Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. Philippians 2:3-4

 

In a popular movie of the 80s, the leading actress says, “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?” It’s funny…because it’s real life.

“It happened again,” Ava thought to herself as she left the party. “I could tell you the life stories of at least three people in the room,” she shared with her husband when she got home. “But not one of them asked me about myself.”

Now Ava hadn’t gone to the party to talk about herself, but increasingly she noticed how eager we are to drone on about ourselves, asking little about one another. Ava and her husband are followers of Jesus. They know that Jesus’s interest was always in others, and he wasn’t impressed with someone’s status in life. He stopped to talk with a man up in a tree, a woman with a questionable reputation and children (Luke 19, John 4, Mark 10).

The Bible teaches the Jesus-way in verses like these in the book of Philippians: “Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too,” (Philippians 2:3-4).

Ava and her husband try to live out these verses with their two school aged sons. When the family invites others over for a meal they have their boys think of three questions they each can ask their guests during the meal. Something interesting almost always comes up from the conversations and, after a time of contributing at the table the boys are free to go play on their own.

The message for all of us is that people matter. Maybe we should all keep three friendly questions at the ready and be ready to listen.