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| Christmas card with Caspar Milquetoast by H. T. Webster |
If
this question had asked about increasing one's power, the answer
would have been such things as the power to know the future, or the
power of to get inside people's heads and see things exactly from
their perspective, and after gaining such knowledge, the power to
gain access to people's levers of perception to change them to
conform to my opinions and beliefs. But, thanks be to God, such
highways to perdition are hopefully forever closed to attainment due
to the cantankerous integrity of the human will.
In
the effort to discern where I need greater wisdom, the related
question is – where do I chronically lack insight or understanding?
Phrased in this way, indicators for improvements become clear. All my
life I have had tendencies of introversion. I have, quite wrongfully,
flattered myself in assuming that my reticence equated with humility.
From this point of view, I was able to rationalize that extroversion
and its cousins (which were outside my abilities anyway) equated with
arrogance. Thus, being shy, I quietly flattered myself as being
humble and superior when compared to the arrogance of the more vocal
and outgoing. It was, if truth be told, a painful instance of sour
grapes.
I
have come to view true humility as the simple yet decisive
inclination to do God's will. And God's will when translated into
human lives does not always look and sound the same. God's will for
me today may look entirely different from God's will for me tomorrow,
or for his will for others at some given time. My sitting quietly in
the back row can conform to God's will for me as surely as Eddie
Murphy's stage performance before thousands can conform to God's will
for him. In short, humility, true abject humility, can appear in
strikingly different forms. Moses was humble in tending the flocks of
his father-in-law, and he was equally humble in telling Pharaoh to go
fly a kite. While I'm sure that Pharaoh must have found Moses
inconceivably and infuriatingly arrogant, Moses from a different
point of view was the most humble of men abjectly doing the will of God.
Thus a conundrum confronts us.
It takes wisdom to discern the difference between milquetoast
behavior that can in fact derive from arrogance, and seeming
arrogance that can in fact derive from humble obedience to God and
conscience. This is an area of my life where I (particularly as a
retiring soul) need greater wisdom. From
this point of view boldness is not an end in itself, but simply a
mode of expression that can derive from arrogance or humility –
whichever the case may be.
