...to have won this lifetime achievement award today...
...to have been elected as your fearless leader...
...to have been selected as the Most Awe-Inspiring Person of 2013..."
Maybe I'm strange, but when I've won an award or been selected for some kind of honor, I don't actually feel all that humbled. I usually feel pretty proud of myself. I might try to hide it, which is maybe what all those Oscar winners are trying to do, but on the inside I'm feeling good, and not necessarily all that humble.
In some areas of my life, especially academically, success has come fairly easily. And success and humility are not always the best of friends.
Humility has been a little easier to come by in the past several years, since parenting doesn't come with a textbook, a syllabus, and a weekly 20-point spelling test.
Parenthood is more like an open-ended project with an empty rubric that I know needs to be filled with things like "Love" and "Discipline", but I'm not really sure how or what kind or when or to what extent.
In school, I may have kept track of how many math facts I could whip out in one minute.
In parenthood, I may keep a mental tally of other things, like how many loads of clean laundry are piled on my couch waiting to be folded. Or how many dirty diapers Tucker has produced since dinnertime (Yes, folks, I'm a broken record, the yuck is still happening over here.)
In school, I may have gotten a "way to go" sticker or a smiley face at the top of a paper I turned in.
In parenthood, I get a bear hug from my preschooler for that amazing PB&J I made at lunch (way to go!), but this is swiftly followed by my near-1-year-old crawling madly towards me and trying to physically force his sister out of my arms, because no, they are not my arms, they are actually an extension of his body.
In school, I may have smiled to myself when my work was displayed in a hallway somewhere.
In parenthood, I try to laugh at myself when I see the hallway display at preschool: Yes, my daughter was the one thankful for "TV" while pretty much the rest of her class was thankful for "mommy."
Surely God has his own reasons for giving us the children he does, and I have no doubt that humility is one of them.
I'm proud of my kids, the bright and funny things they say and do.
But I'm also humbled - seriously humbled - because I don't actually know how to effectively discipline my high-spirited little girl...
and I'm actually kind of worried that my son is going to take teething to the next level and start biting (eek!)...
and the responsibility sometimes feels like a heavy weight...
and I don't feel nearly as old and well-equipped as I assumed my mom was when I was the child and she was the parent... (Sorry for calling you old, Mom!)
and I've made mistakes, not just with these two little ones, but with our two former foster children who are other places now, with other parents (older? better-equipped?)...
But I think maybe God likes this kind of humility. All over the Bible, His people talk about giving glory to God. And what better way to give glory to God than to realize that you can't do it without Him. You NEED His Daily Bread.
So, for Day 12, go ahead and pray for a little more of that kind of humbled.
Deuteronomy 8:2-3 And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
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