Muck Buckets

Just had a good conversation with my sister-in-law and she said something that I thought was so good and such a great reminder. We had been talking about friendships and how it's hard sometimes to really be real in front of people, and how we have a tendency toward pride as humans. Pride can be as simple as wanting people to think we have it together when we don't. Anyway she said this, and I really love it:

"You can't fight pride by just praying against it. In Job 41 God refers to it as like an alligator where you can't catch it or tame it. The way we fight pride is to practice humility; we practice humility by opening our hearts."

It's sometimes hard to open our hearts to people and let them see the beauty God created there, and the darkness we have harbored there. It's hard to share our deepest joys and wounds. We don't want to be viewed as arrogant and we don't want to be viewed as a mess. But the truth is we all have things in us that aren't pretty, and God wants to refine us and continually make us more into the likeness of Christ. The truth is also that God has deposited glory in each of us, and we are sometimes afraid to step out in it. The beautiful thing about having a few really close friendships is that you can go to the deeper places together.

I like metaphor...and this specifically makes me think of your heart being like a place that is beautiful but has a few mucky places that need to be cleaned out. Friends are those you invite to go in with you and who walk through the mud together with you, buckets in hand, helping to clean one another out, while also rejoicing together when one of you finds gold! Sometimes the most beautiful pieces of gold in us have been hidden under a mountain of mud, and we just needed a friend to come along and be willing to get a little dirty with us. As we hauled that mud pile away together, low and behold one of you strikes gold, and your friend is able to call out in you something that has been given by God...maybe a gifting or a special grace for a certain area. We need to practice humility by opening our hearts so we can be the body of Christ, iron sharpening iron. We need to learn to be real with people so we can do as a team what we can't do alone.

In a book I'm reading it talks about pride, humility, confidence and arrogance. The author said that humility is often kind of associated with demeaning ourselves. And pride is associated with recognition of our strengths or goodness. However as long as we acknowledge where our greatness comes from, we're not in danger of pride. We don't glorify God by saying we're not great. We glorify Him by acknowledging that He is the source of that greatness. Humility is not demeaning ourselves, but exalting our God. Isn't it truth that the greatness of the King's subjects actually glorify the King Himself? Unfortunately, confidence always looks like arrogance to the insecure. 

So what does it look like to walk in humility and confidence? This is something I have been thinking a lot about the past few weeks. We act out of who we believe we are. We respond to our environment according to the way we see ourselves. We will reproduce the environment around us that we cultivate within us. 
I can't afford to think differently about my life than God does. SO what does he think? I am thankful for the friendships I have that I am learning to open my heart to.. who show me grace when I'm muddy and who can see the gold for what it is when I don't recognize it myself, and are helping me see myself the way God does so I can live out the life of authority, confidence, power and love that He has called me to so I can affect generations for His kingdom.

It's a beautiful messy thing.