“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor.”

We’ve all likely been in a position where we’ve made a mistake and someone else has had to dig in and figure out what was wrong.  I remember it happening to me early within a new job I had and as the numbers my team had come up with were significantly wrong, the finance team had lots of fun pointing out the error and then questioning everything else in the spreadsheets.  To say the least, it was humiliating.  It took me a long time to earn the credibility back and I had to listen to a lot of razzing with each subsequent presentation.  But, I/we got over it.  It happens.  We may be very sure about something and then find out that we were wrong (I wrote a little about that last week) or we just blew it.  Just as important to how we resolve the issue is how we respond to it, and the attitude in how we recover.

Last week, a good friend, David, said within a meeting we were having, “You can’t be humiliated if you are humble.”  I told him on the spot that he’d just spoken a life lesson for all of us.  We know that God expects humility from us and that doesn’t come naturally in the human spirit.  We have to work hard at it.  Imagine that David is so right that if we are humble enough, nothing can be humiliating.  This doesn’t mean we don’t care, it just says that we can be open and accepting of criticism, investigation, challenges, etc.  I want to be so humble that I can never be humiliated!

Reference:  James 4:10 (New Living Translation)