Pride, the great facade.

Pride passionately wants you to look righteous, but humility passionately wants you to be righteous.

Pride inevitably stunts, defeats growth, for when we are prideful, we care about us, only us, and usually others perceptions of us. Man, pride would rather have you being 'right' than growing. Pride skews proper vision, not humility. Pride collides with reality, but humility alligns, embraces it. In my mind pride is always exaggerating the good and the accomplishments attributing their existence to some sort of deep inner genius that overflowed out my very being. However, when I run into the bad things, into my failures, then pride is ever present to rationalize or mostly just deny any evident flaws, attributing their existence (or lack there of) to everyone else.

I create a facade, the great facade, the way I want to be seen. As soon as someone pokes a hole in my great facade and I realize that the image I wish to portray has been breached, then I get defensive. Honestly I spend more time nurturing my facade than I do actually nurturing my inner broken man. If I cared as much about my heart changing as I did about appearing a changed man then God could have infinite room to grow me.

I pray the next time a friend of mine comes to me and I hear that painful twinge of truth, the next time instead of resisting the truth because it makes me look bad, I will embrace truth knowing that it's revelation will make me more like Jesus.

We will find humility as we continue to embrance and recognize God's view of us, as well as God's mercy towards us.
Humility isn't demeaning, it's freeing. Throughout my life it was never humility which caused me frustration, inner turmoil, impatience and divisions. No, it was my pride that produced all that!

Pride always thinks about you, but humility always thinks about Jesus.