Pride never seemed more ridiculous than this…

Have you ever wanted to be an all-wise, all-knowing, all-intuitive sage who could always immediately pinpoint the problem with someone’s spiritual life? With your Holy Spirit-led instincts, you would present and explain in measured tones the solution to the grateful seeker who extols your brilliant Enlightenment. To his effusive thanksgiving, you would then smile benevolently and demur, “It was all from God. Praise the Lord!”

Have you?

I have!

Well, the idea did not sound so ridiculous at first.

All I wanted to do was help a friend get out of her spiritual rut. I wanted to give a solution to her problem… now what exactly is her problem again?

I don’t know!

So I made one up, one purely based on what I can see, what I can guess, what I can… solve. Because what would I do with a problem I can’t solve?

Now this creates two problems right away.

1. Instead of  actively listening to my friend and finding out how is she struggling, I would be actively seeking to impose my suggestion on her. That’s unhelpful and really rude. She would be confused, if not terribly upset.
2. I’m pretending I’m not really a fallible and imperfect human being who can’t read people’s minds and put a finger on their destiny. If God doesn’t expect me to be a guru, why should I? I’m getting stressed over nothing.

If this was just a delusion I’m suffering from, it would be good enough for God to snap me right out of it. But God being God and me being me, he showed me that it was not merely mistaken beliefs but my sinful pride which was setting up my foolish delusion.

I was elevating myself over my friend, I was elevating myself over who I really am, and mostly — I was elevating myself over God himself!

Paul’s wise counsel in Romans 12.3 came to my mind:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

It was a sobering lesson yet I had a good laugh at myself too. It’s better that the joke’s on my expense than to lord over a friend!