Back in the day, when I was in high school, I heard a sermon on love, and it had the punch line was that we should view ourselves as third in importance, after God and others. Being the clever high-schooler that I was, I wrote “I am 3rd” on my tennis shoes to remind me of the message (and also because tennis shoes cost a lot less back then so writing on them wasn’t a big deal).
Now, getting high schoolers to think of anybody other than themselves is a noble if not perhaps futile cause. However, that message (and hundreds like it that I’ve heard over the years) can overlook an important point about the self and loving others.
Namely, if we want to love other people as much as we can, we probably need to work hard at taking care of and improving ourselves. For several reasons …
1) Leading by example. Somewhere in the universe, there’s a law written down that leadership works best by example. So, if we want to help others, a form of interpersonal leadership, we need to start with ourselves. Without doing this, we’re like parents who smoke telling their children not to—the message just doesn’t transfer.
2) Self-improvement gives us resources. Selfless, sacrificial love takes a lot of emotional work and discipline. We can’t do that if our own lives are in shambles because we just won’t have the inner resources to give others. It’s analogous to putting on our own oxygen mask before helping others in an airplane emergency.
3) Self-improvement gives us skills. When we love others effectively, it’s often in areas that we ourselves have had to work hard in because we have developed skills that can be used for helping others. I’ve heard this referred to as being wounded healers. We help others in areas in which we have felt pain ourselves.
4) We take care of ourselves so that others don’t have to. A common source of pain in our lives is our loved ones not effectively taking care of themselves because it means that we have to do it for them. We bear significant costs when a loved one doesn’t take care of their health, manage their own finances, pursue healing for mental illness and, in general, live an effective life. In our own selfishness, we can think that taking care of ourselves is only about ourselves, but it is not. We manage our own lives to lessen the burden we place on others.
