From everything I’ve been able to gather, the most prized and strived for personal possession in our character building treasure chest is patience. Patience displayed is humility or being humble.
What if true humility only comes from being truly humiliated? Personally I see two types of humility in the world, people who have learned to act humble and people who truly are. In general, those who truly are seem to be those who have been truly humiliated, over and over and over again.
I’m not talking about the funny kind of humiliation, where you did something stupid and it gets a few laughs at your expense. I mean run out of town by your own friends and family, raw, ugly to the bone, condemned and stoned by an angry horde humiliated. It’s the very last thing anyone wants to go thru.
But what if it’s absolutely necessary to building true humility into your real character? How far are you willing to go for it? Are you willing to be hated by your own children as a failed parent? Are you willing to be seen as a waste of life by your own society? Are you willing to try as hard as you can and still fail the ones you love? Are you willing to put your entire life into some endeavor nobody around you sees the value of until long after you’re gone? Are you willing to be completely misunderstood by the world around you with no chance to explain… ever?
Stupid questions really, nobody wants to be in any of those dreaded positions, yet here we are as much as we’d like to avoid it. Rather than just flip out a judgement call and say it’s all wrong and we’re all messed up, I’m going to postulate that we’re going thru what we NEED to go thru to build the character in ourselves that we ourselves respect and admire.
Do we or should we enjoy going thru it? Hell no! Are we putting ourselves thru hell for a damned good reason? God yes!
What we endure is temporary, what we gain from it is eternal. Keeping that in mind, it is worth it to me to go thru whatever I must temporarily endure to build my eternal character into something I can live with… forever.
Serve me up a heaping helping, because I suck at acting humble 🙂