A Slice of Humble Pie

Last night I fell asleep pondering what it is to truly be humble. This morning, I woke up with an answer.
God has been leading me to this revelation now for two years, but just in the past few weeks have I been searching my own heart and asking Him to give me a spirit of humility and humbleness. I've always been a stubborn, very prideful girl. My family will testify of that because I always had to be right growing up. It was my way or the highway and so many times I would find myself in trouble because of it. When I was seventeen, my knowledge of the Lord grew, but that only fueled my self-righteous attitude. When I served in Peru, my understanding of the Lord became more clear, and I became humbled but only for a time. Even after my experience there, I came back to the United States with a bigger world view, but eventually my old ways set back in and I went back to a self-righteous state of mind. My relationships suffered, not just with the boys that I dated, but with my family and friends as well. I became a hypocrite in every sense of the word. I used people, deceived people, and all this to make myself look good. To hide from what I really was inside. Then two years ago, everyone close to me found out that I really wasn't all that and a bag of chips. The Lord unveiled who I was, and although it was embarrassing, it still didn't truly bring me to my knees in complete humility. I made things right the best I could, and I was very ashamed and sorry, but God wanted more of me. I still wasn't acting in complete humility to Him. I was humble to everyone I had affected, but I didn't have the slightest idea of what it meant to submit to Him on a daily basis. For the first year and a half of my marriage, I clung to my husband when I should have been clinging to God. Then, he was involved in an accident and almost died and I realized that people can evaporate in a second, and who am I to wholly trust my happiness to someone besides the Lord? It was during that incident that God really revealed to me my flaws, my mistakes, myself. I fell to my knees. I didn't want to put my trust in someone that could so easily slip away anymore. I had no choice but to give everything to Him, including my marriage. He brought me under His subjection, His rule. It's been a daily struggle ever since then to not go back to my self-righteous days of making myself look good. I have to turn to Him every single day for help, and some days I still fail. So last night, I fell asleep pondering all of this, and wondering if I had finally reached a state of true humility in my own life. I drifted off searching my heart and questioning the Lord. Sometime during the night, I received the answer. Maybe it was in a dream that I don't remember, I don't know. All I know is that when I opened my eyes early this morning, this thought came into my mind: Do not be concerned about being humble. Be concerned about letting God change and mold you every second of everyday, because that's where you first begin to learn humility, is on your knees, looking up.
So many of us think that humility is serving others, submitting to others, yielding to others. And while yes, that is humility, true humility is first serving God, submitting to God, and yielding to God. We can get so carried away with self-righteous acts of service that soon that's all they become. Acts. By first humbling ourselves before God, we are admitting that He comes first, He is in control. And we relinquish our sense of power, our pride, our domineering selves.
Now, I can honestly say that I know what it is to be humble; to act in humility. It's a lesson that took me so long to learn, and yet, was so simple.
I write this blog out of complete humility in the hopes that whoever is reading, may learn what I have and maybe won't have to go through the things that I had to in order to learn this valuable lesson. The way of the cross is hard, but the way of self is harder in the end and leads you down a much more dangerous road.

"What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us; it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God" -Monica Baldwin