In my entire life, I have never encountered anything nearly as intense as the lunch rush at McDonalds. This situation can only be described with the crazy mental pictures of drinks pouring everywhere, fries being shoved every which way, and angry customers who don’t understand that the dilemma at hand was created by their own lack of communication. As the front drive thru food-shover (my self-proclaimed title), I am usually the first one to take the blame for a slow moving line of cars. As much as I’d like to, sometimes it just does not seem like I can move fast enough. The biggest problem is, I also receive negative feedback if I miss a drink or forget to grab the second bag for the order. In the midst of the chaos, my manager Miss Barbara summed up the grand purpose of the McDonald’s drive thru. “We are striving to operate at 100% efficiency and 100% speed.” Seemed like a lose-lose situation to me.
The front drive thru is an art. Perfection is attainable for a certain amount of time, but it is still a constant struggle to keep up a fast pace while being diligent to double check every single order. Sometimes opposite traits aren’t so difficult to obtain after all when you are striving for total excellence instead of in each area. During a life chat, I discovered another situation in which we are asked to accomplish two things that seem so very different:
1. Humility:
Adjective: A modest or low estimate of one’s own importance
2. Confidence:
Noun: The feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something
Life confuses me. As we go through high school and college, we place a huge emphasis on building one’s confidence, specifically on ourselves. We love to preach the importance of “believing in yourself,” and “trusting yourself,” and other various cheesy things. At a first glance, it is easy to assume that the more confidence you have in yourself, the easier things are going to be and the more success you will experience. But let’s face the facts, it seems like the more chips you accumulate on the confidence board, the more you lose in the game of humility. The confidence we preach about is shallow and can be easily taken away from us.
So we also like to talk about this cool thing called humility. We hear all the time that “we should be humble,” never taking credit for the awesome things in our lives or “assume we are better than another person.” Confidence and humility seem to contradict each other.
In my own life, it seems like the more confidence I have built over the years, the harder and harder it is to not have pride in everything I have invested my time and energy in building up. My problem was that I connected the words confidence with the word pride. Confidence is different from the word pride in the fact that confidence has a deeper root than just oneself, because it is connected to a deeper purpose. In the same way, my view of “humility” was the same as of “shyness.” The truth is, “humility” is simply a humbling of ourselves that is caused by a greater purpose in our lives. Confidence and humility are one in the same in that they both describe how we view the purpose of our lives, and especially how we view the greatness of our Creator. We can be both confident in the faithfulness and ultimate purpose of Christ, and humbled by his perfection.
Connectedness (connecting the dots between different situations in my life and others) may be one of my top strengths, but there it is no stretch to make the connection between this week’s look at 2 Corinthians and Paul’s view of his creator.
“Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom, but according to God’s grace.” --2 Corinthians 1:12
Paul has full confidence in his actions because they were for the purpose of glorifying God by teaching and rebuking the Corinthians. He uses the word “boast” because God’s presence in our lives and His work through us is truly the only thing we can boast about, because nothing else is substantial enough. He is also humbled by this and realizes that he has no part of his, and in fact, all of the earthly things that surround him (worldly wisdom) are separate. He is so focused on God that he does not even see the presence of his talents and abilities and the world in the picture.
Paul knew that our lives are not our own. Every talent, ability, and even life situation we are blessed enough to experience and use was given to us. Since we have nothing, we have nothing to be confident or try to be humble about. Functioning on opposites is difficult, but easy when we can see the situation from a more encompassing point of view. This week, I challenge you to make confidence and humility in your life one of the same.
McQuestion: Are you functioning on the 100/100 vision in your life? Or is one side (confidence or humility) heavier than the other?
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