Some years ago, I found myself working crazy hard, making what felt like near blood sacrifices in all my relationships and responsibilities but getting little appreciation or reward for my effort.  After a long season of feeling underappreciated a subtle attitude of entitlement crept in.  This entitlement was a significant factor in the worst failure of my life.

I believed a lie.

I got to thinking,

“After all I’ve done, surely

I deserve better treatment than this!’

Someone once said:

This kind of offense creates a high degree of anger and unhappiness in the world.  And that’s what happened in me.

Without realizing it, I was keeping a subconscious ledger, calculating all the ways I had “given at the office,” served God above and beyond the call of duty, giving up valuable time, energy, whatever, for all the causes and commitments in my life.

If you had asked me, “Are you doing all this for the reward?” I’d have said, “Of course not.” But I do think I just naturally expected that, after awhile, all that effort would pay off in a currency that somehow benefitted me.

My intent was to give and serve people out of my love for God, but I’ve come to see that some part of my serving was about my love for me, what I wanted and thought I deserved.

Every expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.

The parable Jesus teaches in Matthew 20:1-16 has really schooled me about expectation and resentment.

There was an owner of a vineyard who hired workers throughout the course of the day – at 6am; 9am; noon; 3pm; 6pm.  He promised to pay each of them a fair wage. But at the end of the day the owner had the foreman pay each worker the same wage regardless of how long they worked.

Those that worked the whole day went nuts protesting, “…we have born the burden of the day… in the days heat.”  But the owner just said “Are you envious because I’m generous?”

This part of the gospel infuriates us– what a rip off! … unless we are the ones hired at the end of the day!

There have been multiple times through my life, when I felt I had born the burden of the day, in the heat of the day, in my marriage, family, church and extra local ministry and I just wasn’t getting a fair return.

What I knew then was that I enjoyed working hard, taking on big challenges and watching fruit come from it.  What I know now is that I was looking for a certain type of feedback, and rest, between those challenges- and, to my liking, that wasn’t happening in sufficient amounts.

I remember feeling that after all my sacrifice,

including for Jesus,

my life should be getting easier,

but it just seemed to get harder.

The challenges (some out of my control, some clearly generated by me) just seemed to get bigger and take more out of me.  I felt the older I got the more suffering I experienced.

Somewhere, I had taken on a false belief

that life should be getting easier as time went on.

I felt I had a right to less suffering and when this didn’t happen I think I lost hope that this equation (my days wage) would ever balance fair.

Eventually, this left me vulnerable to the enemy’s illegitimate offers to even the scale another way.

All of this was the trap of entitlement. 

When we allow ourselves to feel entitled over a long period of time, with little ‘title,’ as we see it, coming back our way, we get bitter. (We would never call it that. We might call it frustration or disappointment.) But if we feel bitter, long enough it poisons the water table of our heart, and, ultimately, if left unchecked, it can destroy a significant part of our life.

 

So, how do we move

from entitlement to acceptance and contentment?

There seem to be 2 primary paths.

1.  Experience everything that comes your way as an undeserved gift

You and I were born from grace and are sustained by grace each day.  Someone Else, not us, dreamed us up… designed us from the bottom-up… then had us delivered from the eternal world into this world, breathing life into us.

We had nothing to do with things like our frame; heritage; intelligence; gifts and abilities; relational capacity.  And not only that, we were totally dependent on others for many years, since we couldn’t survive on our own.

Anything I get to experience: ability to see or be on the water; to feel love; the birthing of an idea; meaningful work; the circumstance to make an opportune connection, etc…  are all undeserved gifts.

We need to practice

gratefulness for those gifts

without demanding more from those gifts.

 

Our mindset really has to shift

if we want to rid ourselves of entitlement.

Unfortunately,

 most of us will have to experience

something deeply painful,

in order for this shift to happen.

 

2.  Experience the wake-up call of profound loss or failure that gets met with inexplicable, undeserved love

It seems from scripture and experience, in order to beat entitlement and embrace gratitude, at least once in a person’s life, there has to come an experience where:

–       They can’t even get out ‘to the field’ to work and earn pay’ because they are so immobilized by a loss in their life, but by miraculous intervention they still “get paid” what the hardest worker does anyway

OR

–       They’ve demonstrated that they don’t even ‘deserve’ to work for the owner, because they’ve failed him, but they get hired anyway and still get paid as much as the most ‘deserving’ worker.

That last one is what has happened to me 

These days I realize that I’m not entitled to anyone or anything ‘being’ a certain way.  INSTEAD I realize that I am one God-privileged son, just to be here in this moment, experiencing the goodness of whatever is there, seeing everything as sheer, undeserved gift.

Hold on!

That reminds me of a country song!

“So damn easy to say that life’s so hard

Everybody’s got their share of battle scars

As for me, I’d like to thank my lucky starts that

 I’m alive and well…

 

It’d be easy to add up all the pain

And all the dreams you sat and watched go up in flames

Dwell on the wreckage as it smolders in the rain

But not me… I’m alive

 

And today you know that’s good enough for me

Breathin’ in and out’s a blessing can’t you see

Today’s the first day of the rest of my life and

 I’m alive and well… I’m alive and well”

 

(“I’m Alive” by Kenny Chesney)