Overcoming Pride

One of my great struggles in life has been overcoming pride.

Pride is extremely dangerous. As C.S. Lewis has noticed in his book, Mere Christianity, pride is the only sin that alienates people from other people.

Every other sin can bring people together in some way. People who like stealing go on raids together. People who like lying pull off complicated deceptions. People who like adultery will congregate to do inappropriate things.

But pride is different. Pride is the one sin that makes someone completely alienated. When you are prideful you want to be above and beyond everyone else, having no fellowship with them at all. Sure, people's compliments can fuel you for a while, but those compliments only serve to push your airy head as far past those people as it can get.

And worse, pride can alienate us from God. Ezekiel tells us that Satan fell from Heaven because of pride. He loved how good he was, he pushed himself above and beyond everyone else, including God, and he rebelled and got kicked out. He's still rebelling, and we're helping him every day.

Yup, pride is dangerous, and I've definitely been guilty of it. Worse, I've usually been very confused about how to fix it.

But I've been thinking about it a lot and studying the Bible, and I think I may have figured out my problem. It can be summed up in one phrase.

Dealing with pride is not done by thinking less of yourself. Dealing with pride is done by thinking more of others.

That's the problem. I usually try to think less of myself - oh, never mind, sure, I did that, but I'm not really that great a guy. I belittle myself and try to fake myself out that I don't think too highly of myself.

But maybe there's another way to fix the problem. Maybe instead of trying to knock my opinion of myself down, I can raise my opinion of others. Maybe instead of trying to serve myself less I can try to serve others more.

As a last thought, I think I'll share something from Communications class. It's the most valuable thing we learned all year, in my opinion. It is the acronym:

JOY

It stands for Jesus, Others, and You. That's the order of priorities.

I'm Solidifying

I've noticed something rather scary that's been happening to me lately. In one sense it elates me, and in another, it scares me to death.

I feel like I'm beginning to solidify.

When I was a lot younger, I was much more impressionable. I mean, if anyone said something it would stick with me quickly. It would affect me seriously. Think about the word "impressionable" for a moment. What is an impression? It is like a handprint or a footprint. When you place your foot on the soft sand of the beach, you leave a mark of your foot there. The sand takes the shape of your foot.

As an impressionable youth, I was the same way. It was easy to shape me. I was like soft sand, and anything anyone said or did left an imprint on me.

I have done a lot of online debating, mostly on the subject of creation/evolution. Actually at one point when I was thirteen I debated for almost a straight week, spending every spare second online fighting for my beliefs.

I became very angry and confused. I didn't know what to think because so many atheists assaulted me all week long. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know if what I was taught when I was young (and even more impressionable!) was right.

I learned in debates this year that it doesn't matter which side sounds more impressive or has more evidence, the other side can still be right. There can usually be evidence for any idea if you look around hard enough. I think it's a combination of learning truths like this and just growing up that is causing me to solidify.

So in a way it's a good thing. I'm starting to be able to hold on to my beliefs more strongly. I debated atheists again over the past few weeks. I've been able to hold up a lot better. I guess I also have more knowledge in addition to more faith.

But in another way, I'm afraid of solidifying. I've heard that the teen years are the end of the impressionable years. When you're 16, 17, 18, you're becoming the person you're going to be for the rest of your life.

I'm scared that a lot of artifacts that I don't want in that person will solidify with the rest of me. What if I lose the most impressionable time of my life, the time when I'm shaping and molding myself and letting God shape and mold me into the man He wants me to be? What if I solidify before I'm ready, and it's no longer so easy to change?

I guess I should be comforted. Because with God, all things are possible. But I should also be careful of who I am now and who I am becoming.

So should you.

I Quote My Wise Friends

Here are just a few quotes from my friends that I found really inspiring.

"Maybe the problem with Christians is that we're told to live our lives for Christ, when we should really be sacrificing our lives for Christ."
-Joshua T.

"It's so easy to think that if I am pretty good and don't do really bad things throughout the day, I am living a godly life. It's not what we don't do, it's what we do do!"
-Makenna J.

Just some good stuff to think about. The first quote I like a whole lot. We tend to think that Christians will just do the normal unbelieving thing with a few edits here and there, but we're really called to do a whole new thing. We're not called to go to school, do our homework, watch movies, listen to music, hang out with friends at the mall, etc. None of that stuff is wrong, but we're called to be radically different. Jesus certainly was.

And Makenna's quote is also pretty impressive. It's not about what we don't do. In reality, even when we abstain from stuff, we're still doing something: choosing the right path. There is so much more to the Christian life than just not watching any movies over PG-13, not drinking and smoking, and not having sex before marriage. That stuff isn't even the main course, it is (or should be) just a byproduct of a deep, powerful love for our Jesus.

And it is so much more important to choose to do the right thing than to choose not to do the wrong thing.

Learning to Blog

I've always been a writer. When I was very young I would write simple stories with predictable plots and morals. When I was older I would chronicle my life. Those writings usually ended up being deleted permanently from the computer, because they were simply so deep. So into my life. So real. I was afraid of them, because they were so honest.

I wish now that I had kept them. I could have a narration of my life by myself, and see how much I have grown. Things that were huge to me at one point are now silly and inconsequential. Things I thought were insurmountable are now trivial.

I could also see how much I have fallen apart. How far away I have gotten from God. How scary some of my life really was in a spiritual sense. I could see what a shaky, unstable organism I really was. How immature I was. How depraved I had become.

I wish I had chronicled then. I wish I had kept all my old journals and exposed them. So many life lessons can be learned from the scrawling of other human beings as they make their way through life. You can learn so much from what other people have been through.

Especially yourself.

And that is why I'm blogging here. I have longed to have a place to organize all my random thoughts, put the pieces together, see how life fits and flows and moves and loves. And when a good friend of mine got a blog, copycat or not, it was too hard to resist.

This will be my thinking place. The place where I learn from my own mistakes, pick myself up with my own advice. And I hope, in some simple sort of way, that maybe something I've written can help others, too.

I want to learn from this. I want to fit together all the truth that I can, piece my life together, understand it and shape it. I want to learn the simple things, the compelling things, the beautiful things, that I have been learning all my life. I want to learn the essential.

I want to learn to breathe.