Waiting To Feel It

Eleven months ago she asked God for humility.

She meant it. It was not a passing thing; she had come to the end of something and she prayed a real prayer in a real moment and she has not forgotten the date.

And then she waited.

She has been waiting for a feeling. She could describe it if you pressed her, though she has never had to: a kind of settledness, a lowering somewhere in her chest, an absence of the thing that goes off when somebody else is praised.

It has not come.

And because it has not come she has drawn a conclusion, and the conclusion is that God has not started with her yet. That she is still on the list. That whatever He does to make a person humble, He has not begun doing it, and there is presumably a reason.

So she has not done anything. Not out of laziness. She has been waiting to be equipped, the way you wait for a delivery before you begin a job, and it has been eleven months and she is a little further from it than she was.

If you have been waiting to feel something before you act, you know exactly what I mean.

It is a verb

Let me answer the question directly, because eleven months is long enough to be waiting for the wrong thing.

Look at how James words it, and look particularly at who is doing the action.

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.James 4:10

Humble yourselves. It is an imperative aimed at you and it is a thing you do. It is not humility being poured into a person while they wait, and it is not a temperament being installed.

The whole letter is like that. James has no interest at all in what anybody feels about anything; he asks what people are doing, over and over, until it becomes almost rude.

You have been given a verb rather than a condition, and a verb is available to somebody who feels nothing at all. That is not my encouragement. It is written in James 4:10, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

So eleven months of waiting has not been patience. You have something you can do today, and the doing of it never once required the feeling to arrive first. The word settled that long before you prayed, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

What you were waiting for is not on the list

Here is worth naming, because you have been checking for something that was never promised.

Nowhere in Scripture is anybody described as feeling humble. There is no verse about the sensation of it. The word is used about postures, about actions, about people going low in front of God, and never once about an interior weather system.

Which means the check you have been running has no reading to give you. You have been putting a thermometer into a thing that does not have a temperature, monthly, for eleven months, and concluding from the blank that nothing is happening.

And there is something else, gently. A person waiting to feel humble is doing something with a particular shape, which is monitoring their own interior for evidence about themselves. That is a great deal of attention on the self, and it is a very ordinary trap, and it is worth noticing without turning it into one more fault to add to the file.

You have not been failing. You have been waiting for a delivery that was never coming, because the thing was a verb the whole time.

You have permission to act without the feeling, and the permission does not depend on your interior cooperating. James 4 puts the whole thing in the imperative; His Spirit is the one who makes an unfelt obedience an actual one.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of why you are waiting is that somebody near you makes you pay for getting things wrong, 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.