When I started working in the newspaper business so many
years ago, one of my first jobs was to look after the syndicated daily cartoon
and make sure that it was always available for publication and in the right
sequence. We might all take newspaper cartoons for granted and don’t look at
the work that goes on behind the scenes…and for one thing, someone has to
coordinate the work for publication!
That simple job gave me, the budding kid journalist, a sense
responsibility that has remained with me.
Ironically, the cartoon was called “Useless Eustace”, a funny man with a
big round head who has now long been put out to pasture by the newspaper I
worked for. Perhaps he was a left over from British wartime influence on my
country. But Eustace (here seen in a
wartime clipping) was always up to some stupidity or other and to some extent
he was a reflection of ourselves.
How many times do we fall into humorous conversation with
friends about the stupid things we get up to, which in themselves reflect how
we may poorly perceive ourselves. A friend recently told me that after her
first visit to her psychologist she came back with the comment that all she was
suffering from was a sickness called “You don’t love herself enough!” And if we stop to think about it I think
we’ll find that we generally do under-rate ourselves tremendously. Especially
in the way we go through life.
In marketing terms, we are all classified into two groups –
leaders and followers. The vast majority of us are followers who are so easily
influenced by those who are the first to do/try all the new things that come
out on the market. We tend to think of
ourselves as unique yet we really aren’t all that different from each other.
Because we continue to insist on seeing our faults and shortcomings rather than
how good we really are.
So is your bottle half full or half empty?
This is what Eustace was all about. He was the harbinger of
uselessness, and believed it. Hence the result of his daily mess ups. So, believe you are useless and you will
become one! This also applies to our spiritual life. If we are seeing things from the Useless Eustace viewpoint, then
God is too busy to bother with us, poor, stupid, ordinary humans. And that is definitely incorrect. We should
remember that we were created in His image and likeness. The fact that God is
so great means that he cannot be in us completely in His image, since we were
not made to contain Him completely. There are ample references in Scripture to
the fact that we are too finite to be
able to even look Him in the face. Yet
in His creation of humanity God has willed it to give each and every one of us
a drop of Himself which is enough to fill us completely ….for the moment, this
lifetime.
If we agree to that concept, then we can never – should
never – believe that we can possibly be useless, no matter the circumstances in
our life. God told Paul that “My grace
is enough” for him, and so it is for us
too. We are all made to achieve so if
we think otherwise then we are probably going against God’s plan for us.
Opening ourselves to be under-achievers, continuing the saga of Useless
Eustace’s!
