More Humble Than Proud

In the Hebrew the word for humility carries with it a sense of knowing how much space to take up. When should you take up space in order to help those who need help and when do you need to take up less space in order to allow others to have space to breathe. It is a great image for me to consider that being humble has both a meek and a powerful side to it.

When I think of the word 'proud' I tend to think of a person puffing out their chest, sometimes in healthy ways (such as when a good job is done) and sometimes in a unhealthy ways (such as when talking about how awesome you are). Proud always takes up more space while humility knows what is the correct space to take up. 

For reasons I do not know, we are writing and talking less about being humble and more about being proud (see Ngram below). The spiritual life is one that is not afraid of being proud, there are healthy times to take up more space. However, the spiritual life is knowing when to take up less space. Proud is fine, humble is greater.

May the Lord torment you

The past week I encountered a woman named Sheila Richards who has a habit of sharing a particular benediction of retired Indiana Conference Bishop White. He contributed this benediction to the now no longer in print United Methodist Reporter. Since she shared it with me I thought others may resonate with it. 

May the Lord torment you. May the Lord disturb you. May the Lord keep before you the faces of the despised, rejected, lonely and oppressed. May the Lord give you strength and courage and compassion to make this a better world. And may you do your very best to make this a better city, a better state, a better world. And after you have done your best, may the Lord grant you peace. Amen. 

My Trainer Gives Me Donuts and Beer

Once a week I go to a trainer at the gym and she is great. You should meet her. She is funny and easy to work with. She tells me stories and gives me a good feeling every time I leave the gym. Most of my week is spent dealing with heavy things and the last thing that I want to do on my day off is to lift do any more heavy lifting. I was looking for a trainer for a long time, but most of them made me uncomfortable with the amount of work they were asking me to do. Which is why my trainer is great because she gives me what I really want donuts and beer.

Of course this is fictional. No one wants to attend a gym that employs trainers that will give you donuts and beer. We go to gyms to work out our bodies and stretch beyond what we think we are able to do in order to be fit for whatever may happen in our lives. 

In my years of ministry I have met a good number of people who want a pastor to be the equivalent to the donut dispensing trainer. Some of us are looking for a pastor that will tell us good stories, to make us feel good, to get a good laugh and walk out in the same shape as we walked in with but with a smile.

It has been said that the prophets are those who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. But I can tell you that many pastors feel like we are not able to follow this calling out of fear. There is a fear among many of us clergy to do the work of afflicting the comfortable because we fear loosing out jobs. At times, clergy have been known to gripe about the church for being too complacent or too petty. However these conversations distract us clergy from the hard truth that many of us do not want to face: we are the trainers passing out donuts and beer. 

This season of Lent, I am going to spend a decent amount of time considering how it is that I have become a donuts and beer pastor.