As for so many of us, the pandemic lockdown meant our whole family was at home all the time with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Sharon and I were splitting our days working and watching the kids. This meant long stretches of time when I had all three kids to myself. As the days and weeks went by and the pressures and tensions of life mounted, I struggled to be present with my kids. I was irritable and lost my temper too easily with them. I was watching them, but my mind was working on problems at work.
Things weren’t okay at home. Things weren’t okay at work. And things weren’t okay in me.
My depression was resurfacing, and I was beginning to struggle with anxiety. The fact that things weren’t okay was intensified by the guilt I now felt for not being able to make things okay. The plan of care my psychiatrist prescribed included an as-needed anti-anxiety medication.
As the pandemic dragged on and the tensions in our world heightened, I found myself taking increasing amounts of my anti-anxiety medication to numb the pain I couldn’t fix and silence the shame I felt for not being able to fix it. I had developed an unhealthy relationship with my medication.
In what I’ve come to call a moment of God’s severe mercy, Sharon discovered my medication misuse. This forced the hardest confession of all: I was not okay.
The Source of This False Belief
As I dug deeper to understand the source of this pressure, I found at the base of this was the false belief that everything depended on me. The truth is, this was a weight that I wasn’t made to carry. (This pressure is exacerbated if we came from a family system where we couldn’t trust a caregiver to nurture, protect, and meet our needs).
I was suffering under the weight of an over-inflated sense of how much things depended on me. In theological terms, I was dealing with less commonly discussed form of pride. It’s not that I was boastful or thought too highly of myself. Rather, it was the kind of pride that says, “only I can carry this. Otherwise, it will fall apart.”
Now, pride often gets labelled as a deeply sinful problem, and for those who grew up in religious contexts, we equate “sin” with something that needs to be punished. This is an incomplete definition of “sin.”
This kind of pride doesn’t arise from foolish arrogance. It comes from the extreme sense of responsibility that we carry into everything we do. A sense of responsibility for more than we were meant to carry by ourselves.
Originally, sin was an archery term. It literally means to miss the mark. The “sin” of an arrow then, was the distance between where the arrow lands on the target, and the bull’s eye of the target. Theologically, this is used metaphorically to name that the reality that creation has “missed the mark” of what it was created to be—things aren’t as they should be. In this light some sin is willful disobedience and rebellion against God. But there’s also a whole lot of “missing the mark” that is the outworking of our brokenness. Things aren’t as they should be because broken people hurt us, and we’re living out of the brokenness inflicted on us.
This isn’t an excuse to say we aren’t responsible for our actions and decisions, but it’s to say that a more robust view of salvation is that Christ didn’t only come to take away punishment for our sin. He also came as the great physician to heal us of sin and its effects. This is an especially powerful correction to our theology for those of us who grew up under harsh and abusive punishment.
Not everything in us needs punishment. Some of what’s broken in us needs healing.
In this framework, pride isn’t exalting ourselves above others. Pride is the overinflated sense that everything depends on us. Granted, this isn’t a feeling we chose. It’s something that the dysfunction of our childhood formed in us. Nevertheless, it needs to be healed because it produces overwhelming pressure that leads to exhaustion and burnout. It needs healing, not just for God’s sake, but also for ours.
The antidote to pride is still humility, but a kind of humility that’s different from what we’re used to. We typically think of humility as thinking lowly of oneself, and we don’t struggle to think lowly of ourselves. That seems to come pretty naturally. But Andrew Murray gives one of the most beautiful depictions of humility: humility is living from a place of complete dependence on God.
On this reading, the sin of pride in the Garden of Eden wasn’t that Adam and Eve wanted to be equal with God. The sin of pride was believing they could make their lives better by adding to what God had already given them. They moved from a place of complete dependence on God, to reliance on themselves. Along with that came fear, shame, and doubt about God’s goodness. Murray writes that at this moment “they fell from their high position.”[1] At the moment they attempted to exalt themselves to the side of God, they fell from the lightness and freedom that came from dependence on God.
In our own lives, we may feel a need to “help God” a little. We might not put it that way, but the sense that nothing is ever okay unless we constantly work to make them “okay” betrays this deep-seated belief. To this mentality, Murray says that in false humility, we say, “I’m only a little bit.” But to say we are a little bit is to say that God is not all. God is only “most.” True humility is ‘the place of entire dependence on God,’ the simple sense of entire nothingness that leaves God free to be all.
In humility we remember that it all depends on God, and we live from a place of entire dependence on God.
Excerpted from Good Baggage by Ike Miller. Copyright 2023 by Ike Miller. Published by Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Used by permission. BakerPublishingGroup.com
