October 22, 2006 11:38 AM
Yesterday: Elisabeth Elliot on meekness
Another great EE column. This time I'm just going to give you some teasers:
Meekness is not indecision or laziness or feminine fragility or loose sentimentalism or indifference or affable neutrality.Meekness is most emphatically not weakness. Do you remember who was the meekest man in the Old Testament? Moses! (See Numbers 12:3). My mental image of him is not of a feeble man. It is shaped by Michelangelo's sculpture and painting and by the biblical descriptions. Think of him murdering the Egyptian, smashing the tablets of the commandments, grinding the golden calf to a powder, scattering it on the water and making the Israelites drink it. Nary a hint of weakness there, nor in David who wrote, "The meek will he guide in judgment" (Psalm 25:9, KJV), nor in Isaiah, who wrote, "The meek also shall increase their joy in the Lord" (Isaiah 29:19, KJV). . . . .
Meekness is teachability. "The meek will he teach his way" (Psalm 25:9, KJV). It is the readiness to be shown, which includes the readiness to lay down my fixed notions, my objections and "what ifs" or "but what abouts," my certainties about the rightness of what I have always done or thought or said. It is the child's glad "Show me! Is this the way? Please help me." We won't make it into the kingdom without that childlikeness, that simple willingness to be taught and corrected and helped. "Receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls" (James 1:21, KJV). Meekness is an explicitly spiritual quality, a fruit of the Spirit, learned, not inherited. It shows in the kind of attention we pay to one another, the tone of voice we use, the facial expression.
I have a list of about thirty things I want to blog about. One of those subjects is teachability - which I consider to be one of my strongest assets. It's so important to not get locked into a position that you can't absorb new information and allow God to lead you in another direction. As my hubby Tripp always reminds our kids: "It's not who's right, but what's right."
For any woman who wants to make the most of her motherhood journey, I would recommend most being open and teachable. Keep a humble heart. Listen carefully to what others say because God may be speaking through them. Whatever you do, don't even try to pretend to the outside world that you are perfect. That only makes you hard and brittle and eventually leads to self-deception and an inability to admit your faults even to yourself.
Be teachable. Be willing to change.
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