I Turned It Into A Schedule

There is a sheet of paper folded in the back of his notebook and it has six things on it.

He wrote it in January, in good faith, on a morning when something had genuinely moved in him. Six practices, one for each weekday and a lighter one for Friday, and he was not being grandiose about it; the six things are all small and sensible and any of them would do a person good.

He kept it for nine days.

He restarted in February. He got eleven days that time, which he took as progress, and then there was a week of travel and it went.

April. Then June, when he rewrote it down to four things because he decided the original had been too ambitious, and he kept the four for six days.

It is August. The paper is still in the notebook.

And what he has actually got out of eight months is not humility. It is a quiet and growing sense of himself as a man who cannot keep a simple thing, which is roughly the opposite of what he was after, and it is heavier now than whatever he was trying to fix in January.

If you have restarted the same list four times, you know exactly what I mean.

Not a practice, a direction

Let me say the plain thing, because eight months is long enough.

Look at how Paul actually words it, because there is not a practice anywhere in the sentence.

Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.Romans 12:16

Condescend to men of low estate. The older wording is awkward now and the sense is plain: go along with the lowly, be willing to be with people of no standing, let yourself be carried in that direction rather than the other one.

That is not a discipline. There is no timetable in it and nothing to keep up.

It is a direction, and it is described in terms of people rather than in terms of a person's interior. Paul does not say cultivate a low opinion. He says go and be among these people.

You have a direction to walk in rather than a standard to maintain, and it does not have a streak to break. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Romans 12:16, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

So eight months of the sheet has not been humility. You have people to be among today, and the being among them is the whole of the instruction. The word settled that long before January, and the same Spirit who inspired it is at that table while you read this.

Why the schedule was always going to fail

Here is worth being exact about, because you have concluded something about yourself and it is the wrong conclusion.

You did not fail at humility four times. You failed at a schedule four times, which is a completely ordinary thing that happens to almost everybody who writes one, and the schedule was measuring something a schedule cannot measure.

And notice what a scheme like that quietly does. It turns a posture into a performance with a scoreboard, and then it puts you at the center of the scoreboard, checking daily how you are doing at not being at the center of things.

That is not a criticism of you. It is what happens to anybody who tries to systematize this, and it is why nobody in Scripture is ever given a humility regimen.

The one thing that is asked is stated in terms of other people: go along with the lowly. Nobody keeps a streak of that. You either spend some of today with somebody who has nothing to offer you, or you do not, and tomorrow is a fresh morning with no ledger carried over.

You have permission to burn the sheet, and burning it costs nothing that was ever working. Romans 12 puts the whole thing in terms of who you are with; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to walk in a direction without keeping score of it.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep reaching for a system is that somebody near you makes you pay for every failure, 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.