Asking Humbly
Ever try to give someone a compliment who couldn’t accept it?
I like your shirt. Oh this? I got it on the clearance rack.
Good job! I could have done better, just got lucky.
Or next level: It wasn’t me; it was the Lord. All glory goes to God.
Maybe we feel unworthy…or think we’re being humble or more spiritual by deflecting praise. But in trying to be humble, we humiliate ourselves with deprecation and the giver by essentially saying we know better. True humility doesn’t reduce us or others to lower levels. It simply recognizes what is.
Humble people see themselves as they are. No more or less. Their relationships with others as they are—perfectly level. Their relationship with God—dependent, vulnerable, yet loved and accepted at the same time. But to be humble is to step outside your egoic mind that is always fighting to make you more or less than you are: defensive, fear-based positions, the ego’s will to survive. To be fearlessly humble—or gratefully realistic—is to have become entirely ready to see self and life from God’s, love-based position, where all is one and connected.
Our defects of character express our deepest fears of aloneness and inadequacy driving thought and behavior patterns that harm relationships and further isolate us, reinforcing fear. To humbly ask God to remove our defects is the culmination of having become aware of our deepest fears and how they drive our destructive behavior; to have admitted them to another person and experienced continued acceptance and love; and to have become entirely ready to see ourselves from God’s point of view.
To ask, in the Aramaic of Jesus’ language, is an expression of deepest longing and desire for change. A desire accompanied by the will to act now as if that change had already occurred—faith. To humbly ask is to cradle our desire in the awareness of the resistance our fears create and the reality of our connection to everyone and everything else. Humility balances fear with connection, unparalyzing us to take next steps as if the change we seek has already occurred…the only way to find that by asking in humble action, it actually has.
