January 29: Pride Keeps You Sick

You’ve always been the one other people came to. Asking for help feels like losing something.

James quotes the Old Testament here. God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It’s a simple sentence with a hard edge. Pride doesn’t just fail to receive grace. It pushes it away.

Pride in drinking doesn’t always look like arrogance. Sometimes it looks like competence. You’re capable. You run a business, raise a family, lead at church. You’ve solved every other problem in your life by working harder. So you assume this one should yield to the same approach.

Sometimes pride looks like privacy. “This is my business. I’ll handle it.” Sometimes it looks like comparison. “I’m not like those people in the meetings.” Sometimes it even looks like humility, refusing help because you don’t want to be a burden.

All of these keep the door shut.

Step One is a humbling step. There’s no way around that. It asks you to say that something got the better of you. For capable, private, responsible people, that can feel like the hardest sentence in the world.

But humility isn’t humiliation. Humility just means seeing yourself accurately. Not worse than you are. Not better. Accurately. And the accurate truth is that you are a human being who got caught by something too strong for you, and you need help.

When you say that, James says, grace comes in. Not grudgingly. God gives it. People who have walked into their first meeting with their pride in their throat often say the same thing: they expected to feel small, and instead they felt relief.

Here’s a test for pride: who knows how much you really drink? If the answer is nobody, that might be the place to start. Let one person in.

One thing today

Ask someone for help with something today, even something small. Notice how it feels. Then ask yourself what bigger help you’ve been refusing.

A prayer

God, my pride has kept me sick. I’m used to handling things alone. Humble me gently. Help me ask for help, and receive the grace You give the humble.

The humility of Step One opens the door.

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