Humility and Receiving Love

Journaling is essential to growing. I need to do it more. I feel I keep relearning things over and over again and forgetting them in the process. But I guess that's the excitement of this journey. It would be so boring if I learned something once and never had to deal with it again.

So lately I've been learning about humility. Thomas Kempis emphasizes humility ridiculously in "Imitations of Christ" and I think it's the key to Christianity. If we don't humble ourselves, we aren't admitting that we need God, and if we don't admit to ourselves that we need God, then we're pretty hopeless human beings sucked into thinking that we can do it on our own. Humility is essential.

However, another thing I've learned is that humility is not treating yourself like crap and hating yourself. For some reason I seemed to get into that mindset, that I need to see myself as absolutely nothing in order to put God first. But I don't think God wants me to treat myself that way. God VALUES me. I need to see that as well. A friend of mine recently posted on facebook, "The biggest problem with Christians today is that they don't see how valued they are by God." I was outraged by that (not necessarily outraged, but it makes for a better post if I go to the extreme of my emotions). I thought to myself...the greatest problem is that we're too damn proud and not humble enough. But a friend slapped me across the face (figuratively) and made me realize that it's our inability to receive love from God that causes us to become prideful and causes us to pretend that we're "all that". So I guess my friend's post on facebook had a lot of truth; we do need to see our value in Christ a whole lot more...and that, in turn, will affect our character. Because if we cannot receive love from God or from others, how can we give it to others? And if receiving love is wrong, then it's wrong to give it because then we are causing someone else to receive it. And if giving love is wrong, then Jesus lied a lot and this world is completely depraved and hopeless.

I think my friend was right.