Honesty and Humility

The Lord has been teaching me a lot for quite some time about honesty and humility. They are surprisingly connected in our lives. You cannot be truly humble unless you are honest with who you are, and you cannot be honest about who you are without being extremely humbled.

I used to think that being humble was about being as lowly a person as possible. I thought it was about sacrificing as much as myself as I could for the good of everyone else. I thought it was about letting people walk on me and treat me like dirt. I thought if I let people walk on me and treat me poorly if I lowered myself as much as I could God would lift me up to a place where people could love me. I looked down on people who didn't "humble" themselves in this way, I was quite often proud of myself for how "humble" I was. But sometimes I was jealous of those same people, but I knew I could never be as confidant or as good as them, and had to content myself with being "humble". No one ever heard me protest, I quietly withstood the pains of life and the cruelty of the people around me convinced I was following God's will. That is a very dangerous place to be in. It tastes sweet to be able to look down on people and know that they are not sacrificing as much as you are. It feels like humility and it feels good. But it is in fact pride.

Pride is all about comparison. If you are ever comparing yourself to another person you are dealing with pride. Pride is seen both in looking down on people, "I'm glad I'm so much better than they", but it is also seen in looking down on yourself in comparison to people, "look at me, I could never be as great as the people around me". The one is being prideful or haughty, the other is false pride. Both are a matter of judgment or comparison. It is never our place to judge or compare anyone, not even ourselves. It is the God's job to judge, we are not sent here to judge, but to serve. When we are prideful, not only have we taken our eyes off of God and focused them on ourselves, either on how awesome we are, or how pathetic, but we have also put ourselves in God's place in our lives and try to cast judgement on ourselves and those around us. This should not be so. It is extremely damaging to everyone involved. I know first hand.

Humility is about truth. It is about seeing the world as it truly is, it's about seeing ourselves as we truly are. It's about loving our neighbors as we love ourselves and about loving ourselves as we love our neighbors.

Imagine that you are looking at two paintings, one that you painted and another that was painted by a complete stranger. if you look at those paintings with any sort of pride in your heart you will have one of two reactions, either you will prefer your own painting to the other, because you painted it, and all you will see at the mistakes in the others painting. Or you will prefer the other's painting to your own, and all you will be able to see are the mistakes in your own painting. But if you look at those to paintings with humility in your heart, you will see both of them clearly, without bias for or against your own. you will be able to see the good and the bad in both of them, and be able to appreciate the beauty of both paintings equally. This is what it means to be humble, to be able to look at yourself and to look at someone else, and to be able to see the faults and the good things about both you and the other person equally and without condemnation towards either one.

Humility is about seeing the truth, knowing who you are, and who you are not. It is about knowing that you are not the judge of yourself or those around you and about being able to live in the freedom of who you are, without condemnation. Not because your perfect, but because you no longer choose to judge yourself or compare yourself to others, but have chosen to simply live in the will of the Father and leave judging to Him. If you are honest with yourself and God you cannot help but be humble, and if you are humble before God, you cannot help but be honest. Only pride tries to puff itself up into something it is not.