Humble Pie.

This past week I decided to have a focus for self-improvement. Along with other goals, I selected being more humble as something I was going to work on this week. As I made efforts at getting a little humility, I planned to journal my experiences. I was especially attentive to humility-learning opportunities and situations.

Or so I thought.

So the beginning of the week came screaming to a start with the bad colds, cold weather, Toddler for three days, cabin fever thing. Add my (insert preferred euphemism for "period" here), plus wacky hormones from weaning, a teething baby, packing for a whirlwind weekend away, and a husband-wife duo who were kind of cranky with each other and... 
TA-DAA! The perfect scenario to learn....um, patience...?


Wrong virtue. I was supposed to be working on humility, dangit.

I concluded that maybe Heavenly Father was giving me the opportunity to learn to be humble enough to ask Him for the help and strength to get through it all. Which was probably true, too. But there was a bigger lesson for me to learn there, too.

Did I mention the husband-wife duo that was kind of cranky with each other? And did I mention the hormones? AND the fact that I needed to be humble enough to ask for help...not DEMAND it like I'm cashing in an I.O.U?

When Baby Rae and I finally got out the door for a quick weekend road trip to The Land of the Extended Family for a special event (D-Hubby had a midterm and had to study...poor hubby), D-Hubby and I kissed goodbye and were...ready... for the required few days apart.

And so the weekend went.
I got to see my little sister and her almost-hubby treat each other like gold. I got to spend a lot of time driving and thinking. And I got to spend a lot of time in a deeply spiritual place.

The recipe for a remedy.

By request, my sister told me a little about what she thought of her hubby-to-be. In describing her fiance to me, my sister said "he gives praise and affection freely, something I now know is an aspect of humility."
Ding!
At this, I knew what my week was supposed to teach me. It really was humility all along. I sure hadn't been showering D-Hubby with praise and affection the past week, that's for sure. Some of the things that we had been working through that week were valid concerns that needed to be addressed, but I sure could have done five hundred times better at making sure that he felt loved and validated while we were working through them.

My sissy and I had a conversation this past summer about the whole praise thing. There's a line in a talk by Ezra Taft Benson called Beware of Pride (a fanTAStic talk, a must-read) where he describes a symptom of pride as being "withholding praise." It's an aspect of pride that has always intrigued me (hence, why it came up in discussion with this sissy). I have often wondered what it is about pride that causes you to withhold praise from another. I have some theories. One is that you feel that it's your responsibility to keep them humble, not the Lord's. You feel like you'd be giving them a big head if you told them too many good things. Another is maybe that you feel you could have done better anyway, and that what they're doing is really not that great, or that it's something they're supposed to be doing anyway...so why tell them it's appreciated? Or that they did a good job of it? Another is that we somehow think that by telling someone what's good about them, we're saying that we lack it...or that it diminishes us somehow. Or we don't do it  because we think that we deserve the praise somehow, and that if we're not getting it then nobody is.

I don't really know what it is about pride that causes an inability to sincerely praise the attributes and accomplishments of others. But whatever it is, I don't want it.

Ewww.

So that was the lesson I was taught about humility this week.
(Which is good, because I failed miserably at the patience one.)
After a weekend away from my D-Hubby, I sure appreciated and loved him more.

And you better believe I went and TOLD him so.