Pride and Restoration

Last week was super strange for me. I had the privilege of sharing at our fellowship here in Diguna on Wednesday evening. On the Monday before that, I was playing football with some friends, as usual, and was having a very nice time doing it. As we were playing, I got the ball from a team mate and made a super pass to another team mate who went on to score. Everyone was busy congratulating me on the pass, it was a really good one….and then an opponent took the ball and started running towards our goal. He is also good at football and especially at scoring from a distance. He shot towards our goal and I stretched out my foot to block the ball and inadvertently guided the ball into our own goal! I was more embarrassed than shocked, and my team mates were very gentle with me, no one scolded me at all.

This was not usual for me because I am used to scolding people when they make a mistake on the football field. I realized that I mostly scold those who are not very good at playing, or when I feel that I could have done better in the same situation. That’s when I realized that I had a problem that affected those who played on my team as much as it affected me. Pride. I realized that I cannot rate someone’s effectiveness in a matter unless I feel I could do it better myself. On the one hand, it may be argued that leaders have to gauge the performance of those under them, but on the other hand, the same leaders cannot afford to feel that they are much better than their juniors.

When it comes to restoration, we are warned against slipping into the dangerous pitfall of pride. We are cautioned to restore those who fall in gentleness knowing that we could also fall into the same situations in life. If someone is caught in a sin, we who are spiritual should restore them in gentleness and humility. We need to esteem others more highly than ourselves. We should have the restoration of the fallen brother or sister as our prime focus, and not our self-gratification at having helped someone through a tough patch in life. We should handle people just as graciously as we would like to be handled if we were the ones going through that situation.

Some of us are so harsh in our critique that no one feels safe telling us what they are going through. We are similar to hard rocks, and you will rarely find someone going to a rock to shed their tears. We need to be like soft cushions that can massage the head and absorb the tears that fall. We should be cities of refuge rather than critics of refugees. Are you a rock, or a cushion? Are you a city of refuge, or a critic of refugees? Just in case you were wondering, the scriptures referred to are: Romans 12:3; Galatians 6:1-4.