Divided We Stand: How to Love When We Disagreeنموونە

What Am I Missing?

Humility can be a difficult virtue to define, so let’s start with its opposite—pride. Pride is trusting yourself more than anyone else. In pride, we only trust ourselves with ourselves, and no one else gets a say.

Humility, however, is trusting God and others with ourselves. We begin our journey with Christ in humility, declaring that we need Him and cannot save ourselves. We humbly accept a gift that we cannot earn or accomplish. We continue the rest of our Christian lives in humility, trusting God over ourselves as we learn to live and love like Him.

In humility, we live in the reality that God is God, and we are not. He seems to know a lot of things that we don’t, and He is the only one who sees things perfectly. In humility, we begin to take caution from the religious professionals of Jesus’ day, who were quite sure that they alone saw things correctly and had it all figured out. Meanwhile, Jesus said that they completely missed the point. Humility reminds us that while we can have strong convictions, we are still only human, and our perspective could still be wrong.

In humility, it’s not only God who knows things we don’t; other people also know things! They can see blind spots and biases we’re unaware of and help us see from perspectives we couldn’t have on our own. Holding this humility—even in areas we feel strongly about—sets the stage for curious, humble conversations with those with whom we disagree.

Reflection:

Where do you find it most difficult to trust God with you?

Where do you assume your perspective is the only “right”?