Rooting Out Our Own Greed

Joshua Becker is a Christian who focuses on a lifestyle of simplicity on his blog Becoming Minimalist. He wrote a book called Simplify: 7 Guiding Principles to Help Anyone Declutter Their Home and Life as well as several other books on this topic. What is refreshing about Joshua’s take on this subject matter is the way that he highlights that a simpler lifestyle can be freeing and can help us to better focus on what is really meaningful in our lives, and he avoids the temptation to be legalistic or rigid.

On his blog today he challenged readers who are angry or discouraged about corporate greed and selfishness to start by examining the ways that they themselves have been selfish or greedy. While these qualities can seem obvious to us in corporations or those around us,  it’s sometimes difficult to recognize them in our own hearts.

From the blog post:

Recognizing the negative effects of corporate selfishness is easy. But identifying our own selfish motivation is more difficult to accomplish. It is, after all, far more painful to discover and admit.

As a result, we rarely recognize how selfishness within us is…

• contributing to the feelings of jealousy we experience.
• causing strife in our relationships with others.
• negatively impacting our relationship with our spouse.
• motivating so many of the unhealthy decisions we make with our money.
• preventing us from meeting the apparent needs of others.
• keeping us from experiencing love, joy, hope, gratitude, generosity.
• hindering us from finding true contentment.

Image by David Ohmer. Used in accordance with Creative Commons. Sourced via Flickr.