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Thursday, September 29, 2011

The Wounds of Pride

I read this excerpt from Celtic daily prayers and it was really good for me.

"He said, 'Let us pray for those we love.' And that was easy. Then he said, 'Let us pray for those we do not love.' And there rose before my mind three men for whom I had to pray. They were men who have opposed my work. In this they may have been wrong.  But my wrong was in resentment and a feeling of letting myself be cut off from them, and even from praying for them, because of it. Years ago I read a quote from Mary Lyon that recurs to me again and again: 'Nine-tenths of our suffering is caused by others not thinking so much of us as we think they ought.' If you want to know where pride nestles and festers in most of us, that is right where it is; and it is not the opposition of others, but our pride, which causes the deepest hurt. I never read a word that penetrated more deeply into the sin of pride from which all of us suffer, nor one which opens up more surgically our places of unforgiveness."

Samuel Moor Shoemaker, And Thy Neighbor




Can't really add to that. It is a convicting reflection about what offends me and how I respond.

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