I'm afraid that despite my best efforts, I'm pretty good at feeling sorry for myself.
You know that feeling when you're walking on a sidewalk with some friends and there's not enough room for all of you, and you're the one that gets squeezed to the side? Not always a great feeling, especially when it's hard to feel included in the conversation. I hate it when this happens to me, and I always end up having a self-pity party afterwards. That's why I'm fairly certain that I'm good at feeling sorry for myself.
Today I was walking with some friends on the sidewalk and ended up having to walk on the grass beside them, and for a few seconds I was really wallowing in my own selfish thoughts about how sad it is that nobody cares about me, and I have a headache, and I'll probably flunk out of school and end up peddling ice to the penguins of Antarctica or something, not that anyone would care anyway. (I told you I was really good at this. Most of that stuff wasn't even related to having to walk on the grass, but I still came up with it.)
But then I thought about Jesus, which is basically a miracle if you think about how selfish I was being. I thought about how He might feel if we were walking together and He had to walk on the grass. And what I ended up deciding is that I think Jesus would like to walk on the grass. Jesus wouldn't mind that his running shoes got all wet and cold. I bet He wouldn't even really mind that much if He stepped in some mud. He wouldn't mind because He'd want me to be able to walk on the sidewalk. And, really, He'd just be glad to spend time with me. Because He loves me.
I think that if life was a sidewalk that we were all walking on, Jesus would be walking on the grass just to make room for one more person. And his sneakers would be all muddy and gross, and his legs might have little scratches from where He had to squeeze by a bush, and maybe He even stepped in some dog poop or accidentally tripped over a branch. But I think He'd be fine with it, because He would be with His friends and they would be happy together. (Why Jesus ever wanted to be friends with us I don't know, except to say that it's His nature to love unlovable things.)
Sometimes walking on the grass is okay. It doesn't mean that I'm less of a friend; it means that there isn't enough room on the sidewalk. Somebody's got to move, and sometimes it gets to be me, which is fine because I like grass anyways, and I'm (hopefully) slowly learning from Jesus that it's okay to be happy even when things aren't the way I want them to be.