It’s amazing the lengths we go to sometimes to avoid admitting that we’re wrong. God brought a certain tendency to mind today during my time with Him, but I’m not yet sure how to qualify it. It’s a sense that I’ve gotten more than once, this past Sunday, and during a men’s meeting at our church a while back. The mood that constrains both of them is just one of enormous spiritual inadequecy and distance from God, but it goes deeper than that and loops back around to me, as these things invariably do. It’s the resentment I feel (just in general) when I compare myself to others in some area and find myself lacking. The element of it that causes me to pause for a second as I ruminate over it is the fact that more often than not I revel in this feeling, like I’m proud of it, or proud of my inadequecy. Instead of humbling myself and being malleable and teachable, I harden myself and declare defiantly that “I just can’t do it,” or “That doesn’t work for me.” It’s the whole sour grapes principle, really, pride, but it’s another area it had weaved into my life undetected, and it not only keeps me from receiving instruction and growing in the Lord, more often than not, it holds me back from trying new things; it makes me fearful and hesitant.
I remember one instance in particular more than a while back. I was homeschooled through all of middle school and high school, and one day in high school I was having some difficulty with my math lesson. I don’t remember the material other than it was algebra. Percentages, maybe, but in any case, my mom came over, and at great length and with great patience, explained it to me. I didn’t understand the math lesson for a while during her explanation, and I kept repeating to her, quite honestly, that I didn’t understand. Slowly, though, it came into focus, and I got my mind around the lesson. I didn’t immediately declare this to my mom, though, but kept insisting that I just didn’t understand. It sounds so ridiculous in retrospect, but I can still remember the mood and the mindset that produced that response, the almost-pride that I “just didn’t get it.” As I grow older I become more skilled at camouflaging things, as does everyone, but this flavor of pride is an old and bitter acquaintance.
Tacking away from that example, wonderful things happen when I renounce the hardening and maintain an open mind. I remember telling myself those words during a trip to the mountains when I was eight years old, “I’ll just keep an open mind about this,” and learning to ski, and ski well, was the result. To this day it and tennis are really the only two sports I can hold my own at, both sprung from a renunciation of the stubborn, ridiculous pride and an embracing of all there was to learn and experience.
I want to keep those eyes that first looked the white mountain up and down with a spirit of anticipation, so young, those eyes which are wide, to let in the light, and let it fill me, to express, to grow, to experience.