What It Looks Like On A Tuesday

Sixth in the line at the returns desk, and the man at the front has a story about a shed.

It is twenty past two on a wet Tuesday and everybody's coat is steaming slightly. She has a bracket in a bag with a split in the corner, the wrong size, bought in good faith on Saturday, and the receipt is somewhere in a pocket she has already checked twice. Behind the desk a young lad is doing his level best with a system that keeps asking him for a number nobody has. Somewhere over by the paint counter a tin is being shaken, that thudding rattle that gets into your back teeth.

And she is standing there thinking about humility, because she has been reading about it all week and it has been a strange week.

Not thinking about it in a lofty way. Thinking about it the way you think about a word you have been given and cannot place. She has read that it is not thinking less of yourself. She has read that God gives grace to the humble. She believes all of it. And standing here, sixth in a line, damp, with a bracket, she genuinely cannot see where any of it would go. Where does that fit in this? What is the humble version of the next four minutes?

Then the woman in front of her, who is older and has a tin of masonry paint that is plainly too heavy for the way she is holding it, shifts her grip, and she takes it off her and holds it for her while the line moves up, and hands it back at the desk. That is all. Nobody says anything much. And she does not know, and would not have thought to ask, whether that counted as anything at all.

Maybe you know that exact feeling. You have read the good things, you agree with the good things, and you cannot work out what any of it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing spiritual is happening and nobody is watching and you are just a person in a line.

Humility is not a state you reach

Let us clear the biggest obstacle first, because it is the one that has been quietly costing you.

Humility has been treated, in your head and in mine, as a level. Something with a threshold, that a person eventually attains and can then be said to have. And if it is a level, then every ordinary day is either progress toward it or a wasted opportunity, and a wet Tuesday in a returns line is obviously a wasted one, which is why you cannot find it there.

It is not a level. It is a posture. A posture is something a body is in right now, or is not, and it can be taken in four seconds, and it does not accumulate, and nobody grades it. You cannot be behind on it. There is no backlog.

You are not being marked, and there is no record being kept of how low you have managed to get. Scripture puts the grace at the low place rather than at the end of a course, and the Holy Spirit is not an examiner, He is the One who makes the written word live in an ordinary hour.

Here is Peter, and notice how domestic he keeps it.

Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.1 Peter 5:5

Clothe yourselves. It is a getting-dressed word. It is the same order of action as putting on a coat in the hall: you do it today, you do it again tomorrow, and nobody stands in the doorway announcing that they have finally achieved outerwear.

And read the second half slowly, because it is the whole engine of this. God gives grace to the humble. Not to the impressive, and not eventually. Grace has a location, and the location is low.

Where the grace is kept

That changes what the low place actually is.

Most of us hear "take the low place" as a loss. A demotion accepted for God's sake, a thing endured now for a lifting later. But if the grace is given to the humble, then the low place is not the price of grace. It is the address of it. Going low is not paying for something; it is going to where the thing is kept.

You have grace waiting at the exact spot you have been avoiding, and it was put there before you got anywhere near it. The written word says God gives it to the lowly, and His Spirit is the One who carries a promise across the gap between a page and a Tuesday.

Now hold that beside the other thing this site says as often as it can, because a reader can take everything above and turn it into a weapon against themselves.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is not shrinking. It is not going quiet so as to take up less room, and it is certainly not agreeing with anybody who is treating you badly. If you have spent years making yourself smaller and calling it obedience, hear this plainly: that was never what was being asked of you, and if you are in a situation where somebody is harming you, nothing in this message asks you to stay there or to keep quiet about it. Please tell someone who can actually help. That is not a failure of humility; there is no version of this word that requires a person to be hurt.

The lowly person in Peter's sentence is not a diminished person. They are a person the right way up. You were made a particular size by God and you are not required to be any less than that in order to be low enough for Him. That is the settled testimony of Scripture about how He made people, and the Holy Spirit does not do His work by making a person smaller.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason nothing you do ever seems to count is that somebody near you makes sure it does not, 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.