“But enough about me,” the character played by Bette Midler says after going on and on. “Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?” It’s an old line, but it still lands.

Perhaps we laugh because it feels a little too recognizable, too much like us in our less-than-best moments. We are tempted to worship what someone once called the Almighty I. Even our lofty words can bend in a selfward direction. “I love you” can become “I love what you do for me,” or “I love how you make me feel.”

We are not practiced in a love that costs us. The aftertaste of materialism, self-pampering, and habitual me-ism is a life that turns inward. The soul, meant to unfold outward, begins instead to contract. We turn in on ourselves, thinking it only good and right, an earned reward.

Today, though, on Maundy Thursday, for those who keep the church calendar, we glimpse another way to live, a deeper way to be in the world, another way to love.

No one likes to hear a “no.”

You’d think by now we’d have gotten used to it, maybe grown relational calluses. Some of us were the last ones picked for the playground team, the ones cut after auditions, the ones whose name never appeared in the email announcing promotions. We’ve stood at doors that did not open, knowing someone was hunkering inside. We bristle (or get discouraged) when we get the email that begins, “We reviewed your [application, article, etc.] and regret to inform you. …” We get a letter or voice mail dressing us down, making us feel little, humiliated. Our hearts flare (or sometimes just fold).

Birth is more a jolt than a gentle entrance. We don’t often think of our coming into the world that way. But according to one pediatrician, “There is no time in life, not even the moment of death, that can compare to the human body’s transformation in the first five minutes outside the womb.” We join the world disoriented, gasping, stunned by sound and light and air. We face the glare of a bright-lit entry. A doctor snips a connecting cord.  

This is the threshold God crossed to be with us when born into our midst. There’s a lot to see here.

Next to suffering, waiting may be one of the hardest things we do. Sometimes waiting becomes its own kind of suffering. We can all supply our own stories when waiting was difficult—not just an inconvenience but a heartache. I imagine you can easily come up with a few instances in your life where it hurt to wait. And we look with an aching heart at a world that seems shrouded in violence and darkness. We don’t always wait happily.