Am I that important?

Am I more important then you?

Only the English language capitalizes the personal pronoun in the middle of a sentence. In every other language, i is not capitalized unless it begins a sentence. Even in English, we do not capitalize the other pronouns – “he,” “she,” “you,” “they,” or even “we,” (as if adding another person somehow lowers the respect due to myself!). This practice feels very vain to me.

Other people have questioned this. The best guess is that we began capitalizing “i” because the lower case “i” is such a tiny pen stroke that it may get lost on the page. I don’t really buy that explanation because we seem very caught up in periods and commas, obviously able to see those much smaller pen strokes. It’s not because it’s a single letter either, because we don’t capitalize “a.”

I have kept a journal for most of my adult life, writing out my prayers to God, poured out without structure and in compete honesty.

From the beginning, I capitalized “You” as I was addressing God. Thank You, Lord. What do You want me to do? What is Your will in this situation? It seemed the respectful thing to do.

Somewhere along the line, i stopped capitalizing “i.” It felt like i was putting myself on an equal footing with God, referring to myself with the same respect. Somehow, using capital pronouns to refer to God and lower case pronouns to refer to myself seemed to be a more appropriate reflection of the honor due each of us. After all, He is God; i am not.

I had wanted to continue this practice for this blog, but people were distracted by it and missed the message.  So, for now, i will continue using the egotistical “I” in the blog posts.  Maybe some other day, in some later post.