Day Thirty | March 28 THIRTY

Whole-hearted Humility

Born into the world He created, the King of Kings was birthed not in a gilded palace but in a borrowed stable. And after His cruel death, His pierced body was laid not behind walls of marble but behind the stone of a borrowed tomb. His first companions were lowly shepherds; and His last, a struggling group of outcasts and sinners.

“Who do you say I am?” He asks. From the very beginning, He was showing us. He was telling us.

He was the humble Savior of the world. He was our Rock and our Redeemer. He was the Great I Am. And He still is. Jesus is our Lord.

And the world might look upon His earthly accomplishments with scorn, upon His career trajectory with contempt. The world might say that He didn’t accomplish anything: He died without a family, without a home, without even so much as a place to be buried … but we know better. We know better than to judge Jesus’ life by what He amassed and His worth by who He knew. We know better than to think that Jesus was a failure. In fact, we claim Him as our model for success.

Why, then, do we live so di erently? Why do we work and worry so incessantly? Why do we want to live a life that is so markedly di erent than our Lord’s – one that is acclaimed as an outward success? Could it be that we want others to think that we’ve “made it,” that we’ve arrived, that we’ve accomplished something with our lives? Or could it be that we want to believe that about ourselves?

In the waking hours of the night, when we’re alone, with only our thoughts and dreams and fears, we know this about ourselves: we know that we’re one mistake away from failure, one misspoken word away from heartbreak, one misstep away from being exposed as the frauds we know ourselves to be. So, to compensate for our fear and our frailty, we muster all our strength to play the “game” one more time. We fake the

WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?

answers and pretend to be who-we-know-we’renot one more time … and we waste our lives away one proud game – one arrogant day at a time – never realizing that the success we’re looking for is actually within the fear, itself. For it is that willingness to be exposed for who we really are that is the heart of humility. It is that desire to be real that marks the way of our Lord. But it’s a path not to be taken by the fainthearted or by the half-hearted, for only the wholehearted will endure this way of su ering and sacrifice, this way of humility and surrender. It is a Truth that we must return to time and time, again: that the way of the Gospel is never one of upward mobility, but one always of down: down to the lowly, down to the lost, down to those who’ve fallen on their faces … for it is only there that we meet the God who picks us up.