Pride

Let’s talk about pride for a few minutes. I remember hearing a talk as a young girl about pride. In it was a story about a man receiving an award for his humility, and as he accepted the award, he realized that he was no longer humble but full of pride. In essence, the moment you feel like you’ve got the whole humble thing down, that is when you have to start working on it again. It was an amusing story and I began to understand that humility is a life-long quest and nothing that you can ever say you’ve perfected. 

Which makes the idea of struggling with humility a little easier when you think that every other person on earth has the same struggle. So if it is such a never ending struggle, why bother with it at all? There are several reasons.

First, people don’t like to be around a prideful person for very long. Those filled with pride become obnoxious and hard. They tend to want their way and feel that they are always right. It’s no fun dealing with that kind of attitude. 

Second, prideful people don’t tend to work well with others. They rarely listen to the ideas of others and when they do, they don’t give their ideas much if any consideration. This is especially hard in a marriage.

Marriage

When my husband and I were pregnant with our first, we had a day that we decided to take a drive to Potato Lake for fun. Travel was easy until the final ten miles where we had to turn off the highway and travel around the mountain on a dirt road. As we progressed, my anxiety over my husband’s driving increased until I finally asked him to slow down. He said he would, but if there was a change of speed, I was unaware of it.

As we went around corners, I could feel the back wheels skidding out on the soft dirt and I could look out my window and see down the steep side of the mountain to the bottom several hundred feet below. My hands were in death grips on the door and the side of my seat. My feet were firmly planted on the imaginary brake pedal in front of me.

Suddenly, on a sharp turn, the wheels completely spun out and in an attempt to keep us from flying off the mountain, my husband overcorrected and ended going up the opposite side of the mountain, mowing down several small trees in the process, and finally ending in a ditch.

I was furious! I had asked him to slow down, but to my knowledge he had decided he had control of the vehicle and didn’t need to. We were extraordinarily lucky not to go careening off the mountain and we were lucky to land upright in the ditch. But husband didn’t think that this turn of events was due to his reckless driving, so much as old tires and a dirt road.

After pulling tree limbs out of our grill, and deciding we were so close to the lake that it would be a shame to turn around at this point, we got back on the road for the final two miles to the lake. Once again I felt he was driving too fast, and decided I had every right to not so nicely tell him that I didn’t appreciate that he was trying to kill both my and our baby. In my pride, I knew I was right and he was absolutely wrong!

But I wasn’t the only one full of pride at this moment. My husband’s response was to put on just a little more speed with a comment that he was a very good driver and I was being ridiculous. We both were fuming at this point.

Less than five minutes later, blinded by the sun in his eyes and distracted by a trailer on the side of the road, my scream came too late as he drove straight into a downed log the size of a large couch. Imagine a very pregnant woman, already upset with her husband’s driving and stewing in her righteous pride now completely incensed at this second attempt on her life by someone so wrapped up in his own pride, he ignored safety measures to prove he was right.

But who was really right?

Results of Pride

Was I right? When looking at the facts, it appears that my case is more solid than my husbands, but I was just as full of pride in my absolute correctness as he was in his recklessness. My pride did just as much damage as the trees did to our vehicle; maybe even more damage. For years after this episode, I couldn’t ride in the vehicle with my husband driving without gripping the sides of the seat which he could see and it would irritate him to no end. I spent countless drives telling him to slow down and reminding him of this moment. I shoved it in his face over and over again, but in my pride, I felt justified.

In his prideful anger, he maintained that his driving skills were superior and took stupid risks to prove his agility. It got to the point that I didn’t have to say anything to him, as a look from me or a view of my gripping hands was enough to set him over the edge about his driving. We were both full of pride and neither of us was willing to let it go. Instead of treating the episode as a crazy accident that could have happened to anyone, we both blamed each other and the irritation had echoing effects for many years after.

 

Letting Go of Pride

Learning to let go of your pride is not easy. We all have heard the warnings that pride goes before the fall and is one of the deadly sins. But pride is essentially selfish. It is the desire to have more or better than another. It is belief only in self and what you feel you deserve. Joyce Meyer said, “Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.” Ezra Taft Benson spoke frequently on pride. Two of his well known quotes are: “The proud wish God would agree with them. They are not interested in changing their opinions to agree with God’s.” and “Pride adversely affects all our relationships – our relationship with God and His servants, between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student, and all mankind.”

But understanding that pride is not good, how do we eliminate it from our hearts? C.S. Lewis may have had the key when he said, “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”

Remembering that we all make mistakes, and we are each children of God, it is easier to take away the competition that so readily besets our minds. In loving your spouse, wouldn’t you want to have them succeed? In looking at your neighbor or co-worker and realizing that they are your brother or sister, wouldn’t you want them to be happy? Forgetting about the competition is as easy as desiring a loving attitude towards all. Understanding that we are all from a loving Heavenly Father, makes it so that these are not strangers or associates, but family members. Praying for the ability to let go of pride is something I do every day.