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I am a pastor and a clinical psychotherapist. My life's passion is defining healthiness from a human perspective and paralleling it to the holiness of God, divine perspective. Shifting perspectives creates a paradigm that is alongside of rather than over and against. The parakalein of God and the paradoxes of humanity are redefined. Humanity is all about winning and yet we are losing ground everywhere. Divinity is all about letting go of the desire to win and the fear of loss. The Divine embraces the world with loving care regardless of anything.

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Chosen implies You are Special

Posted by Don Paine

Are you chosen?

Do you feel chosen?

When you are selected for a team, a position, at place do you feel more important or the most important .   So the competition imperative of our society marches to the drum of "I am special" in the midst of an inner voice that says, "I am not special".  Who or what are we trying to prove to whom or by what?

In a book by Henri J.M. Nouwen entitled "The Beloved", he argues that you are chosen by God.  He adds that the fact you are not chosen does not mean that you are not good only that someone else is a little better.  The fact that you are chosen does not mean that others are not good, only that you are a little better (p.54-55).

Yet the fact that someone is a little better than me or that I am a little better than someone else perpetuates the secret enemy of contradictory competitiveness.  Competitiveness that has to be better or accept that someone else is better continues the comparativeness that contradicts the nature of all things.  The nature of all things is that everything fits together in a complimentary way not in a competitive way. It is when competition is about contradicting the other or co-opting the other that the seeds of negating or accepting, deflating or inflating take center stage.  When the seeds of complementariness take over something changes inside a person which makes it not about better but complementary.

So I agree with Henri Nouwen in that we are all chosen.  I simply think that when we are not chosen that it is not because someone else is better that we are but that someone else in some particular way seems better to another but only a compliment about a small arena not that I am not center stage.  I am chosen even when I am not.  Even when I am not chosen in a particular sense does not mean I am not chosen in a real sense.

I therefore would add to his words:
The fact that you are not chosen does not mean you are not chosen just that someone else thinks someone else is better than you in that particular way, at that particular time, and for that particular purpose. No rejection is present here. The fact that you are chosen does not make other not good or not make you chosen only that you are a little better in a particular way, for a particular time and a particular purpose.

The fact that you are chosen does not mean that others are not chosen it means that in some particular way for some particular purpose you are chosen while others are chosen of another particular purpose and way.  Being chosen is a compliment to being chosen.  Being chosen does not compete with others who are equally chosen.  Hostilities and arguments between groups of people who seemingly think they are God's chosen people or chosen messengers, would cease in the wake of depreciating others in false humility or self-rejection or appreciating in false confidence or arrogance.

When Jesus said you have not chosen me but I have chosen you it was not to feed their egos that need no inflating nor to starve their egos that need reassurance it was to make it clear that God choses to chose everyone and everything to live in a complimentary wholeness of life and love.  We live in a competitive deterioration of our wholeness as individuals and as a community.

I am not better.  I am chosen.  You are chosen. You are not better.  If we can hold those truths in complimentary community all competition will serve to make us better.  Competition would not be used for us to act like we are better or worse than anyone else.  Good competition brings out the best in people.  Self serving competition brings out the worst in all of us.

We are complimentarily chosen to be the people of God as individuals chosen by God for love and collectively chosen as a community.


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