I woke the other morning with thoughts already running. Not a dream exactly — more the thoughts upon the bed that Nebuchadnezzar speaks of at the start of Daniel four.
The thoughts upon my bed and the visions of my head troubled me. Daniel 4:5
In mine, someone was asking me to do something. It was to do with ministry, and it was not a bad thing to be asked. And I said no. And I felt entirely justified in saying no.
It is the feeling justified that has stayed with me.
Because I have been writing about pride, and the thing I keep running into is that pride never feels like pride from the inside. It feels like accuracy. Nebuchadnezzar on his roof was not lying — he had built Babylon. Naaman was not being unreasonable — the rivers of Damascus really are better rivers. Every one of them was quite sure. And the pride was invisible to the very person holding it.
So I find I cannot answer the question I want to answer. Was my no a sound judgement, or was it arrogance I could not see as arrogance? I do not know.
But I have started to think that is the wrong question anyway. We treat pride as a verdict — am I proud or am I humble — and then we reach for the flattering answer, because a proud man returns the verdict “humble” every single time. The verdict is useless.
There is a better test, and it is harder to cheat. Am I listening? Can I be corrected? When the servant, not the prophet, tells me to go and wash, will I go — or will I only do the big things I would have chosen for myself?
That is what the whole thing turned on. Nebuchadnezzar had Daniel. Naaman had his stable hands. Howard Hughes had a payroll and nobody left who could tell him the truth. The difference was never talent or wealth. It was whether there was anyone able to say no, and whether the man was willing to hear it.
I do not know that I have a problem with pride today.
That is rather the point. I wouldn't.
What I know is that pride makes us deaf before it makes us anything else, and that the safest thing I can do is stop asking whether I am humble and start asking who is telling me the truth at the moment, and whether I am listening.
If you want to sit with that longer, I have written it out in full — the three men who could not hear, and the one who could. It is called Nobody Left to Say No.