Day Twenty-Four

Day Twenty-Four // March 24 // Vanity & Pride

“It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.” – Abraham Lincoln –

The rotten fruit of selfishness too often begins with misplaced pride and vanity. We forget that there is no such thing as a self-made person. We are helped and blessed by others consistently; and when we lose sight of that, we lose our way. Coach Barry Switzer used to love to say: “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. That mentality should never be said of us. We constantly need to check our attitudes. We continually need to be aware of those danger words: I, me and mine. To be generous, we cannot let selfishness seize us with its empty and thankless hands.”

One of the ways we might battle this attitude of pride is to look for ways to pay forward the help we have been given. Sportswriter Gil McGregor was a personal friend of the late Maya Angelou. He was contacted by a charity in North Carolina who had been trying to get Dr. Angelou to host a dinner at her house to raise money for their cause. They tried to call, they tried to contact her agent; they tried everything they knew to do, but they could not get through. In desperation, they approached Gil to ask if he might help. He agreed to ask Dr. Angelou, and she agreed. After they chatted for a while, he asked, “Dr. Angelou, I hope you don’t feel that I am using our friendship in order to get you to volunteer?” Her response was a classic. She laughed and said, “Mr. McGregor, if one cannot be used, it only means that one is useless.”

Lent calls us forth to be people who are willing to be used; more than that, it calls us forth to be people who desire to be used. Everything we have is a gift from God. Our resources, our talents and the success in our careers – it should all be seen and received and used as fodder to help those who follow after us. Our lasting legacy will come in the people we help and the encouragement we give. We should never let our pride nor vanity keep us from discovering the Life that really is life.