God, grant me the freedom of humility.

Little Fright, I want to thank you for letting yourself be seen.

I’m a big fan of voice memos. (My friends get annoyed at me for my voice messages, but I never stop sending them, so good for Apple for caring for my friends well: offering transcriptions now, and all that.) If something hits—especially if I can’t write it down, like when I’m driving (and I’m always driving)—I’ll open the Voice Memos app and start yapping away.

I tell my writing clients to do this, as well. Sometimes, that’s the only way to capture the spark: yapping. Call it a first draft. Sometimes, if I pull out a pen and paper, or open my phone and see that bright, blue light shining back at me while I’m trying to type into the Notes App, it all just disappears. I start thinking about how to say it, instead of just saying it, and letting the shaping of the saying come later.

Anyway, I’ve been recording some voice memos to myself over the past couple of weeks about the freedom of humility. Just yapping away.

A few nights ago I sent someone a text that said, "I'm crashing. Sleep well." And I got all worried about thinking that might make them upset or disappointed in me. Upset, I think, more than disappointed. (Don’t ask me why telling someone to “sleep well” would do this.)

I didn’t dismiss it as a just silly thought, though. Part of me thinks that, of course. But instead of telling that part it’s stupid, I was about to get curious about it.

"Well okay... what if she does get upset?" How bad a thing would that be?

Not like I want to make anyone upset. But that's the problem. There’s a hard-wired assumption inside of me that they will be, and so I put filters on myself. Mostly, unless I get a real slowed down glimpse into what’s happening inside, I rarely notice it. Even if I still say something wrong, I’ll unconscioiusly run it through a thousand different ways that I can try my best to be as not-bothersome as possible (presuming, I suppose, that bothersome is somehow the baseline perception someone else has of me).

It's exhausting.

I have a friend who sometimes bothers me, but the thing I respect about him is: he just says his shit.

It felt important to capture.

It's okay if someone gets upset.

This plays into a thought that I had while I was driving around the other day, recording things, about humility being essential to a full life. Without humility, you can't own it and apologize...

Unless you can apologize and not let your failure destroy you with shame and fear and defense, I’m not sure we really have the freedom to live into a full and unrestrained life. But if you can say stuff and mess up, because you can be apologetic and forgiven, suddenly, there’s space for existence, and you might have to exert all this energy toward trying to consider all possible scenarios and the cushions they’d otherwise require, without even really realizing that that's what you're doing (but it absolutely is).

And there's a freedom here that I wanted to capture, because to not constantly anticipant someone's reaction—or how something that you worked so hard for (consciously or not) made them feel...

You can just find out. You don't have to control or subtly manipulate someone else's emotion, bending the outcome toward a certain something.

And so you get the freedom to be fully you. They get the freedom to be fully them. Humility. Love. Forgiveness. You know that there's a sustaining force there. It isn't threatened by all the same things that the worried part of me is threatened by. And it's okay.

It's okay.

Little Fright, I want to thank you for letting yourself be seen. Thank you for articulating it to me. Thank you for thanking me for listening. You don't have to be afraid. I probably won't get everything perfect. I'll mess some shit up. But I can learn that way. I can grow that way. I can apologize and experience forgiveness. I can extend forgiveness when someone you want to be that free in themselves, or himself, or herself... messes up.

It’s just living.

I can trust the work established in me, and take off the training wheels, and ride my bike without looking over my shoulder, knowing that—in the words of my friend Matt Shatto—I'm home wherever I go.

I want to be able to be one who is humble, because I want to be able to be one who is free, and they're not mutually exclusive. I'm not convinced that power and pride are freedoms. Or, maybe a better way of saying it is: I'm more and more convinced that the ability to be humble is a more robust kind of power that allows for a more earnest kind of proud—one that does not dominate over or control others, but moves with them, and the flows.

The anticipatory nature of subtly micromanaging other people's emotions as they arise according to who I am leaves me in a state of constantly not being able to be whomever I am, too busy wondering about who I need to be for their sake. Whoever "they" are. And it doesn't have to do with not caring about them...

It’s just… I am learning, more and more, to trust who I am, and apologize when I fail. (Learning seems to happen that way, anyhow—through failure—if you can look straight at it and not turn away, held in a kind of gaze-become-compassion.) My spiritual director recently spoke with me about trusting God by trusting who I am. That trust doesn’t mean that I won’t fail, but also: failure doesn’t mean don’t trust who I am. It just means that part it—or maybe foundational to it—must be humility, so that when failure does come, shame doesn't infiltrate its place. They are different things. And God is Goodness constantly holding us in Her hands, entirely unbothered by our failures.

“Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland, ourselves, that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God’s DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment.”

Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart

I think that I can see it more and more.

"Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past." Buddy Wakefield said that in a poem that I watched last night. It doesn't sound fatalistic to me. Release that hope for a better past. Feel it, mourn it, move through it, and open your hands. Whatever I missed. Wherever I failed. Whatever I wish could have been. Whatever I wonder might be different now if it was different then.

It wasn't. And this isn't.

It was. And this is.

And that's alright. Forgiving yourself is a lot harder, I think, than letting God forgive you. In your deepest heart, though, both offerings spring up from the same place.

God, grant me the freedom of humility.