The One Who Never Makes a Fuss

Six of them in the hallway, because the meeting room upstairs is being redecorated and nobody minds standing. There is a folding table with a plate of biscuits on it that nobody will touch, and a strip light near the lift that has been buzzing since February, and the door entry buzzer goes twice while they are talking and both times it is somebody's shopping.

Item four is the storage cupboard under the stairs. She has kept her bike in it for nine years. It is agreed, in under a minute, in a friendly way, by people who are all perfectly nice, that the cupboard would be better used for the pushchairs, and that she will not mind because there is a shed round the back, and the shed has a padlock somebody's brother could probably look at.

She says of course. She says it before the sentence about the shed has even finished, because she can feel the whole hallway leaning that way and it is easier to get there first.

And then, on the way to the lift, the woman from the second floor puts a hand on her arm and says it warmly, the way people always say it. She never makes a fuss, that one. Never has.

It is meant kindly. It is entirely meant kindly. That is what makes it sit in her chest all evening like a swallowed stone, because underneath the small thing about the cupboard is a very large thing about nine years and a shed and a pattern she can see from a long way off now, and underneath even that is the sentence she has been carrying since she was about nineteen years old. Somebody told her, once, in a room where she had asked for something, that a humble person does not need to be treated well.

She has never been able to get that sentence out. It sounds like Scripture. It is not Scripture, and it has run more of her life than most of the verses she can quote.

Humility is a posture, not a size

Let me put down the thing that has been used on you, because it is not true and it has been doing damage for years. Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It never was. It is not a smaller opinion, a quieter voice, a lower ceiling or a life with the edges filed off. Humility is standing under God rather than beside Him, and a person can do that at full height, with both feet on the ground, in a hallway, with a bike that has to go somewhere.

What has been sold to you is something else wearing the same coat. Shrinking is not lowliness. Absorbing is not meekness. Going without is not automatically obedience, and being easy to overlook is not a spiritual gift. There are people who have spent thirty years making themselves smaller in the belief that God asked for it, and He did not ask for it, and He has been grieved by the loss of them the whole time.

So take this now, plainly. You are humble before God, and that has nothing whatever to do with how much you are willing to lose. Scripture puts the posture in the will and never in the wound, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works it in a person, gently, from the inside, which is the opposite of how it gets pressed on somebody from the outside.

And if you want to know what it looks like when the two are held together at once, look at the hardest night in the gospels. Jesus is in a courtyard, bound, and an officer standing beside Him hits Him across the face for the way He answered a question.

"If what I said is wrong, bear witness about the wrong; but if what I said is right, why do you strike me?"John 18:23

Read it again slowly, because most of us were taught the other half of that night and never this bit. He does not hit back. He does not curse the man, threaten him, or call heaven down on the courtyard, and a few hours later He is praying for the people driving the nails in. And He does not agree with the blow either. He does not lower His eyes and take it as though it were owed to Him. He asks a question, out loud, in front of everybody: what is this for?

Nobody has ever managed to call that pride. It is the most humble man who has ever lived, keeping something, and what He keeps is not His comfort or His rights or His safety. He keeps the truth about what just happened. He will not let a wrong thing be renamed as a right thing in His presence, not even when the wrong thing is being done to Him.

Which means you have permission you have never given yourself. You have the right to say, quietly and without heat, that a thing is not right, and to still be a humble person at the end of the sentence. That permission is not mine to hand out and I am not handing it out. It is written into how the Lord Himself behaved on the worst night of His life, and His Spirit is the one who will steady your voice when you use it.

Now, a word I am not able to say lightly, because I do not know your situation and I am not going to pretend to. This article is not telling you to stay anywhere and it is not telling you to leave anywhere. That judgment belongs to you, and to the people who actually know your life, and to God. What I can say is this: if somebody is hurting you, that is not something God is asking you to absorb as an act of worship, and you are allowed to reach for help. Tell one person who can act. A doctor. A domestic abuse line: 0808 2000 247 in the United Kingdom, 1 800 799 7233 in the United States. If you are in danger right now, the emergency number where you are. And if the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please call a crisis line today, 988 in the United States or 116 123 in the United Kingdom, and tell somebody living.

None of that is a failure of humility. Asking for help is what a person under authority does. It is not what a proud person does at all.