The Quest for Humility
Nov 16, 08- (by Mama MPJ)
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- Family and Friends, Mind, Body, Spirit, Sober Salon
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Step 7: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomingsI’ve been going through the process of working the 12 Steps around my own personal craziness, and last week, I reached the point where I was supposed to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. Whew! That has so many problematic words in it. I mean even if we forget about “shortcomings” (because, let’s face it, don’t most of us want to keep on keeping on with the ignoring in that department?), we have words like “God” and “ask” and “remove” and (trickiest of all) “humbly.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a healthy sense of humility. I can do self-righteous superiority or rampant insecurity or defensive arrogance or abject self-abasement. But there is no healthy medium of humility for me without either a heaping dollop of “I suck” or a secret “see how much humbler I am than you!” I did some 12 Step readings around humility, but I still couldn’t envision that middle ground. What I heard were exhortations to perfection: “Do this, but not too much! But then again, don’t go too far the other way! Get it juuust right.”
Then the Junky’s Wife helped me out by sharing that she saw humility as simply asking for help when you needed it. I’m not good at that, but at least I can understand and aspire to it, which I could see was a step in the right direction.
So, I sat down and prepared to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. And I couldn’t. I was stuck. So, I thought about what the Junky’s Wife told me about humility as being the ability to ask for help when you needed it. And I thought it was pretty clear to me by now that I could use some help. So, I tried to ask. But I still couldn’t. Now that’s frustrating. So, I tried to figure out why I might not want to ask. Was I holding on to my shortcomings? Was I afraid to lose them? Was I stuck on this whole asking thing not working with my particular concept of God? What was the problem?
And then it hit me. I needed to ask for help asking for help. So, I humbly asked God to remove my inability to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. And guess what? My newly humbled self was unstuck. Go figure.
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Cool. I realized a long time ago that I was better at taking care of others than allowing them to do so for me. This also directly influenced my ability to ask for help. I learned how to ask for help and to have humility when I came down with Lymes disease and needed help. I’m glad you are unstuck now and recognize how impportant it is to be comfortable asking for help. It does not mean you are weak, as I used to think it meant of me. It means you are in touch. You are honest and therefore have the strength of a warrior.
This reminds me of my prayer a few months ago: “Dear God, if you are there, please help me believe you are there.” And, like you said, guess what?
An interesting look at humility - that we need to admit that we can’t make it without the help of someone or some entity apart from ourselves.
I feel at my most humble when surrounded by nature. I’m so small. Just a tiny little drop in the ocean.
I also feel humble when people who love me come out in full force or with small gestures and make me realize that I’m LOVED.
I have trouble with humility too, MPJ, and feel about it exactly as you describe it. I’m excellent at self-righteous superiority and really, really bad at true humility. Maybe this will work for me too …