Thoughts On Self and Selfishness

Today was quite a hectic day. My mother went to a local Target store and while transferring her purchases into her car, she inadvertently left her purse behind in her shopping cart. She didn't discover the problem until she met up with me, and I drove her back to see if we could retrieve it. Unfortunately, twenty-five minutes had elapsed and someone else had beat us to the cart and her purse. When she checked with a young woman at customer services she was told that no one had turned in a purse.

The afternoon was spent canceling credit cards, checks and considering having locks re-keyed. I had hoped that someone would leave a message on her answering machine telling her that they had her purse, and while checking that out three hours later, I decided to call the store again. After some checking, a young guy told me that her purse had indeed been turned in to lost and found.

A quick trip out there revealed that almost everything she left was intact, save some cash. She had $260 in her checkbook, and $160 of it was missing. The thief missed a crisp $100 bill that sort of stuck to the back of her checks. The first two times she fanned through her checkbook, even she missed it. It ticked me off that someone would steal from my mother, but she has a different attitude.

She said that whoever took the $160 must really have needed it, and after all, she tempted them by leaving her purse out there. If you could see the look on my face you would know that I disagreed with her. Technically, she may have indeed accidentally provided a source of temptation, but the example we have in Christ Jesus is that no temptation has overtaken us except what is common to man, and the simple way out would have been not to rip off my mother. Still, she insisted that $160 was not too bad all in all. "After all," she said, "I was going to give $100 of that to you." I laughed so hard that I had to take my glasses off in order to wipe my eyes. I must say, her attitude about the whole thing was much better than mine.

Learned something about attitude assessment from Mom today.