faithMile

By Katryna Starks

HUMILITY

We are often told to be humble and to “let God do it” when it comes to our accomplishments. Often, we don’t understand what that means or how to live that out. The first step in having God’s humility is to understand our proper relationship to him. God is like the sun, and he shines. We are like the moon. We only appear to shine. The moon doesn’t have any light of its own, it only reflects the light of the sun. When the moon is not able to reflect the sun’s light, we only see a part of it. We see “half-moons” and “crescent moons”. It’s not that the moon actually diminishes or disappears, it’s that we only see the parts of it that are properly reflected. The rest of the moon is in darkness and therefore invisible.

The same is true of us and our relationship with God. Our job description, as humans, is to reflect God’s glory. That’s it. The whole thing. But we are capable of maneuvering ourselves in such a way that we are out of God’s direct light upon our lives. Like the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32), we can sin or turn away or just forget who we are and who we belong to. At those times, we become like “half-souls” or “crescent people”. We don’t reflect the full glory of God because we have moved out of God’s light.

PURPOSE

Our purpose is to reflect God’s glory and we can do this in two ways. One way is that we simply obey God’s orders in the Bible. There are several, but the Ten Commandments are the ones that sum them all up – and, Jesus said when asked, if you can’t remember ten, just remember two: Love God above all, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:36-40).

Many of us struggle to find “our specific purpose” in God and we don’t know what to do when we don’t feel like we are hearing from him. In those times, go back to Matthew 22 and just do the two things that you know. If you need more specifics, see Micah 6:8 where God enumerates his commands with three requirements: act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

PASSION

The second way to live out humility and purpose is to find and live our passion. Passion is the essence of humility. You’ve probably been taught the opposite, so this can be confusing. Living MY passion is the way to live GOD’S humility and GOD’S purpose for me? Exactly.

Think about the last time you did something you were passionate about, or created something out of passion. It could be a poem or a painting or simply cleaning the carpet in your living room. When you were in the process of doing whatever that is, you probably got so absorbed in your actions that you lost track of time. When you were finished, you looked proudly at your accomplishment, but it wasn’t the type of pride that says “I’m better than others.” It was the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from having fulfilled a part of yourself. For a moment, as you admire your handiwork or remember the process, it feels as though all is “right” with the world. And for you, for a moment, it is.

This is the pride of accomplishment that God had in Genesis when he created the heavens, earth, animals and humans and stood back and said “it is good.” It is fulfilling and not haughty. When you live in this sense of passion, its impossible to not be humble. While God fully owned his creation, we know when we live in those passionate moments that our accomplishments are not our own. We know that we have been helped. Even famous non-religious musicians will speak of divine intervention when they wrote certain songs. In the past, some have called it “genius” and some have called it “a muse”, but there is a definite sense in which we know that the result of our passionate works is not ours alone to claim – and therefore we are humble. If we become successful and we try to create those same works without the same motivation (i.e. writing songs for money and not for passion), we may meet the same material success, but we won’t retain our humility.

Humility is not a real sense that we are not worthy; nor a false distancing of ourselves from our works. It’s living fully in the light that we are given without fooling ourselves into believing that we are it’s source.

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Footnote: A good summation of this is a famous quote by Marianne Richardson. She is a new age teacher and not a Christian one, but I believe that God speaks to his entire creation and sometimes people who don’t believe in him still hear him (it’s not that what they hear is untrue, it’s that they don’t know/acknowledge where it comes from.)

In this famous passage, Williams says, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

She is almost right. It isn’t “our light” that shines. It’s God’s light and we are reflecting it.

Will you?