Humility

1 Peter 5:6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may life you up in due time.

One of my greatest struggles in life is to think of myself less. I often catch myself thinking of how events will affect me first, before thinking how they will affect others. I live in a world where I really have very little control globally and a great deal of control individually. I can make choices in the moment, but those choices don’t move the world one direction or the other to any appreciable degree. I am a nobody to the world.

When I am in one of those moments when I am thinking about myself, I often plot out what I would do if I were the person holding the power, making policy, governing large swaths of humanity. I can imagine a more righteous outcome. But, once again, I am probably giving myself too much credit for my solutions.

I think we all have moments where we imagine life differently from its current path. We imagine having great sums of wealth and the charity that we could do, the businesses that we could seed to raise the dignity and responsibility of so many. We could provide the world with clean water! We could buy everyone in poverty a dozen chickens, or goats, or cows as a way to give them sustainable income.

We could use our creativity to solve the world’s problems. (And by the way, this is one of the things we as Jesus-followers are supposed to be doing.) But then the reality for most of us is that we don’t really have the influence to solve problems of this size. Most of us can only solve problems within our local circles of influence.

But just because we can’t solve world-sized problems doesn’t mean we sit on our hands. We have local problems that are our size. We can make a difference in them. But this is where it gets hard, because most problems and their solutions are interconnected with other problems and solutions.

Right now I am trying to refocus on solving a local problem, but I can’t identify how I fit into the solution of which problem. I can’t fix them all. I can’t even see so many. I sit in my comfortable bubble and watch the world go by. (Just being honest here.)

I am the problem. I need to get off my duff and get busy doing. I need to identify the need I am designed to meet. And then I need to meet it. Boy do I need the LORD now. I need the fog lifted and a clear direction.