Is it me?
Our daughter has lived in Japan for the last eight years. She married a Japanese man, has learned the language (this is the girl who tore up her French O Level paper) and loves the life there. Apart from one area. When anything goes wrong in the country it’s always the foreigners who get the blame. If it wasn’t for the foreigners everything would be okay. Sound familiar? Now this article is not about immigration which is a complex issue, but rather about an attitude that can prevail in all humans at times and certainly in me. There’s a problem, so who’s to blame? In my own life for many years I very rarely thought that the person at fault was me. It was always someone else. During the eighties I went through a dizzying array of jobs which I always found exciting to start with, but after a while it didn’t meet my expectations and I moved on. The problem was always the employer and never me.
The bible always insists that I take responsibility for my actions. Part of this responsibility is engaging in what the Bible calls “repentance”. The word means literally to turn around and go in a different direction. It involves acknowledging my own faults, my own weaknesses, my own shame and then turning to God. The amazing thing about this is that God stands eager to forgive and give me a new start with Jesus. The other amazing thing is that by doing this a whole load comes off my mind. I feel free for the first time.
I of course realise that not everything that happens to us is our fault. Injustice and hurt happens to all of us in our lives. On the other hand if we are always blaming others for what goes wrong in our lives, it maybe worth just asking the question: Is it them or is it me?