Famous For Being Humble

She caught it in the middle of a Wednesday and it was very quick.

She had done something small for somebody, without being asked, and she had made sure not to mention it, and she was walking to the parking lot feeling perfectly ordinary about the whole thing.

And a thought went past that said: I wonder if she noticed that I did not say anything.

That was all. It took under a second and it was gone.

But she heard the shape of it. She heard, quite precisely, that she had been hoping to be seen not wanting to be seen, and that this is a loop with no floor at the bottom of it, and that it had almost certainly been running for a very long time before she caught it.

That was six weeks ago and she has not done a single quiet thing since without checking the room.

That is the actual problem now. Not the original thought. She has become an inspector of her own motives, and she cannot lift a chair without asking who might be watching her lift it, and it has taken all the ordinariness out of an ordinary week.

If you have caught yourself like that, you know exactly what I mean.

Who was in the room

Let me put the passage in front of you, because it is the deepest one in the New Testament on this and it is strangely practical.

But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.Philippians 2:7

Made Himself of no reputation. He emptied Himself, is the plainer rendering, and the thing that goes with it is the form of a servant.

Now ask the practical question that nobody asks about that verse. Who saw it?

Nobody did. There was no audience for it. The emptying happened before there was a single human being in a position to observe it or be impressed by it, and there is no scene, no witnesses and no account of anybody's reaction.

He did the most humble act in the history of the universe in an empty room.

You have a pattern to follow that was performed with nobody watching, and the not being watched was never a problem He had to solve. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Philippians 2:7, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So six weeks of checking the room has not been humility. You have somewhere to look that is not inward, and it was there before you caught yourself. The word settled that before the world was made, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the parking lot while you read this.

The loop, and why you cannot get out of it by looking harder

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being precise about because you have been trying to solve it with the very thing causing it.

The loop is this. You do a quiet thing. You notice you did it quietly. You then wonder whether the noticing spoiled it. Then you notice the wondering, and so on, and every level of it is more attention on yourself than the level before.

You cannot inspect your way out of a problem that is made of inspection.

And here is the good news buried in your six weeks, which is worth more than it looks. The fact that you caught it at all is not evidence of a deep fault. Nobody catches a thing like that unless they are honest. Vanity does not audit itself.

So the catch was a good thing and the six weeks that followed were not a punishment you deserved. They were you trying to fix it with the only tool you had, which was more looking.

Put the tool down.

The way out of the loop is not a cleaner motive; it is a different direction of attention. It is the person in front of you, the chair that needs lifting, the actual thing. Your motives will be mixed today and they will be mixed tomorrow and they were mixed nineteen years ago when you never once thought about it, and God has been perfectly aware of that the whole time and has gone on using the work anyway.

You have permission to act with mixed motives, and the permission does not require you to purify them first. Philippians 2 has the emptying done with no audience at all; His Spirit is the one who turns a person's attention outward, which is the only thing that has ever actually worked.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of why you cannot stop inspecting yourself is that somebody near you audits everything you do, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.