Pride

I struggle with pride.  Most of you probably already know that as you've either seen it first hand, or you've heard me confess it, or both.  Actually, from what I hear from other people, most of us struggle with pride.  It's just funny how it manifests itself in different people.  Have I written about this before?  Feeling a little déjà vu…  Anyway, for probably over a year now I've been thinking about the idea of humility and pride and all that stuff, but humility is one of those things that it's real scary to ask for.  How does God teach humility?  He humbles you.  And it ain't no fun.  But, luckily, sometimes God teaches us things in other ways, too, and hopefully I'm not so stubborn that I can't learn things the not hard way.

So I've been reading a lot recently, which is part of the reason I haven't been blogging as much.  Reading and writing are both very time consuming and I think that other people have written things that are so much more interesting than what I would be writing about, so sometimes I opt just to read other people's stuff.  Plus, I don’t have to think as much then.  Writing sometimes makes my brain hurt.

So, what have I learned about pride and humility?  First of all, just as a person can CHOOSE to act in a loving manner even when they don't FEEL it, a person can CHOOSE to act in a humble manner even when every ounce of their being is screaming in indignation.  That's for starters.  So even when I think I'm right and the other person is wrong, that doesn't mean it's okay for me to tell them how stupid they are.  Even if I think it.  The goal, of course, is to actually have the appropriate attitude to go along with it, but that comes with time.  In the meantime, I can choose to suppress my own will and let God's mandates dictate my behavior.  But it's so hard…

Some of the other things I've learned have come from what I've been reading lately.  So tonight, let's take a look…  

I've been reading the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis.  I just finished The Horse and His Boy.  In this book, there is a horse named Bree who is an intelligent, talking war horse from Narnia, not the dumb, nontalking kind we are used to.  During the story, he and his boy, Shasta, and another horse and her girl, Hwin and Aravis, are being chased by a lion.  Shasta falls off Bree, but Bree continues to run in fear and leaves Shasta and the slower Hwin and Aravis behind.  

Bree is shamed when he realized what he has done: "Slavery is all I'm fit for.  How can I ever show my face among the free Horses of Narnia?- I who left a mare and a girl and a boy to be eaten by lions while I galloped all I could to save my own wretched skin!"

The wise hermit responds: "My good Horse, you've lost nothing but your self-conceit.  No, no, cousin.  Don't put back your ears and shake your mane at me.  If you are really so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense.  You're not quite the great Horse you had come to think, from living among poor dumb horses.  Of course you were braver and cleverer than them.  You could hardly help being that.  It doesn't follow that you'll be anyone very special in Narnia.  But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another."

I'm good at some things.  Other things, not so much.  I had let my little brain get so wrapped up in the things I COULD do well, that I had begun to think myself better than other people.  

I think that sometimes as Christians, we get to where we begin to compare ourselves to nonbelievers and end up feeling prideful.  Like we're better than them because we don't do some of the things that are so obviously self-destructive.  But we forget that things aren't quite so obvious to them.  We have been given the light, while they are still in darkness.  We forget the condition in which they live their lives, without the power of the Holy Spirit, without the hope of future glory with our Lord.  We begin to feel like talking war horses from Narnia, much superior to poor dumb horses.  But compared with who we SHOULD be, we are no one special.  And as long as we (and by 'we' I mean 'I') keep that in mind, we just might turn out to be a decent sort of horse.