do we truly get outside ourselves?

The only way to truly get outside ourselves is to have the mind of Christ. Jesus fully emptied himself of every ounce of glory he had, and all of it was for us, even though we were deep within our own selfish minds. He completely humbled himself to reach us. He even died for us. He lived a righteous life.

Here’s the key my friends: we need to become nothing to gain everything.

We have to let go of ourselves. Our selfishness is tearing us apart. We’ve got to empty ourselves of everything this world has filled us with. In return, Christ will fill us, and he will make us new. Christ can be all we need if we let him. We’ve just got to get outside ourselves and let him in.

“Humanity is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

-C.S. LEWIS