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PITTSBURG —
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
There is only one way this comes out. It might be with a hand clutched to your chest. It might be quietly in the night. It might be in a sterile hospital room with a monitor as your only company. It might be in a bed at home with loved ones at your side.
It’s all the same.
We are here by God’s grace. He caused this whirlwind of dust that is me--this dust devil, as it were--to come into being. My life is a gift. I didn’t have a thing to do with being born. As is the nature of gifts, I haven’t always made the best use of it. We leave our gifts wrapped; we give to much respect to the paper around it to rip it open and then we don’t have sufficient time to appreciate what’s inside the rapping.
But perhaps that is simply the nature of things and not something to be regretted.
Lately I’ve been contemplating the importance of ego in our existence. Ego gets a bad rap. We hear people being criticised for having huge egos. We hear humility praised as a virtue. And I am all for that. Gentle Jesus wants us to be humble.
But.
But perhaps humility is more nuanced than we might think. Perhaps in true humility there is a realization that what you want is not just going to be laid out on a platter for you because you become a doormat for the world. Perhaps humility is the realization that nothing is free; nothing is going to be given to you just because you are nice; and that if you want something, then you are just going to have to shoulder your way in just like everybody else.
Jesus taught the Parable of the Unjust Judge. Basically, this is a story about a woman who hounded a judge until he gave the correct verdict simply to get her out of his hair. This is not one of those nice sugar-coated little stories that we often associate with Sunday School. The woman is humble; she’s just not a doormat.
Preachers, pastors of churches, have a hard row to hoe, in that society has set up the image of the milquetoast parson. There is a set of expectations. There is a framework. If the preachers step out of that framework, parishioners get upset.
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
There is only one way this comes out. It might be with a hand clutched to your chest. It might be quietly in the night. It might be in a sterile hospital room with a monitor as your only company. It might be in a bed at home with loved ones at your side.
It’s all the same.
We are here by God’s grace. He caused this whirlwind of dust that is me--this dust devil, as it were--to come into being. My life is a gift. I didn’t have a thing to do with being born. As is the nature of gifts, I haven’t always made the best use of it. We leave our gifts wrapped; we give to much respect to the paper around it to rip it open and then we don’t have sufficient time to appreciate what’s inside the rapping.
But perhaps that is simply the nature of things and not something to be regretted.
Lately I’ve been contemplating the importance of ego in our existence. Ego gets a bad rap. We hear people being criticised for having huge egos. We hear humility praised as a virtue. And I am all for that. Gentle Jesus wants us to be humble.
But.
But perhaps humility is more nuanced than we might think. Perhaps in true humility there is a realization that what you want is not just going to be laid out on a platter for you because you become a doormat for the world. Perhaps humility is the realization that nothing is free; nothing is going to be given to you just because you are nice; and that if you want something, then you are just going to have to shoulder your way in just like everybody else.
Jesus taught the Parable of the Unjust Judge. Basically, this is a story about a woman who hounded a judge until he gave the correct verdict simply to get her out of his hair. This is not one of those nice sugar-coated little stories that we often associate with Sunday School. The woman is humble; she’s just not a doormat.
Preachers, pastors of churches, have a hard row to hoe, in that society has set up the image of the milquetoast parson. There is a set of expectations. There is a framework. If the preachers step out of that framework, parishioners get upset.
The late Richard John Neuhaus told a story about a man who’d taken his son to the consecration of a bishop. During one point of the ceremony, the lad had asked, “Dad, what’s happening now?”
“Hush,” his father replied. “I think this is the part where they remove the spine.”
As Christians are taught to turn the other cheek. We are not told to never do anything that would make someone want to hit us. To survive, to flourish, to do what is right, we all need to have a backbone and there will be people who want to hit us.
Each of us needs an ego. Ego is the first person singular pronoun in Greek, the I, as it were. This is “I” as in “I am here and you are going to have to deal with me.” It is this “I” that keeps the dust whirling.
True humility is perhaps simply the realization that this “I” is just one dust-devil out of many and each of the others was created by God as well. I should respect them as such, but I should also respect myself as one of His creatures.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University. He blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com.
