Threshold of humility

Another night writing, another night spent thinking of how humility has shaped me, or more importantly, how God has shaped me by using humility as the knife.

Many of the people I associate with today would tell you that I am one of the most humble people they know, and to that I would tell you I am flattered, but I would also tell you that it’s possible I’ve gotten very good at faking it. However, in order to fake it, there would have to be times when I was anything but humble and would find myself as arrogant as ever. The truth is that God has removed that arrogance from me, stripped it away completely. It is hard to say when it happened initially, or how quickly I changed, but I know that something is different to be sure.

What I don’t want to do is be the person who sits here and lauds himself for supposed humility but does so in a way that would appear to be bragging. In fact, before I go any further let me say this; God is at the front, on the sides and at the rear of what is going on in my life. If it were up to me, I would have derailed this train years ago, wrecked in a heap of self delusion and pride, beyond arrogant; deliriously drunk on the wine of me. To be honest, I lived that way for so long that it is impossible for me to fix all the damage I did back then. I have left a swath of hurting people along the road and for a long time I refused to even look their way, let alone acknowledge they were laying there. All I can really do now is pray for forgiveness and ask God to do what is ultimately impossible for me to do on my own.

This is also not supposed to be a pity party. I am certainly not looking for sympathy or a pat on the back for changing my much maligned ways. Mostly, this is simply my brain telling my fingers to type and fill in the white of the page. There is so much I wish to get out on paper and for so long I have either kept it hidden from view or simply refused to let it out of my head. The dangers of this are well documented and I am well aware that I should probably see someone on a professional level in order to adequately deal with what I carry around. And yet, today I find myself in a place of peace that I truly did not know existed and I’m starting to realize that all I needed to do was stop living for myself and wake up to the reality of living for everyone else around me.

I think that what has humbled me the most is the realization of what Christ did for me. That while I was still a sinner, He died for me. He didn’t wait for me to realize it or make reparations, He jumped in and took the initiative because He knew that I was too arrogant to see past my own nose and recognize the need for change. I don’t deserve that, in fact, I never will. There is nothing I can ever do to earn it. But here’s the craziest part of all of that; Jesus did what He did not because He was hoping to fix my arrogance but because He loves me. I REALLY don’t deserve THAT.

The THAT in that statement is GRACE; a small and seemingly basic monosyllabic word that has the power to change lives. Grace is the difference between what I deserve and what I have been given instead. To say that I don’t deserve it is one thing, but to grasp the scope of grace is to stand at the threshold of humility. Truly, I have been humbled because of what one man did for me. Humility comes with accepting His grace and mercy. And with humility comes the opportunity to give grace; the most humbling act of all.