I was diagnosed with a chronic disease last year and put on steroids. It caused me to gain about 45 pounds. Although I’m off of the steroids now, I am struggling to lose that weight. When I pray, I normally pray for others. I don’t pray for myself and I would feel odd doing so.
Is it selfish to pray to lose weight? I not only need to do it for health reasons, but I am really embarrassed at how heavy I’ve become since my diagnosis. I’m about 60 pounds overweight. Thank you for any responses.
Selfishness has not conventionally been taken to include any and all actions which merely benefit oneself, for that would be much too wide a usage of such a disparaging term. If a behavior is selfish, then it must be
excessively self-absorbed and/or self-rewarding, with the qualification of excess usually entailing some significant disregard toward the (often competing) goods of others. Unless you’ve been flatly ignoring any prayer for others in order to somehow concentrate all divine favor onto yourself instead (say, under a mistaken impression that God’s given you only a limited allotment of listening-time per day or something), then I believe you’re in the clear here. Plus, you may not be giving your motives enough credit. As you’re apparently a mom, I presume you’ve also got a husband around. Now, as you may know, spouses everywhere have had a persistent reputation for being pleased whenever their respective beloveds proactively work at maintaining a healthy and attractive body. Therefore I’m confident that there’s someone else in your life who would benefit from and nonetheless appreciate how you want to lose weight. In fact, even if you haven’t
consciously had his wishes in mind, at the end of the day, your own desire to remain physically fit and appealing is likely rooted in a deeper habit of yours that’s driving you to want to please a man you love, so I’d even venture to say that this modest concern you have might actually be indicative of a
marital virtue, not a vice.
Furthermore, petitionary prayer is always primarily for the prayer (that is, the person who’s doing the praying) and only for the petition itself in the sense of its extra function on a less important level, so every time someone prays he’s nevertheless mostly doing something that’s, objectively speaking, for himself (despite, paradoxically, the intention often being quite selfless, e.g., while praying only for others). That’s because God made prayer fundamentally efficacious in the fact that the very act of speaking and reaching out to our Father in heaven is, by itself, through our nature as communicative social creatures, a unitive mode of personal relationship. He wills that Man, for his own good, shall learn to always go to Him with his wants and needs for constant provision, to faithfully rely on his Lord’s Love with an acknowledged dependency in order to be happy. (I think the ultimate reason for this may simply be that doing so (along with suffering) is the most effective, humbling, and gratifying way to inspire Man into willful, intimate communion with Him in an eternal afterlife.)
:hug1::byzsoc: