Eating Humble Pie for Breakfast
Another much-needed Lenten lesson
It’s Palm Sunday, and Holy Week is taking off with a bang. So many valuable lessons this past week—it feels like everything I’ve been writing and talking about recently is being laid out before me to observe and to learn from.
Just yesterday, I got another big lesson in humility. A sweet lady from my church had invited me to a group breakfast because she wanted me to meet a German friend of hers. She thought we’d have a lot in common. Well, she was probably right… but not in the way she’d have liked to.
In a nutshell, we got together and the other woman and I instantly disliked each other. Within five minutes, it became clear that we were polar opposites. She hated everything about America and felt stuck here, and I could tell she had hoped to find someone to commiserate. Unfortunately, I had the exact same feelings about Germany (and most Germans, to tell the truth), which is why I’d moved to the United States. She said she loved order and discipline; I said I appreciated the freedom here.
If you’ve met native Germans, you know that we tend to have all kinds of strong opinions and aren’t afraid to voice them. So we were at each others’ throats for most of the breakfast, and I felt bad for the two sweet Asian ladies who felt visibly awkward having to sit through this. When the waitress brought the check, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
After I got home—and vented to my son for half an hour—I realized two things:
That my animosity toward most things German hasn’t subsided as much as I thought… a sign of unresolved issues and quite a shock because I thought I’d dealt with all those feelings of resentment already.
That the German woman was one of those “Mirror People” who I wrote about here. With some introspection, I could clearly see that her negativity and judgmental attitude that pushed my buttons so hard were reflected back to me as my own.
This also kind of ties into the value of suffering and our little crosses I’ve been reading so much about this week.
It was in my power to make this breakfast… well, maybe not a sweeping success, but at least a much more pleasant interaction. I didn’t have to take the bait and respond in kind. I could have decided that a harmonious breakfast was more important than proving a point. But by the time I tried to turn it around, the trenches had already been dug.
I didn’t have to engage; I wanted to. Instead of pushing back, I could have let her negativity slide off me, Teflon-style. Or, even better, I could have offered a silent prayer to alleviate the tension and let Jesus “take the wheel,” which no doubt would have led to a very different experience.
So this is basically my roundabout way of saying, humility and obedience and patience and “suffering well” all sounds really great—as long as it’s in theory. The practice, even if it’s as trivial as my little breakfast encounter, is so much harder, but also so necessary.
Thank you, Lord, for sending me these small tests and trials (which I usually fail miserably). This is how all of us grow, baby-step by baby-step.
May your Holy Week be a blessed one, and may you suffer your own little crosses well.
EDIT: Right after posting this, I discovered a YouTube video that every Catholic (and every other type of Christian) needs to watch. Fr. Chad Ripperger and Chris Stefanick talk about how erasing negativity from our lives and focusing on God can free us from the grip of the Evil One.