In the time I've been here in India I've noticed some changes in myself that have come about. Some have been the result of a conscience choice to change while others have be brought on, more or less, against my will. But, I realize that even if they were against what I wanted at the time, I have come to enjoy them, and I am terrified of being put back into American culture. So many of the changes that have happened have been to break the American mindset that I had lived in for 22 years. I am so afraid that I will just slide back into those habits, that I won't be able to enforce them in myself, so I've been racking my brain for the past few days as to ways that I can enforce these changes upon myself, and then this morning it dawned on me, I can't enforce these changes in myself. Deep down I am an arrogant, lustful, stubborn man who is resistant to change. The only way I can make any of these changes stick is by submitting myself to God, and being willing to crucify my pride. Regrettably, I realize this is not something that can be done one and then it's more life, it may be like tat for some people but not for me. I realize that I must do that daily, and probably more than once a day.
When I step back and look at all the changes I realize they mostly center around one thing: Pride, the great assassin of so many Christians. I've been reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and he has some really good thoughts on pride, He actually refers to it as the Great Sin.
He starts a chapter with the following quote, " Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness and all that, are merely flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind." Reading this blew me away, and at first I was skeptical but the more I reflected on it I came to see that he is, in fact, dead on. Pride is the root cause of the pain and grief in this world, and it does lead to every other major vice. It leads to other vices because pride is nothing but competitiveness. Lewis sums this up perfectly. "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."
Think back to a time when you were one of the first people to get something, something that nobody around you had, that item was your most prized possesion. But then others around you began to get that item, and the more people that acquired it the less important it became to you.
But not every aspect of pride is horrible, pride is a natural human emotion, but like so many other things that are natural, this has become mutilated by The Fall. If you would take no pride in your work, you would have no reason to do our best, you would simply do it to get it done. But by taking pride, we as humans are able to compose symphonies, create masterpieces, bring new life from the soil, and build amazing buildings.
