They Called My Questions Pride

She was twenty two and she asked three questions in a room of fourteen people, and one of them was about a verse that seemed to say the opposite of what the study notes said it meant.

She was not being clever. She had read it four times on the bus and it genuinely did not fit.

The man leading it said, kindly, in front of everybody, that there was a lot of pride in wanting to have it all worked out, and that a humble heart accepts what it is given. Two people nodded. Somebody made tea.

She did not go back. Not that week and not the week after, and then it had been a month, and then it had been eighteen years.

She has a good life. She is godmother to two children and she is the person her friends call when something goes wrong at two in the morning, and she has read more theology on her own than most of the people in that room ever did.

She also apologizes. In a shop, in a doorway, on the phone, in a meeting where she is the one who knows. Sorry, sorry, sorry, and she is not sorry, and she does not know how to stop.

If you were handed a verdict once and have been serving the sentence ever since, you know exactly what I mean. And it may be that nobody has ever told you the verdict was wrong.

The definition you were handed was the wrong one

Let me say the plain thing first, because you have waited eighteen years and nobody should have to wait longer.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It never was. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, or perhaps not, and either way it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact about that, because nothing else gets through until it is said. You were twenty two, you were in a room of people you trusted, they used a word with weight in it, and you believed them. That is not gullibility. That is what an honest person does with an authority they have no reason to doubt yet.

Now read what God says about how you got here, and read it slowly, because there are three verbs in it and every one of them is His.

Yet now hear, O Jacob my servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen: Thus saith the LORD that made thee, and formed thee from the womb, which will help thee; Fear not, O Jacob, my servant; and thou, Jesurun, whom I have chosen.Isaiah 44:2

Made. Formed. Chosen. Three decisions, all taken by God, none of them taken in that room in front of fourteen people. You were formed from the womb by God and chosen by Him, and neither of those has been reviewed since. That is not my kindness to you. It is written in Isaiah 44:2, 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.

And look at what He says to somebody who has been told to be smaller. Fear not. Not think less of yourself, not take up less room, not stop asking. Fear not, servant, chosen.

So the eighteen years of apologizing in doorways have not been humility. You have a place that God gave you and it does not shrink when somebody in a room disapproves of a question. The word settled that before you were born, and the same Spirit who inspired it is with you while you read this.

A question is not a claim

Here is the thing that was done to you, and it is worth naming precisely so you can stop carrying it as a fact about yourself.

You were told that wanting to understand was pride. But a question is the opposite of a claim. A person who asks is a person who does not think they already have it. The room used the word pride to describe the least proud thing that happened in it that evening.

Scripture is full of people asking. Job asks for a hundred and fifty verses at a time. Habakkuk opens by asking how long. Mary asks how this can be, and the angel answers her rather than rebuking her. The one thing God does not appear to be is nervous about the question.

Anybody who has ever kept accounts knows what happened to your books that night. A figure written up beyond its worth is a false entry. A figure written down below its worth is exactly the same false entry facing the other way. Both are wrong. Only one of them ever gets called modest.

You were never asked for a small account of yourself, and you were never asked for an inaccurate one. The word tells you He formed you and chose you, and His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to look straight at their own life without flinching in either direction.

And nothing here is handing you self-promotion instead. I am careful about that, because a woman who has been going down for eighteen years is not helped by being told to start going up. That is the same false entry the other way round and it is just as tiring. Humility is not a size at all. It is a posture: a person standing at their true measure in front of a God who is immeasurably larger, and knowing exactly which of the two of them is which.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep making yourself small is that somebody near you punishes you for taking up space, nothing here is telling 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.