The Pride of LIfe

We are all born sinners, and we are all capable of any kind of sin; but the one that trips us up the most is pride. Think about it: we’re even proud about being humble.

I got to thinking about this yesterday during church. The elderly couple was sitting behind me, and Miss Ruby would talk ever-so-often. Several times she turned to her husband and said, “Do you like me?” And if he didn’t answer right away, she would ask again. She has probably been asking that question for the past ninety years.

As a kid, I was too shy to go right up to anyone and ask, “Do you like me?”, but I wondered it often enough. From the very youngest age, our life centers around other people liking us. We want the neighbors to like us, our school mates to like us, the librarians to like us, our teachers to like us, the newspaper boy to like us – we even want our enemies to like us! That’s why we scurry around doing almost everything humanly possible to get someone to like us. And if they don’t like us, we sit down and cry. How many times have we come to our mothers with tears pouring down our cheeks, sobbing, “Mommy, he doesn’t like me!”?

And ninety years later – sick with dementia so she can’t remember her own name – Miss Ruby wants to know if her husband likes her. Or if I like her. Or if the guy sitting in the pew across the way likes her. She won’t remember two seconds later that we do like her, but she wants the assurance of being liked. Because to humanity the most important thing in the world is to be liked.

Pride is a weed in our life with a root so deep we can never completely be rid of it. But we can work at pruning it a bit. One way to do that is to remember that we don’t have to be liked by every Tom, Dick and Harry. Some people will simply never like us. And we just have to live with that. For at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if our garbage man likes us. If we know Christ as our Savior, then we have something much better than being liked. We are loved – by the Creator of the Universe. There is nothing better than that.