The Balance of Pride

My niece, Isabella, is 16 months old. I notice when I am with her how amazing she is. I marvel at her actions like banging on the bathroom door when her mother is trying for a brief span of privacy and saying, "Hey Momma!" I marvel at the rapid walking in which she engages. We, the adults, around her beam with every moment of growth. We are so very proud of her, for she must be better than or more advanced than any other 16 month old around! Right?! Of course right!

We are prideful and it is a perspective that we would do well to monitor. Pride is yet an even more advanced stage of forceful human consciousness than we have examined heretofore. We have looked at shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire and anger (see the anger article at www.btcevents.blogspot.com).

What we see with pride is a level that invites us to celebrate our achievements. We hold our heads higher, just like Isabella does when our family praises her successful actions. We boast about ourselves and believe that we are truly remarkable individuals. It seems there is a fine line between confidence and pridefulness. That old phrase comes to mind, "pride goeth before the fall" and it is so very true. A person who lives out of pride will find themselves standing very tall when life is going smoothly for them. They can call themselves a good catch and wave the gleaming resume in the air but when things aren't going so well they find that they can plummet back down to the lower stages of consciousness. A prideful person's esteem is rooted in what is occurring outside of themselves. It is rooted in being better than others.

I once heard someone say that no one is special. For if we make ourselves special then we make everyone else "not special." The downfall of this level of consciousness is in making ourselves better than anyone else, of valuing ourselves over everyone else.

As a family, we will do well to build Isabella up but also to teach her and remind ourselves that Isabella is equally as special as every other life on this earth. In so doing, hopefully we will release any bent toward the negative expression of pride.

On the positive side, we each have much to celebrate in our lives even down to the fact that those of us who live out of this level of life are inches away from growing toward a life of power as this is the last stage of forceful living before courage takes to experiencing a level of freedom.

I hope for each of us the ability to keep our pride in balance--to find that balance of being the confident people that God has created us to be but also being sure to honor the other remarkable people around us. May we celebrate one another this day! Amen.