Sunday, April 7, 2019

Musings on Humility

Two things to say immediately about my post on humility: One, it will be the best you've ever read on the subject. And two, I am aware of the irony of writing a post boasting of my learned humility (note the pronoun "I" so frequently mentioned in a post on humility). As in all endeavors on this blog, my only hope in making it public is to learn how to communicate important things well, and to hopefully benefit one of my six readers (see, only humble people do self-deprecating wit). 

They say that you should never pray for humility. I've never been so foolish, and yet God has seen fit to teach me anyway! I'm struck by how God teaches humility. He does it through hard experience. Humiliation is his truest school room for the formation of humility, and it is no process. It is full immersion learning!

Two years ago I lived in the small California city of Bakersfield, and taught at a large Christian school there (large for Christian schools, that is). Our life there was lovely in so many ways, and I liked to believe that I was pretty amazing. Let me count up the ledger of my deluded, and, as it turns out, imminently fragile sense of glory:

1. Successful career: I was known in my small community as a good teacher, even praised fairly regularly in public in various ways. The height of this came the year I left the school, when I was given a congressional award for teaching by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. I came to believe that I was an important teacher in the lives of my students. I believed that I would always be a sought after teacher, especially in the Bible and Philosophy subject areas. I was a realist. I knew I wasn't a first-tier researcher or a creator of new Philosophy, but I thought I was pretty special as a mediator of high things to young men and women.
2. Bakersfield famous: My kids coined this term. Because of my connection with the school, I came to be known in Bakersfield and encountered people who knew me everywhere. My kids were in a small Christian school as well, and I was known there. They even told me how important they felt because everyone knew who I was.
3. The Blog: I connected my teaching at the school to this blog, where I had my first few semi-viral posts. As it turns out, there were only a few posts that got significant attention, but I made it out in my own mind that I was going to be the next C.S. Lewis as a result.
4. Family: My family life early on in Bakersfield was happy, even on the border of idyllic. My three kids were loving and gentle and compliant and joy producing. I was proud of my family and my family life.
5. Health and Appearance: I was fit, strong, able, and always knew I was a better than average looking individual.
6. Financial Stability: At the center of this financial stability was our big and beautiful home in West Bakersfield. I simply felt important when I returned after work each day to this large and beautiful home with towering Sequoia trees dotting the back yard.

All told, I really did believe that I was doing life right. More than that, I believed that there were precious few people that did it as well as I was doing it. While I resisted it through Christian effort, pride was growing in my heart.

And then it all collapsed. It began with my divorce in 2013, finalized in 2016, which of course began long before that. I convinced myself that I had not failed at the most important endeavor of my life, but the fact is that I had. And then our broken family began to impact my relationship with my oldest daughter, who made it rather clear that she wanted nothing to do with God and Church and me.

Then we moved to Austin, Texas, after my ex-wife's company moved to the city. I was confident that with my credentials I would find a position at a Christian school quickly, and in the subject area I had spent 20 years teaching. But the job never came. One school had a Junior High Bible position, which I emailed and called about numerous times, but they never returned my calls or answered my resume. There were at least six schools that passed on me and I was devastated.

I knew that it meant I would have to live off the proceeds of the sale of my beautiful home in Bakersfield until I could find work that was sufficient to support a family of four. That work never came. Financially, I had to abandon the dream of a home for my kids because the only money I could invest was the equity from the house, and it was disappearing rapidly.

On top of it all, the stresses of the situation aggravated my heart condition, multiplying the number of A-fib episodes I endured, and all without a good health care plan to address it through the surgery I knew I needed.

In short, the things I was most proud of were all systematically taken away. A few weeks into the move I realized that to this community I was a foreigner, and made often to feel that way. The suffocating traffic made me feel that way. The swarming masses at the mega-churches I attended made me feel that way. I was disappearing. There was no boasting of my excellence, even to myself. It was a hollow claim coming from a jobless and lonely man living in an apartment in a wealthy suburb of Austin where I didn't belong. Whatever the truth was, whoever I was, I felt like a nobody swallowed up in this city.

But how many theologians and Christian mentors had taught me that this is precisely where God teaches us true reliance on Him. I was fond of reminding students that God owes us nothing, that as sinners we deserve only the hell and separation from Him that our sins merit for us; that this knowledge should keep us humble. But the central truths of the Christian faith are sometimes hard to learn outside of personal experience.

The only thing I knew to do was to hold fast to Christ, pray, seek Him, keep looking for work, and, yes, begin dating again. I believed I was ready in Bakersfield, but didn't pursue anything due to the impending move. It was time. I had grieved my divorce, learned from it, and now was hopeful for the future rather than living in the past, even in the midst of so much uncertainty.

It is nearly two years now since that move to Austin, and while I would appreciate it if God would stop teaching humility, He has nevertheless provided blessings I could never have imagined, nor would have been well prepared for without my season of emptiness and need. I hold the gifts God has given the way I should hold them after so much striving and difficulty.

Indeed, God is good, even in the desert, but no desert is His final place of habitation for His children. Perhaps the best way to say where He has led me is to describe a few brief scenes from my day:

1. Made a beautiful goat cheese, sausage, sun-dried tomato, spinach, and garlic omelette for my godly and loving and true and devastatingly beautiful wife.
2. Drove through a column of brilliant blue wildflowers to my job at Stone House Vineyard near Austin, where new challenges await in an exciting new career in the winery business, and with better pay and upside than any teaching position here in Austin.
3. Watered the new garden boxes in the back yard of our humble south Austin home.
4. Played Clue with my wonderful girls, all of whom are doing well in the big public schools of the Lake Travis school district.
5. Prayed with my girls, and my wife, expressing our gratitude for the life God has given.
6. Sat downstairs and wrote this article while my wife slept because I am awake with another A-fib episode. (I await a surgery that will, God's grace permitting, allow a solution to this frustrating health problem.)

I've learned well that I am a simple man, but God has not provided simple pleasures or simple joys or simple lessons to this simple man. He pours an ocean into me every day, and I have only these hands to hold it. Indeed I've learned it is better to be taken out into the current of His ocean than to try to take it all in. And that is the secret isn't it? The prideful man insists that the universe somehow fit within himself, his desires, his plans, his needs. His instinct is to swallow it up into his infinite need. He would reduce it all to an occasion for himself. The humble man is drawn out into infinite space and discovers how great God's world, His plan, is; and because of it discovers himself truly! He can be a player in a story that is infinitely bigger, and because of it he can become bigger. The prideful man collapses everything into the narrow and vanishing world of his own ego. He becomes small by insisting on being big while the humble man becomes big by finally, painfully, truly understanding his smallness.