QUESTION:

My folks keep telling me that I am a self-centered person and today in school my geometry teacher said that I stick to my own ideas too strongly and will not admit it when I am wrong. I guess there must be some truth in what they all tell me about myself and yet I don’t feel that I am so unpleasant a person as they make me out to be. Can you suggest something for me to read which will help me understand myself better? I am 15 years old.

ANSWER:

My suggestion is that you read through the Psalms and the book of Proverbs, and that as you read them thoughtfully and carefully you ask the Lord to help you refer to yourself those verses and passages that can be given a personal application to your immediate need. Your problem appears to be that of egotism, and frankly, that is a basic weakness against which all of us, more or less, have to guard ourselves. Most of us, before we moved beyond our childhood years, learned how to strain reality through a sieve of self-love, keeping out whatever hurts us. Truth can hurt, and we don’t like it when it does hurt. It comes to us quite naturally to use our own private measurement of truth, and when we do so we are as foolish as the beginner at the piano who wants to let his own preferences decide which key on the piano is middle C. We must learn to love truth more than we love self. Saint Augustine once said, “He is God’s best servant who looks not so much to hear from God that which he himself willeth as rather to will that which he heareth from God.” Think through that statement. It has a wide application to the way we handle all truth, even the truth of geometry!