imageThis quarter we’re posting lots of tutorials, and as I considered things that I know how to do that I could share with you, I had struggled to choose something. However, I kept coming back to this; knowledge I gained under duress, information I wish I didn’t need to have. I started with a list of five things, but they didn’t seem equally important. I scaled it back to three, but I still wasn’t happy with this post. Then in church today, all three meetings managed to speak the same single word to me. So here you go—not five or three ideas, just one idea to help you manage being frail during this frail existence.

Humility. For me, this seems to come with some humiliation, and it’s been the single hardest part of learning to live with a physical and emotional trial that doesn’t have a set solution or end date. Yet in all honesty it’s probably been one of the most useful changes in my life, on both spiritual and temporal levels. I never thought of myself as a particularly prideful person (which maybe says it all right there), and I don’t think this trial is all about a heavenly smack-down of how awesome I think I am, but to survive my pride is a sacrifice I have to make on a regular basis.

I no longer have the luxury of people only seeing my house clean, of never cancelling at the last minute, and never having to ask someone else to step in to help me with everything from taking a kid to a dance class or scout meeting, to making my family dinner, to showing up to be a volunteer for something I signed up to do.

For me, the key to being humble has been acceptance of where I am. This acceptance allows me to know when I need help, and ask for and receive it with relative graciousness. I’m here because there is nowhere better for me to be in order to learn what it is that will prepare me for an eternal, perfect future, and accepting that makes it a little bit easier to look for the good in what feels most of the time like a useless and frustrating waypoint on the road to my “real life”. If this is where I am, what can I do to make the most of it? I loved Swiss Family Robinson as a kid, and I suppose this is an adventure of the same sort—I’m stranded, and it’s time to be resourceful and build a treehouse.

This is what I tell myself almost every day: I will not be able to do it alone. If people are going to help they will have to see some of (some days most of) my messy, painful, carefully hidden reservoirs of imperfection, fear, and incapacity. It’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to be human. Human and open-hearted is how God wants me to be.

What is the one principle that has gotten you through the worst times in your life? Have those worst times changed you for the better in any way?


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