Tired Of Trying To Be Humble

Two years ago he decided to work on it, the way you decide to work on your knees or your sleep.

He read what he could find. He set himself things. He asked two people to tell him when he was being self important and both of them said they would and neither of them ever has, which he has thought about.

And here is the honest report, which he has never given anybody.

He is worse at it than when he started.

Not dramatically. He has not become a monster. But he thinks about himself considerably more than he did in the year before he began, because the project requires it: you cannot monitor your own humility without a great deal of looking at yourself, and he has been looking at himself for two years with the specific purpose of not being self absorbed.

And he is tired. Not from the effort, which is small. He is tired in a way that two years of a small effort should not produce, and he does not sleep well, and he has begun to dread the review he does on Sunday evenings.

If you have been working at this and are worse at it, you know exactly what I mean.

The yoke that is described as easy

Let me put the passage in front of you, because there is a word in it you have not been able to reconcile with the last two years.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.Matthew 11:29

Meek and lowly in heart. That is the only place in the Gospels where He describes His own interior, and this is the sentence He picks, and He offers it in the same breath as rest.

Notice how the learning happens. It is not a curriculum and there is no self assessment in it. Take my yoke: a yoke is worn beside somebody. Learn of me: not learn about, learn from, in the way an apprentice learns, which is by being next to a person doing the work.

And then easy, and light, and rest. Three words about weight, in a passage about becoming lowly.

So the plain question is worth asking. You have been carrying something for two years that is heavy, and the yoke He offers is the one described as light. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Matthew 11:29, 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.

If it is crushing you, it is not the thing He handed you. That is not a rebuke of your two years. It is a piece of information you have been entitled to the whole time.

So the project has not been humility. You have a yoke that was offered rather than assigned, and it comes with somebody in it beside you. The word settled that long before you started, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on that porch while you read this.

Why it went the way it went

Here is the mechanism, and understanding it may be worth more than anything else on this page.

Humility is not a quality you can work on directly, because the working requires attention, and the attention has to go somewhere, and the only available place to put it is yourself.

So a humility project is a self attention project. Necessarily. Not because you did it badly but because that is the only shape the thing can take.

Which is why you are worse. You are not worse at obedience or worse at kindness. You are further into your own head than you were two years ago, and being further into your own head is precisely what you set out to escape.

And the Sunday review is the purest form of it. An hour a week entirely about how you are doing.

I am not telling you that trying was wrong. You wanted a good thing and you went after it in the only way anybody ever offers, and almost every book you read implied a project.

But look at what He offers instead. Not a project. A yoke, with Him in it, and the promise attached is rest.

You have permission to stop working on this, and stopping is not giving up on it. Matthew 11 puts learning beside a person rather than in a curriculum; His Spirit is the one who takes a man out of his own head by putting something else in front of him.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot stop reviewing yourself 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.