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I was driving home tonight in my car with my dog Mallie, a yellow lab mix, in the back seat. We had been shopping at Home Depot, buying parts for Mallie?s new picket fence in our back yard at home (I had promised myself and my wife that we?d be the last people on the block to ever put up a fence?that was before neighbors from two blocks away started knocking on our door with Mallie on the end of their leash, asking us to keep a better eye on her).

As we exited the interstate toward home, I was tempted to shoot around one last car before the lanes merged into one, but decided not to, remembering that I was going home to an empty house with nothing to do. So I slowed downd and stayed behind the creeping car in front of me. What was my hurry anyway? Toward the end of the ramp, the car in front of me started making a dreadful noise. It sounded like a high pressure hose had sprung a leak somewhere. As they pulled off to the side, I went around them, fully expecting to see smoke or steam pouring out from under the hood. There was none.

I passed and kept my sucks-to-be-you comment inside my head. Mallie wouldn?t have understood it anyway. Besides, I wasn?t in a sucks-to-be-you mood. In fact, most of me wanted to stop and help, but for some reason I didn?t?at least not immediately. Usually, stopping to help someone on the side of the road is a knee jerk reaction for me?or at least wanting to help is.

About a hundred yards down the road I decided they may need my cell phone to call AAA for a tow truck, so I turned around and drove back to where the car had pulled over. The owners of the car, an older couple, were now outside looking under the vehicle at whatever was broken. Apparently, a plastic cover on the car?s underbelly had come loose and lodged itself between the road and the car. I thought out loud that the cover was there to protect rocks from flying up and hitting the radiator. Whatever it was, it was not where it was supposed to be, and the noise I had heard as we exited the interstate together made much more sense to me now. It wasn?t a hissing noise. It was a scraping noise.

I was glad to be in my scrub clothes as I lay on the shoulder of the road, lashing the plastic piece securely to the rest of the car with a nylon strap the man had found in the trunk. We made small talk as I worked. They were on their way to visit a friend who lives in the same neighborhood as my wife and I. It felt good to be helping someone else. Extra jewels in my crown, I thought as I examined the situation. Here were two helpless people in need of my extensive auto-mechanical expertise, staying clean as I rolled around on the dirty ground and selflessly risked life and limb to fix their vehicle on the roadside.

They each made sure to mention how much they appreciated my stopping to help. I told them it was no problem; that my wife wasn?t home anyway, so I was in no hurry to get home just to be alone. When I stood up, the man thanked me for the fourth or fifth time and shook my hand. He introduced himself as Charlie Something-or-Other. His wife explained that earlier, when their car first started making the noise, she had whispered a prayer for God to send an angel along to help. She was saying now that I was the answer to her prayer.

?You tell your wife that you are an angel from God,? she said.

?I keep trying to, but she doesn?t believe me,? I joked. ?Would you mind telling her for me??

Up until that point, I felt pretty good about the whole situation. But the thoughts I had as we parted company were what made me feel like a complete loser: What if this guy has money and wants to give a lot of it to me? What if they have connections in the music industry? Will they get my name right when they tell the story to their friends? In no time at all, I was fighting the temptation to twist the situation into something I could profit from. I was grinding the gears in my brain, searching for some way to get something back for my measly 3 minute sacrifice?and I use the word ?sacrifice? very loosely here. It was hardly an inconvenience!

Am I the only one who has these kinds of thoughts? At the risk of opening myself up for even more ridicule, I have to admit that I deal with that kind of temptation quite often. And sometimes I give in. I?ll perform some simple, undemanding task to ?help? someone, and then make sure they have some way to contact me should they ever want to include me in their last will and testament. I sneak hints about my needs into a conversation just in case they want to ?return the favor? sometime. And whether I give in to the temptation or not, the very fact that my mind has the potential to think that way sickens me and I begin to feel like a complete loser. But I suppose that?s exactly what our flesh nature is all about: What?s in it for me?

I don?t have a good answer for how to fix the problem or avoid that temptation. I can only offer that we just keep trying to do better, allowing God to mold us into seekers of his glory and not our own. My reason for sharing is not to stand on a soap box and offer some compact solution. I am the king of Sunday School answers...the kind that are so easy for all of us to say, but very difficult for any of us to do. So I don't write this to give you more advice. Rather, it is to shed light on my sin, my imperfection. It is to confess to you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, with the hope that some of you might know exactly what I am talking about and, in turn, might be less apt to keep your sins safely tucked inside, away from the view of others. That route only encourages us to further create the illusion that we have it all together. And who of us, knowing our own selves quite well, can honestly say that we have it all together?

Take a look at how hiding our sins from one another can quickly trap us in a viscious cycle:

1) I decide not tell anyone about my garbage...in fact I hide it, so,
2) Everyone sees me as someone who has no garbage, so,
3) They think they are the only ones with garbage, then,
4) They feel different for having garbage, and different is bad, so they hide their garbage, so,
5) Everyone sees them as someone with no garbage, so,
6) They hide their garbage...and so on and so forth.

Sin carries with it a lot of shame mainly because we feel like we are the only Christians struggling with it. James 5:16 says to confess our sins to each other and pray for each other so that we may be healed. Well, praying for myself is easy. God knows I have no problem asking to be fixed. But the ?confess your sins to each other? part?that?s tough. But it makes perfect sense! I cannot ask for God?s forgiveness without first acknowledging what I did wrong. Anyone can pray blanket prayers for God's safety and provision, but how can someone else pray specifically for me if they don?t know where I need the prayer? In either case, the change cannot begin without the confession.

That being the case, it seems that in my attempt to only confess a problem and not solve it, I have stumbled upon its solution. I am a sinful man, and I put myself before others far too often. I want to be healed of my fleshly desire for self-promotion and selfish gain. And there, in my confession, in a way only God could work out, is the first step toward healing.