The Lime Trees Had a Good Year

The produce tent smells of cut grass and warm canvas and, faintly, of sponge cake going soft on a paper doily. Trestle tables down both sides. Runner beans laid out like they are being sentenced. A marrow the size of a small dog.

The judge works her way along the honey and stops at a squat jar near the end, holds it up to the light of the tent door, turns it, and puts a small card down beside it.

There is a proper cheer. Four or five neighbors, a hand on a shoulder, somebody saying well done Margaret three times because once was not enough.

And Margaret, before the cheer has finished, says, "It was the lime trees. We had a good year for the lime."

She says it again to the man from the allotments. She says it to the girl with the clipboard. By the third telling it has become a small lecture on nectar flow, and the good word that arrived in that tent about ninety seconds ago has been fully dismantled and put back in its box.

This is not modesty. Modesty would be a small smile and a change of subject. What this is, if you watch it closely, is a woman who cannot let a good word stay in the room with her. She has to take it apart before it settles, the way you would carry a wasp out of a kitchen, quickly, before anybody gets hurt.

You know this from the inside. Somebody says the kind thing, and the counter sentence is already loaded before they have got to the end of it. It was the team. It was a fluke. Anybody would have. You have not slept properly, so it cannot have been that good.

And here is the part that matters, and it is why this is not a small habit. You did not pick that up by accident. Somewhere along the line you were taught that the counter sentence is what a Christian does, that putting yourself back down is the price of not becoming insufferable, and that a person who lets a good word stand is halfway to being ruined by it.

You thought it was obedience.

What the word actually means

Start with the word, because a great deal has been built on top of it that it will not carry.

Humility is a posture. It is a person standing under something, deliberately, because of what that something is. It is not an opinion about your own quality, and it is not a size that somebody cuts you down to. A man can bow low and know exactly what he is worth to God, and those two facts do not fight.

What has been sold to you instead is a running commentary. A voice that goes along beside your life demoting everything as it happens, and calls it faithfulness. That commentary is not the posture. It is a great deal noisier than the posture, and it never once stops talking about you.

You are dear to God this afternoon, and saying so out loud does not make you proud. I am not offering you a nicer opinion of yourself; the psalm says that the Lord takes pleasure in His people and He adorns the humble (Psalm 149:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in a person rather than the pleasantness of hearing it. Look at who is being adorned in that line. The humble. The very ones you would expect Him to leave plain.

For the LORD takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation.Psalm 149:4

He does not manufacture the thing He hates

Sit with the grammar of that verse for a moment, because it settles the whole question.

If receiving something good from God made a person proud, then God would be in the business of producing pride, deliberately, in the people He is most pleased with. He adorns the humble. He does not adorn them and then stand back nervously to see how they take it. He does not hand out an ornament and hope nobody notices they are wearing one.

That is the flaw in the arrangement you have been keeping. You have been guarding the door against something God Himself is bringing in.

You have His pleasure resting on you right now, and it is not a reward you have to keep clear of. The written promise says pleasure, not tolerance, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary person able to stand still under it without flinching. Nothing in that psalm asks the lowly to hand the adornment back.

And notice the direction of it all. He takes the pleasure. He does the adorning. Not one verb in the line belongs to the person being spoken about, which means there is nothing here for you to have earned, and therefore nothing here for you to disqualify yourself from by being pleased.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot let a kind thing stand is that somebody near you punishes you for it, 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.

And say the plain thing with me while we are here, because somebody handed you the other one a long time ago: humility is not thinking less of yourself, and it never was. Putting yourself down is not the low posture God asked for. It is a good word aimed at the wrong number, and you have been faithful to it at real cost.