Think of Yourself Less. I am very qualified to speak on pride because I am so proud.
I hate my pride, but what I take even more seriously is how God hates it so much more. Pride is our greatest enemy because it makes God our enemy — an almighty opponent. “God opposes the proud” (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5). Why? What makes pride so singularly repulsive to God is the way that pride contends for supremacy with God himself. Pride is not just a sin, but a sinful mother — a sinful orientation that gives birth to more sins.
Why? A Shape-Shifting Sin Pride deserves to die, but it is hard to spot and even harder to kill. “That meeting went really well. “Humility is fundamentally a form of self-forgetfulness as opposed to pride’s self-fixation.” Meanwhile three seconds later, “I fight pride pretty hard. Several Shapes of Pride If pride is preoccupation with ourselves, then we cannot defeat pride by becoming preoccupied with how we are doing against pride. Think of Yourself Less Two Crash Sites Other Resources in this Series. What To Do When You Don't Feel God. How Architecture Testifies to Beauty and Brokenness in our Cities. Sukie Leung practices as an architect in Toronto, Canada.
She is a LEED-accredited professional that designs with sustainable strategies and green building technologies. She completed her master of architecture degree from University of Toronto. She is currently working on designing buildings with focus in educational facilities and residential developments. Her interest is in understanding ways in which building can support, engage, and enrich the diverse needs of the people which it serves. How would you describe your work day to day? As an architect, I collaborate with a large team of professionals—engineers, contractors, urban planners, and other stakeholders—to develop a design vision and articulate that vision into built reality. Your architectural firm designs and builds according to the principles of sustainability, efficiency, and intelligence. Good architecture is essential at all scales, from city scale to the scale of a door handle. 7 Reasons Not to Worry. Is there a sin nice, middle-class Christians commit more than the sin of worry?
You wake up ten minutes later than you had hoped and anxiety already starts to creep in: what if I’m late? What about traffic? What’s the weather like? You pass by the mirror and worry that your face has more wrinkles than it used to. You rush downstairs and because you are in a hurry you let the kids eat whatever they want, so then you start to worry if sugar really does cause cancer. Once you get home you pull up Facebook just to unwind.
Hours later when the kids are in bed you turn on the television to forget about the day. The Gift of Failure. It’s funny how success is seen as the route to happiness.
In my experience, it’s the opposite. Striving for something you can’t achieve - being (the most) beautiful (the most) entertaining (the most) intelligent the fittest the richest the thinnest the most popular - but always The Most - doesn’t make you happy; it makes you miserable – and grumpy, to boot. That’s the problem with success – it’s usually a competition. Life is full of challenges. Things like this… 1. 2. there is a God and He comes for failures like me. 3.when I have the freedom to fail, I have the guts to aim bigger. 4. showing other people the (scary) grace that God has shown me. More, But Not Less, Than a Carpenter. I don’t know why I didn’t see it for so long, but one day as I was reading through the Gospel of Mark, I stumbled across a verse that stopped me dead in my tracks.
In Mark 6, we are told that Jesus, who was spending his time as an itinerant rabbi, came back to Nazareth. The hometown crowd listened to Jesus teach in the synagogue, and they were stunned by their native son who was displaying such extraordinary wisdom and power. In their eyes Jesus was first and foremost a carpenter from Nazareth. Mark records the crowd exclaiming with a tone of incredulity, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are You Fighting the New Greed? Kyle and I sat down at the restaurant, away from the children, yet I still couldn't relax and enjoy myself.
I had been consistently distracted for weeks. Slumped at the table, I stared at him and tried to explain how I was feeling. “I feel overrun with thoughts and emotions, many of them sad and discontented. My brain feels like it's being pulled in a million different directions. What is going on with me?” After listening to my winding trail of thoughts for many minutes, Kyle replied, “You check e-mail a lot. My purse sat on the booth seat beside me, and inside my phone's blinking green light beckoned even as he said those words. That description explained it all—the discontentedness, the obsessive comparison with other women, the uncertainty and its resulting pursuit of online evidence that I'm successful and loved, the desire for what I don't have and the wondering if I ever will, the pride.