Chapter 1 Humility Thoughts...

1.       How do the truths in this chapter apply to your personal spiritual life?

 

I had to read and re-read this chapter so many times just to feel like I was grasping what Murray was saying.  I felt like I needed to spend that time just to get his language down.   (Grammar stage!!) After doing so, I realized first that I didn’t have an appropriate understanding of humility.  I think I had grown up with the sense that humility just meant not bragging.  Even in a religious context, I understood humility to be more or less that you didn’t view yourself as more important than someone else or above helping someone.  This chapter was amazing in its revelation of humility as a nothingness—the complete understanding and purposeful giving over of yourself to God in everything because God IS everything.  It was so simple and yet so profound.  I think it is so easy for me to just go about my day completing tasks and concerning myself with “doing” things that if I am not mindful, I forget my place.  I forget to start with that nothingness.  I want to be more mindful of being in that place each day.  I want to be more mindful of being an empty vessel for God.

 

2.       How do the truths in this chapter apply to your leadership role in Classical Conversations?

 

This was actually the easiest question of the 3 from me to answer this month.  The overwhelming point of this chapter for me was that pride is the root of all sin and that humility is where all believers need to focus first.  As a director of a Foundations/Essentials campus, and a new director in particular, I am acutely aware of what I don’t know.  I am far from an authority on how to direct this campus.  I am relying heavily on God to be at work.  I am prayerfully lifting up our community to Him and trusting that He will give me direction and wisdom.  I want to remain in this infant state as the year progresses and I begin to get comfortable in my leadership role.  I want to purposely maintain humility—maintain the ability to admit I don’t know everything and that I have to trust in God first and foremost for all things.

 

3.       What parallels in literature do you see that apply or reference these same truths from this chapter?

 

My children and I are working our way through the Narnia series this summer.  We just finished The Magician’s Nephew a few weeks ago, and the image that kept coming to mind while I read this first chapter of Humility was the description of the beginning of Narnia.  I remember how Lewis describes the empty blackness when Digory and Polly arrive in what will become Narnia.  The cabbie is the one who recognizes this empty nothingness as significant.  He sings a hymn and shortly after that Aslan begins singing Narnia into existence.  I just love how Narnia begins as a dark, empty nothingness, but the nothingness is important. 

-Andrea