Pride & Shame

Right now I’m reading John Piper’s book, Battling Unbelief.  He once again hits a home-run.  It’s an abbreviated version of his longer work, Future Grace, and since as a mommy my time to read is limited, I read this shorter version while I walk on the treadmill :-).  The book has categories of things that we battle, all of which have the same root–unbelief.  Today I read about battling Pride and battling Shame. 

Pride:  Two things struck me about battling pride.  First, we have gotten it all mixed up in our modern minds because we equate theological wishy-washiness (my word!) with humility.  It is not!  We are called to know what we believe, which is not pride.  As GK Chesterton, a British Catholic journalist who died in 1936 said, “What we suffer from . . . is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert–himself.  The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt–the Divine Reason.”  Wow!  Joshua Harris calls this Humble Orthodoxy.  Well said.

 Secondly, CS Lewis says this about Pride:  “The pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching.  If there is an itch one does want . . . (hold on, Dutch just woke up, I’ll be back in a few hours . . . ok I’m back).  If there is an itch one does want to scratch; but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch.  As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and sky) instead.” 

 Lastly, consider this about two forms of pride, boasting and self-pity: “Both are manifestations of pride.  Boasting is the response of pride to success.  Self-pity is the response of pride to suffering.  Boasting says, “I deserve admiration because I have achieved so much.” Self-pity says, “I deserve admiration because I have sacrificed so much.”  Boasting is the voice of pride in the heart of the strong.  Self-pity is the voice of pride in the heart of the weak.  Boasting sounds self-sufficient.  Self-pity sounds self-sacrificing.  The reason self-pity does not look like pride is that it appears to be needy.  But the need arises from a wounded ego and the desire of the self-pitying is not really for others to see them as helpless, but heroes.  The need self-pity feels does not come from a sense of unworthiness, but from a sense of unrecognized worthiness.  It is the response of unapplauded pride.” 

 Boom.  That hits me between the eyes.  Have I done that?  Do I want people to know the things I’ve “suffered” so that somehow that will exalt me?  I hope not!  I think of how that relates even to things that I write, things that I say, things that I share with people.  Even in my writing of the Santa Clara story–I wanted to write it to remember the marvelous things God has done, and yet I’m afraid I will enjoy it if people somehow thing I’ve “endured” a hard thing, as if it had anything to do with us.  It does not.  All too often, I have “the itch”.  In a way, this revelation makes me scared to share with anyone about the hard things that I may be going through, because I don’t want to be seeking their admiration or applause, but on the other hand I also want to be an authentic person.  The difference?  My heart.  Only God can know my motivation.  He and I both know when I have the itch of self-regard.  I do know that I wrote the Santa Clara story with a pure motive and purpose, what I have to fight daily is the desire to have other people somehow applaud me somehow for my faith–which has nothing to do with me anyway.  God, please purify my heart, my motives, my speech, that I would lose the itch of self-regard and lose myself in You.

Shame:

Piper talks about two kinds of shame–appropriate shame, the type we feel when we’ve wronged God, and misplaced shame, which we ought not to have.  The key difference?  We shouldn’t feel shame for the things that dishonor us, but only the things that we’ve done that dishonor God.  However, most of us spend our time feeling shame for things that either are not our fault or that aren’t shameful because they don’t dishonor God.

This past weekend Jeff and I went to Bend.  While we were there we attended a art unveiling with Jeff’s mom.  At the unveiling, we met the painter’s wife and two daughters.  One daughter, a freshman in high school, has some birth defect which has misshapen one side of her face.  However, when I met her, she just beamed, welcoming me and oohing and ahing over Dutch, teasing that she wanted to be the president of his fan club, and wondering if she could marry him when he grew up.  She stood tall and looked me in the eye, a glowing, beautiful, utterly confident girl.  She obviously knew this principle.  There was truly no appropriate reason for her to feel shame, and so she did not.  But how many times I feel shame, not over the things I should (!) but over things that dishonor me rather than God.  I’m thankful that I met this girl who was an example to me of this correct understanding of shame. 

STAY POSTED, because I’m currently working on my next piece, Eva, which is based on a true story:

Eva Marie Van Zandt, named “Ey Ve” after the prize fighting boxer Joey Velez, was born in 1946 to Lois and William Van Zandt.  At eighteen she married her thirty-year-old lover, only to be abandoned with three small children.  Left penniless and alone, she determines to give her sons the best life possible.  Follow Eva’s journey as she battles poverty, cancer, and unbelief, and watch as the faithfulness of God breathes hope into her soul.