All of us are driven by the compelling need to believe that we are significant. I have yet to meet the person who says, "Significance? I couldn't care less. All I want to do is fill space on this planet." Everyone wants to count for something. As author and theologian R. C. Sproul says, "We yearn to believe that in some way we are important. This inner drive is as intense as our need for water and oxygen.'' In fact, because our need for significance is so primary, it can easily become an obsession. Modern counseling and psychology have focused a lot of attention on obsessive behaviors, whether it's an obsession with food, tobacco, alcohol, pornography, drugs, power, work or even an obsession with being abused! But I don't know that I've ever seen a list of obsessive behaviors that includes an addiction to the maintenance, advancement, enlargement, and protection of our significance. Yet for many of us, that is our less-than-magnificent obsession. Just as obsession with food leads to gluttony and an obsession with safety leads to anxiety and even neuroses, an obsession with our significance leads to a life of selfishness.
