Sabbath Devotional :: Embracing the Period of Great Humbling

pride - Mormon Women for Ethical Government — .

Many years ago, in the mythical days just before the internet sped up communication, I was a student studying abroad in London. General Conference had happened somewhere, but it hadn’t happened yet for us, and just as we left to head out on a month-long trip in Europe, a friend got a package containing homemade conference cassette tapes. Because of this, a few days later I found myself on a train, struggling to get discernible words out of a small portable cassette player.

Suddenly, a voice came through clearly. Gordon B. Hinkley was reading a talk that President Benson felt too unwell to give himself, and for some reason it reached me at my core. As we sat and listened, I remember feeling very clearly, “This is a message from a prophet of God,” and the power of that experience, combined with the unique location in which it occurred, impacted me deeply. I read and reread that talk over the next few years, but it has been awhile since I’d sat with it. For some reason this week it kept returning to my mind.

As soon as I started listening it became clear why. The words felt as relevant as the day they were first spoken, but this time as I listened I felt sorrow. What was once a prophetic warning now felt like a missed opportunity. And when he began to define pride as enmity — hostility and hatred between us and others and us and God — I began to cry. Hearing this again in the context of the week’s events has been chilling and disheartening. We are living in a world where this enmity is manifest daily, and I really and truly do not want to “become as the Nephites of old” (D&C 38:39)!

As I listened once again to this powerful message, something entirely new and unexpected reached into my heart. As it worked its way around in there, I began to wonder if maybe my own pride is one of the reasons I am struggling so much to find a way to navigate this increasingly hostile world and find a way to change it.

President Benson explains that “the proud cannot accept the authority of God giving direction to their lives. They pit their perceptions of truth against God’s great knowledge, their abilities versus God’s priesthood power, their accomplishments against His mighty works.” As I struggle with a shockingly sudden shift from a world where things could be planned for, controlled, and expected, to one where they just . . . cannot, I’m increasingly anxious. Is it possible that some of my deepening anxiety is really born from pride? Had I grown so comfortable, so sure of my own capacity and ability to control “my world,” that I had come to believe the fiction that I was actually doing that? Had I forgotten that my life and its gifts and pleasures weren’t so much of my own making as they were a manifestation of His mighty works?

How much of my overwhelm isn’t a lack of faith or hope, but just me bumping into the limits of my own capacity at a stage in life when I have forgotten how it feels to be helpless? And how much of my struggle is my unwillingness to truly accept that if we want things to improve, we will need miracles. Does my pride want these “good things” on my terms and at a speed that eliminates my discomfort? Humility would say that He will accomplish his purposes with less concern for my comfort and control than my pride might like.

There is pride among the wicked, and it will continue to be a source of great pain to all of us. But I am wondering if the Saints of God, those who want to be agents for good and light, can sometimes be limiting their own effectiveness because they disguise their independence and pride with good intentions.

We are in a period of great humbling, and if we embrace that humbling and walk into it, rather than fighting it, will we find unexpected blessings and support? Will we come out as entirely different people than we could have become on our own? Will the Saints develop the powerful capacity to differentiate between their own will and the will of the Lord, their own capacity and the purposes of the Lord made manifest, and their own perceptions and God’s great knowledge? Is this the way we truly become the people of God? Not just by acting willfully to do good, but by acting humbly as we actualize his will?

President Benson concluded his sermon with a clarion call: “My dear brethren and sisters, we must prepare to redeem Zion. It was essentially the sin of pride that kept us from establishing Zion in the days of the Prophet Joseph Smith. It was the same sin of pride that brought consecration to an end among the Nephites. Pride is the great stumbling block to Zion. I repeat: Pride is the great stumbling block to Zion.”

I believe in Zion, and I also believe that the principles upon which it is built are the same principles that can heal us now. So I don’t want to be a stumbling block! How do we cultivate humility? How can we replace anxiety and personal control with an acceptance of the Lord’s will and a vision of what is in store for us?

At the beginning of this painful week, I was praying for capacity, and it didn’t feel like it was working very well. But now, as another Sabbath approaches, I have decided to pray for humility.

For “God will have a humble people. Either we can choose to be humble or we can be compelled to be humble… Let us choose to be humble.”