I have other friends who like to spend their energy listening to themselves talk. They like to post pointed arguments on Facebook to stir up controversy and prove everybody else wrong. It's not that they’re unintelligent…at least some of them. They just talk A L O T. I fall into this category rather than that of my genius friend. It’s not an admirable trait.
My friend has something figured out that those of us too busy talking need to understand. So what is it? What separates my friend from the talking heads? It's not intelligence. The answer, I think, is humility. My friend doesn’t just treat me respectfully, listen more, talk less, and fail to judge me because he pities my lowly level of understanding. You can always tell when someone is being kind out of pity. No, he actually views me as an equal. Humility is the key word. Simple enough, right?
Once Jesus talked about some traits of people who are blessed. People who have it together. People that live in harmony with the Kingdom of God. The first three were the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and the meek. So in other words, the people that have it together are the people that realize they don’t have anything together.
I see a trend amongst Christians to shy away from these things. There is a pressure to be happy all the time because of Jesus. An illusion is created that, because of Christ, all our struggles are wiped away, that we have all the answers, and that we are the only right ones. And everyone else?
Outsiders.
If you’re looking at the beatitudes through this lens, you would read, “Blessed are those that have all the answers, for they will be so sure about life that they will never be down-trodden.”
If you’re anything like me when you experience this, you start to feel like you’re not on the same level of Christian as those around you. You feel like you have to cover who you really are, and what you really think, and arm yourself with a shield of comebacks to defend against honest questioning.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe truth is something we should always be searching for. If you have an opinion, and have a strong reason to support it, that is a good thing. The problem is that under every good opinion is a person that doesn’t have it all figured out, and hasn’t even come close to scratching the surface of the mysteries of God and the universe. But it’s hard to deal with brokenness. No one wants to stand naked, revealing to themselves and the world every imperfection. So we clothe ourselves with all the right answers. We put on our Super Christian suits and disguise who we really are.
The truth is we’re all Clark Kent. The problem is none of us are Superman.
People will always do this. Everyone wants to cover their brokenness with something, and an easy way to do it is to convince ourselves that we have it all figured out. Christian, Atheist, Muslim, you name it. No one is immune. If we think that an area of our lives is safe from pride, then we’ve found the most vulnerable area of our lives for pride to exploit. God loves all of us for who we really are underneath our beliefs and disguises. The moment we acknowledge this is the moment that we step off of our high horses and see our neighbors eye to eye. It’s as the scriptures say, we love because He first loved us. The real us.
When we see who we really are, and acknowledge the poverty of our spirit, we are free to mourn with our neighbors in their brokenness. We are freed from the pressure to be right, and can finally approach the world with meekness and love. When we lay down our pride, we live as humans. When we live as humans, we live in harmony with our Creator.
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
-Albert Einstein
