start with humility

Today in A Year with the Church Fathers, St Aphrahat tells us about humility. He gives us example after example, throughout the Bible, of people who began in pride and ended in humiliation. Jesus summed up this advice when He said to take the lower seat when we go to a banquet, and the host will give us a better one. If we demand the best seat, then we'll be humiliated when we are given our rightful place.

Being humble doesn't mean thinking badly of ourselves. As C.S. Lewis said, humility doesn't mean thinking less of ourselves, it means thinking of ourselves less. Focus on loving other people, and humility comes naturally. As long as we're worried about how we look, and fuss about our ego and how others think about us, we'll struggle with pride and will find ourselves being humbled. But when we begin by loving other people, we find ourselves in humility - which, as Mother Teresa said, is reality.

God, thanks for teaching us to be humble. Help us to remember.