I was halfway paying attention to the televised shenanigans playing out in the Las Vegas Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, when I heard A&E’s Pawn Stars’s Corey Harrison (the owner’s son) say something that made me look up from my pile of canvas orders.
“If this goes wrong, I’m blaming you,” he said to his coworker, Chumlee Russell.
Why did he say that?
Why do any of us say that?
Maybe we don’t use those exact words. Maybe we say something like this:
If this doesn’t work, it was not my fault.
I’ll tell them it was your fault/idea/plan.
Don’t tell people this was my idea.
If this goes wrong, do not blame me.
There are lots of other things we say and do to “pass the buck,” shoot, we even have no-fault insurance (completely irrelevant to my point), but my question is why do we refuse responsibility for our actions?
As I sat on my living room floor packaging canvases that night, I asked myself the same thing.
MY OPINION
Maybe we say resist taking responsibility for our failures because when we acknowledge a mistake our pride takes a blow and we come face to face with the startling reality that we are not as perfect as we like to believe.
We made a mistake. We failed. We blew it.
What do all of those things prove?
We need a Savior.
Our flesh hates to admit that.
For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. -Romans 7:5-6
HEART CHECK
What are you displaying–a humble heart, willing to accept its faults, or a prideful spirit which can’t admit its need for a Savior?
May we live, walk, own our mistakes, accept blame, repent, and embrace our weaknesses in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
For it is when we recognize and embrace those faults that Jesus can be displayed as infinitely strong, sufficient and worthy of every ounce of our lives.
So here’s to learning to more graciously accept responsibility in order to more fully display the splendor of Christ.
-Sophie
Sophie Miller 