This blog kind of goes a long with the statements at the end of my “fearless love” blog, and basically with a lot of what I’ve been learning about the truth that “it’s not about you”. As you all know the last country we were in as a squad was the Philippines. It was truly an amazing 6 week adventure there and part of that adventure was having 4 of our teams in the same location. It almost felt like we were permanently at a mini-debrief, which the only other times that we had all been together as a whole squad. Having so many of us around one another came with its definite perks and the flip side of that was that it also came with challenges.
For ladies one of the challenges of being around so many of each other, and in a society, for the first time on that race, that had malls and fashion, was the everyday temptation, which many of us completely gave in to, to compare ourselves to each other and the other women we were around. Let’s be honest this is a wide spread problem amongst women. Not only in the area of looks but also in the area of leadership, abilities and talents, and even “spirituality”. I think, like fear, that this problem is mostly a selfish one. During the act of comparing ourselves to another in anyway we are always filled with thoughts of ourselves, and we always come to one of two conclusions; those conclusions either being that we are better than them or that they are better than us.
The latter one of those is what I think we tend to focus on more with the problem though, or at least it’s what I saw our group of women focus on. And by that I mean focus on “fixing”. Truthfully that mode of thought in comparing ourselves to another and then believing ourselves to be less because it simply plants lies in our mind. We begin to believe we are not beautiful, unworthy of love, untalented, and the likes. A natural to respond to that is to combat those lies, right, so we tell each other that we are beautiful and that we are worthy and that we are talented, and we quote scripture full of how God see’s us. AND yet…we haven’t fixed a stinkin’ darn thing, because although part of the problem is that we are believing lies that is not THE problem.
I believe that THE problem is that we still believe that it is about us, and we are stuck focusing in a large part on ourselves. The problem is that we are stuck swinging on what I call the pendulum of pride. When we are caught up comparing ourselves to one another we swing from one side of that pendulum to the other. We are either believing too much of ourselves, aka finding ourselves better than others, or we are full of insecurities, aka finding others better than ourselves. Both are pride. Insecurities sure don’t feel like a “pride” issue, but they essentially just the result of your hurt pride and you’re never going to truly escape the cage of that pride by trying to simply increase your self-esteem. The solution for us isn’t just getting outside of the lies of insecurity, but getting outside of our self-centeredness.Puffing up our self-esteem again often times only has the result of actually pushing us the other side of pride.
I am 100 percent convinced that the Lord desires for all of us to believe that we are beautifully and wonderfully made, that we designed and created with specific purposes in mind and that only we can truly fulfill those purposes, and that we are worthy of love and affection because He has said that we are. But I am also 100 percent convinced that we are not to believe this or revel in these things any more or less for ourselves than we are for others. In that there is no room for comparison because it’s not about what we have that others don’t or what they have that we don’t, it’s about what we all have through God’s love.
In writing all of this I was reminded of one of the most influential passages I read from C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters. The book is written from the perspective of a demon and is a series of letter from one who is teaching a younger one how to deceive us. It shed so much light for me on the lies that we so commonly believe and the schemes that we so often get caught up in, and this passage in particular was such a light for me in understanding humility. (preface: when he talks about the “Enemy” he’s talking about God)
“You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an elementof dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.”
