Time for some vulnerability.
I used to think I was pretty humble. (That sentence is ironic)
And I definitely did not think I had a lot of pride.
But the Lord has recently revealed to me that the opposite is true in my life. I am very prideful. I seek to have more than the next man. And not only that, but I desire recognition of how much more of something I have than the next man. I am deeply flawed in this area, and I’ve come to the end of myself in this subject.
So where does this leave me? What do I do now that I’ve acknowledged the wound that sin has left on my heart?
I bet you can figure out the answer to that question. It’s so much easier to see the answer to a problem when you’re not neck deep in it, trying to swim when there’s a wrecking ball tied to your ankle. That’s how I’ve felt lately. And thank God I finally figured out what to do in order to get this weight off me. But that statement is somewhat wrong too, because I didn’t figure it out. However, I’d like to back track a little before I go any further.
During my second month on the race, my team and I were given the opportunity to partake in what we call, “Monk Ministry.” This meant that we spent our mornings going into the local pagodas (Buddhist temples) and building relationships with the men that live there, or monks. Personally, I didn’t see any fruit in this until the last week of month 2. Drew, Luke, and I had been spending our mornings together going to the same pagoda every day. This particular pagoda is also home to a Buddhist university. And suddenly in our last week, the Lord orchestrated the opportunity for us to have our very own classroom, without supervision, spending time simply having conversations with any students who signed up for the class, mainly monks.
Amazing, right?
Needless to say, we were all ecstatic. Word spread quickly throughout our squad that the three of us were about to become college professors. We liked that title. All that said, that same night I was faced with a choice: I could either continue teaching this class or I could switch to be full time cooking team for our squad. This would mean spending all day, every day, cooking to equip the rest of our squad to go out into their ministry well. I took this choice to the Lord, and I felt a resounding answer telling me to make the choice myself. (In hindsight, that’s pretty cool that the Lord trusted me with that choice. But that’s not what this is about) At this time, I was somewhat aware of my issue with pride, so in an attempt to go with the humble choice I decided to go with full time cooking for my third month of ministry on the field. It wasn’t until I made this choice that I realized how deep my issue with pride truly was.
The night I made that choice, the Lord revealed to me that he was indeed pleased with my decision. I heard from him, and he told me that I desired to be in that classroom because my desire for recognition. I wanted to be able to return to the States and tell people, “I shared the gospel with monks.” I wanted these incredible stories, and I wanted them for the wrong reasons.
I didn’t want to share the gospel because it’s good news. I wanted to share the gospel for what it could bring me. There’s nothing I could think of that’s worse than the fact that my pride had spread its roots so deep that it grasped my relationship with the Lord and twisted it into something that I didn’t recognize.
This all sounds very dramatic, but the Lord is working in this. It’s not all dark. Continuing where I was at earlier, the answer to the problem isn’t something that I figured out on my own. My Father revealed to me that the answer to this is… more of Him. I need to surrender this to Him, and he’ll take care of the rest. And I know that it won’t be painless, but the glory to come of it is, currently, unimaginable to me. In The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, Lewis describes a man having his lust ripped from him. He wanted to do it so bad but was scared of the pain, and rightfully so. But when the pain passes and he’s freed from his lust, the spirit of lust that was removed (represented by a small lizard) transforms into a white stallion, and the man climbs up on the stallion and rides into the mountains of heaven. The narrator’s guide describes that how great the result of that fleshly sin was nothing compared the result of a sin of the heart, like pride. I assume it’s something like pride, considering in his other book Mere Christianity, Lewis calls pride, “The Great Sin.”
But I digress.
This all means that I’m no longer trying to fix this problem myself, but I’m not laying back and ignoring the problem. That’s not how fixing our flaws works. We need to be active with the Lord and respond to His teachings and guidance. I’m eager to continue to work on this, but I know it will take time and take me actively choosing humility.
This was a pretty dramatic update post, but I felt it necessary for me to say.
