Pride on the Greek backroads

Pride is an interesting thing.

Today as we were driving back to Albania from Greece, we got lost. We didn’t have service, so it’s just a picture of the map that we make guesses on. Getting lost was pretty inevitable. I don’t know if it is technically considered lost, we saw the highway next to us the whole time and just couldn’t get back on to it. We drove alongside it for a long time with no entrances in sight. 

I couldn’t help but laugh and realize it was almost as if the Lord had placed a lesson right into our laps. I said out loud, “it feels like this is an analogy for something”. It was an analogy for pride. Living in close proximity and working with different people so closely for so long has showed me pride in more ways than I even knew existed. I learned all of the ways that I struggle with pride (I’m working on it, I promise), but I’ve also seen it through each and every person I have worked with, showing itself in completely different ways in each one. I don’t think this is something unique to us young missionaries, I think all humans struggle with pride innately.  

Our drive today was chill, but somewhere along the way, the driver missed the turn on to the highway. She knew it was the wrong turn, she knew it wasn’t right, but was too embarrassed to admit it. We had been making fun of her driving and she had already gotten us lost before, so in an act to not make us joke with her more, she hid it. Her pride wouldn’t let her admit that she had made an error. She just continued driving, saying nothing about it. 

We drove on a dirt road in the middle of a field for about 15 minutes before I said, “Well, this feels off” and she finally stated that she had missed the turn a while ago but instead of turning around and correcting it, she continued with it as to not draw attention to her mistake. She knew she had messed up, but was continuing on the wrong road out of embarrassment, hoping that it would correct itself. We ended up spending a full hour (on a time crunch), driving through mud and rocks and hilly fields. I mean, off roading was cool and all, and no one was upset or in a bad mood, it just wasn’t the goal. This isn’t a “complaining about her driving” blog post in any way. It simply reminded me of life, of myself.

Sometimes when we mess up, we are too prideful to admit it, too scared of being judged by people finding out about it. So we hide it, we pretend it never happened and continue on as if it didn’t. But that only leads us further and further down the wrong road. That only makes it harder to get back to where we should be. We could see the highway the whole time, we knew where we were supposed to be, what we should be doing. But since we continued for so long, it seemed impossible to get back to that, back to where we were meant to be. 

I sit here in the passenger seat thinking about the times that I have done this. Thinking about my human instinct to do it again. I know that I will mess up again sometime. I know that I won’t want people to see it, to think less of me, to question me. But I see things in a new light today. Had she seen the error and instead of being too proud to fix it, turned around to correct it, we wouldn’t have had to go through any of that. We wouldn’t have gone so far off track. So next time I mess up, which I will, I want to remember this day. I want to take full responsibility, no excuses, no fear of judgment, just honestly admit where I fell short and turn around to fix it. 

There were a lot of excuses today, “I couldn’t have seen that”, “it was confusing”, “I thought it would work itself out”. I even made some to make her feel better, “you wanted to take the scenic route so Katie could take pictures”, “maybe the music was distracting you”, “I should’ve been paying attention to help you”. But in all reality, excuses won’t get us anywhere when this happens in life. We are humans, none of us are perfect, perfect drivers or perfect people. We fall, we fail, we falter. That’s just life. That just happens. But excusing it and carrying on as if it never happened, won’t help us get back to that main road, to where we are going. One small mistake shoved under the rug and covered up with an excuse, ends up getting us further and further from where we want to go, from who we want to be.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. I bet she was beating herself up pretty bad for missing that turn and for continuing on out of self preservation. We do that a lot as humans. But it won’t get us anywhere. I don’t know, I’m not one of the great thinkers we learned about in Athens like Socrates, I’m not an apostle like Paul, whom I learned all about in Corinth, I’m not even a great navigator on a road trip like a dad in the 90s. The roads out here are wild, there’s a million and a half roundabouts, and she is doing it all in a stick shift. I won’t pretend I could do any better. I won’t get on here and pretend to have it all together, I won’t pretend to know better than anyone about anything. I mean, I did learn a lot of history facts this week in the museums, but I won’t act like I know everything about everything. I’m just a passenger, looking out at the snow covered hills of this beautiful country, thinking about life, thinking about pride, thinking about how we excuse our flaws instead of fixing them, thinking about how to get back on the highway before the sun goes down, things like that.

Again, we weren’t upset with the situation. I’m not judging it, or her, or anything. I won’t negate her feelings and fears of being judged or mocked or made to feel bad. I’m just saying that I understand, I see myself in it, I see humanity in it. We try to be perfect and don’t want anyone to see when we aren’t. We were never exactly taught to wear our flaws on our sleeves, but instead to hide them and never let them be seen. We all do it, we’ve all been there. We’ve all missed a turn once or twice.

I don’t always fully understand maps or Greece or why humans do what they do. I’m not writing this because I know everything about pride and how to fix it. I’m writing this because I am learning this. I’m writing this as an encouragement to everyone reading. I’m writing this as a reminder, to you, to me, to the world, that we are allowed to mess up, we are allowed to have flaws, we are allowed to take the wrong turn here and there. We are all going to anyways, so why hide it.

I want to have the courage to be honest about it when I do. We have to learn to have enough humility and grace for ourselves to turn around, as embarrassing as it may be, and fix it. To acknowledge our flaws, instead of pushing them out of sight, and work on them. The Greek philosopher Epictetus once said, “It is impossible for man to learn what he thinks he already knows”. We can’t grow in things we refuse to think about. We can’t fix what we refuse to acknowledge is broken. Let’s press into humility, into acknowledging our flaws and mistakes, into growth. So here’s an invitation to be real, raw, imperfect. Here’s a little encouragement, from one flawed human to another, to press into our flaws instead of excusing them. To acknowledge our prideful hearts and human instincts and try to be better. That’s all we can ever do. 

Thank You, Lord, for your grace. Teach me how to have it for myself too, teach us all. Give me humility, the kind that takes responsibilities for my mistakes, for my flaws, for my wrong turns, but doesn’t stay there. The kind that fights to grow, even when it’s hard, even when it’s embarrassing, even when it hurts my pride. Grow me in this today and never stop. Make me humble, make me more like You. 

-K