Humility

Jo Yoder, AIM '06, spent her field time in Grass Valley, CA, and I have the privilege of living with her on her old field, now home. She was writing this to a friend and I overheard a bit of it and asked if I could share it with you all. Be encouraged!

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Tuesdays we have a small group gathering to share what is going on in our lives and to strengthen each other. Tonight we talked about humility. My friend Leland asked us all what our definition or understanding of humility would be.

There were a lot of good points made:
humility is seeing yourself as God sees you;
humility is having an open state of honesty about oneself; and
humility is recognizing that everything we are and have has been given to us.

Jesus is the best example of humility. And we never see him putting himself down, or thinking little of himself, which is something we can sometimes mistake for humility. Instead, we see him constantly acknowledging the Father and walking with confidence in the path that God set before him. That is true humility - dependence on the Lord, putting our focus on him instead of ourselves, on his will instead of ours.

So this is my encouragement to you, that you are able to be completely humble and not dragged down by focusing on yourself, either on how you are inadequate in yourself or how you are strong in yourself. May the Lord be your light, the power in your life and the one who makes you holy!

Blessings.

-Jo Yoder

Who will go first?

"We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger." - Tad Williams

I’m in a missions program. I have people paying me to be on the field. I am working with a church and working for God daily. Shouldn’t I be immune to mistakes? Shouldn’t I be stronger than this? Shouldn’t I have more integrity?

These are just a few of the thoughts I remember thinking when I was on the field. Somehow the label “AIMer” was supposed to make me perfect. Imagine my surprise when I started messing up. I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t ask for help. I couldn’t admit that I was losing control.

The word integrity runs through my head. What I do when no one will ever know or see - that’s who I really am. Paul, even when in prison, rejoiced. He didn’t curse God. He didn’t blame God. He didn’t use his circumstance as an excuse to sin. He had integrity. Yet here I sit in a foreign land, a beautiful place, not a prison, and I want to run from God in embarrassment. I want to find comfort wherever I can.

When asked how I’m doing or asked what’s wrong, I lie. I lie because I’m afraid. I lie because I don’t know how others will react or what they will think. Every time I lie, the fear grows stronger. The chance of me talking about this becomes smaller and smaller.

Someone has to go first. Someone has to be willing to admit the struggle.

I worship at a place where we try to be real - no Sunday School answers, just reality. I see it over and over. Once someone goes beyond the surface and admits something tough, hands begin to go up, and one by one people say, "Me too… I’ve done that… I thought I was the only one."

Someone has to go first. Someone has to be willing to admit the struggle.

About 5 or 6 years after I returned from the field I began to actually be honest. I began to go beyond the surface and talk about my experience and my mistakes. I reached a point where I was no longer afraid of the reactions. The reactions couldn’t hurt as bad as the secrets. It was worth taking a chance. Once I told someone, once I went first, I found out what I should have known all along: I was never alone. I was never the only one.

I thank God for lessons learned. I thank God that He keeps growing something in me that is bigger than the fears that keep me down. Something bigger than depression, addiction, divorce, fear, insecurity, doubt. Whatever the struggle, whatever the fear, He is bigger.

"This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us." - 1 John 3:19-24

Take confidence in this thought. It is true!

And please, find someone to talk to. Be willing to go first.

-Paige Foreman

How are you defined?

Take a minute and think about yourself. How would you define “you”? How would you describe who you really are? I think most of us would have a hard time listing off very many positive things about ourselves … we’ve been raised with the idea that this would be bragging. So instead, we’ve developed the opposite habit. We keep a record of our wrongs … always adding to the list … defining ourselves in a negative light. We never allow ourselves a break.

If this doesn’t sound like you … congratulations … I want to know your secret. Actually, I think I know the secret … I just have a hard time putting that knowledge into action.

One moment does not define us. I will even go as far as to say an accumulation of moments do not define us. God defines us. He made us … He gets to apply the description. He bought us … He gets to write the ad.

God proves this idea to me throughout the Bible. I’ve seen it most in the life of David. The more I study about him the more I see just how much he messed up. And yet, I never hear God tell His people, “Do not be like David who murdered a man.” or “Do not follow David’s example of adultery.” Quite the opposite, over and over throughout the Old Testament God tells the people to remember David, to be like David. Just looking in 1 Kings we see a brief description of David through God’s eyes …

1 Kings 3:14 - … walk in my ways and obey my statutes and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life. 1 Kings 9:4 - … walk before me in integrity of heart and uprightness, as David your father did, 1 Kings 11:4 – … his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father had been. 1 Kings 11:6 – … he did not follow the LORD completely, as David his father had done. 1 Kings 14:8 – … but you have not been like my servant David, who kept my commands and followed me with all his heart, doing only what was right in my eyes.

When I look at David’s life and his actions I don’t always see a man that followed the Lord completely, or that only did what was right in God’s eyes. But this is how God describes Him … this is how God saw Him. So wouldn’t it reason that God sees me the same way?

I was knit together in my mother’s womb, I am fearfully and wonderfully made, I am wonderful. I was created good and I am the apple of His eye.

This is just the beginning … His thoughts about us are too numerous to name, but I want you to try. Tell me some things that God has said about you … how does He define you?



- Paige Foreman

Baloney

Confession: Sometimes I pretend that I’ve read a book when I’ve only read the dustcover.

It’s hard not to be a poser. And it’s hard to let go of wanting to be more than what I am.

Richard Foster, who is best known for his book Celebration of Discipline, talks about spiritual formation with a great affinity. If that terminology is new to you, it’s only a phrase that describes what happens in any life that endeavors to be formed into the image of Jesus Christ. Foster longs for how Christianity could be manifested in our world. “I dream of a day when spiritual formation has so saturated all who follow hard after Jesus that they become known to all as experts in how to live well.” That would make YOU the resident expert on how to love your spouse or children or how to manage money, how to love the least, how to suffer through hardship…

The problem is, some people want to be these experts (or write or speak as such) without having a substantial amount of spiritual formation in their lives to back it up. The result is what Foster calls “Holy Baloney.” And when those who are looking for Christ encounter it so much, it becomes harder to distinguish true Christianity from pseudo-Christianity.

I’ve certainly been guilty of wanting to appear more spiritual than I am. AIM is one of the highlights of my spiritual formation journey. But I admit being tempted to keep up with the spiritual Joneses. And on the mission field, I remember wanting to frame our newsletters in such a way to show we were always on the verge of baptizing someone. Then I felt like as an ex-AIMer, I should be able to ace all Bible trivia questions and should fit neatly into mainstream Christianity…

Look, people want the real deal. Most can recognize when someone’s posing. They sense whether or not you really care about them or if you just want to close the deal with baptism. They are keen to pick up on ulterior motives. They take note of those who talk big and seem to have all the answers.

Being an expert at something doesn’t mean being perfect. In fact, most experts agree that being an expert doesn’t come without years of research and failures in their field.

So, wherever you are in your spiritual formation journey, you are exactly where you should be.

Because the best way for you to be Jesus is for you to just be yourself.

-Angie Burns