20 August 2024
It's a proverb of the Radix Fidem community: Don't take yourself too seriously.
Arrogance and fear are a married couple. Generally, arrogance is rooted in fear (except in the case of psychopaths). Fear is its own thing, but arrogance is one human response to fear, depending on personality and character, though it can also be learned from one's upbringing.
I wasn't born to arrogance by training; it was part of my native character. You see, confidence and humility are also a married couple, the same people as arrogance and fear, but after redemption. It was a long and painful work for me to ditch the arrogance, to learn how to let people be who they are and let God worry about them. To be honest, that fear had me in a choke-hold.
But it's because I spent so much of my life living with both fear and arrogance that I can spot it a mile away. Knowing how it worked in my own soul, I seldom address it openly, and just make note of its presence. It's like a drug for which people must hit bottom on their own terms or they'll never see it as a problem. Telling an arrogant person they are arrogant is the biggest waste of time because they see it as necessary.
One of the biggest issues for those suffering from arrogance is that they must realize that God speaks to others, too. He has been known to guide other people in ways you aren't supposed to go. Be faithful to your own calling and give God room to choose a different path for someone else.
You'll probably understand how confidence can come out of arrogance. But maybe you'll think to ask: How does humility come out of fear? Fear comes from the assumption that you cannot afford to lose control of things. Humility comes out of learning that you couldn't possibly be in the control in the first place.
The English language is quite poverty stricken in discussing such things. The grammatical meaning of "fear" is used for conflicting ideas. The Bible refers to a form of respect that is far more than what the English word "respect" implies, without all the connotations of "fear". It points to a feudal submission that includes an ardent love and commitment to obey. We don't really have a good English word for that. All we have is imagery.
We tremble before the Almighty who really is in control. We tremble from an overwhelming sense of unworthiness, mixed with a passionate drive to please.
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