The Goodness of Dirt
What if someone handed you an envelope, claiming that within was the secret to living at your very best – the life God always meant for you to live? One where you experienced:
And what if when you opened the envelope, you discovered a single, plain sheet of paper on which just one simple word was written?
Humility.
Would that have been your first guess?
Maybe it was. But if not, you’re in good company. It's hard to naturally jump to embracing humility as the route to living our best life.
And why wouldn't it be?
Perhaps images of a person who is groveling, trembling, self-loathing, self-degrading, and living far beneath their potential come to mind. Or stern faces intended to humiliatingly scold anything perceived to be prideful behavior. Maybe even painful memories of feeling humiliated.
The word’s root origin is humus. Which means “earth” or “ground.” Dirt. An insult we all try to avoid.
And it doesn’t help that “humility” sounds a little too much like “humiliation” for our comfort.
But what if humility is simply the original way of seeing life and going about daily tasks placed in the human heart from the moment God first formed Adam? From dirt? Interestingly, the word human also comes from the word “humus” and means, “earthling” or “earthly being.” Dirt man. (Fun fact: the Hebrew word for Adam is Adamah, which means “ground.”)
Which would make “humility” the most grounded, reality-based, and rightful way of seeing ourselves and others. Formed from the dirt for God’s purposes and dependent on Him to fulfill them. Living humbly is the ability to live at our basic, ground level. In the dirt. And it’s not a bad thing. What God does with dirt is miraculous and amazing!
However, through sin-lies, we have been brainwashed to dread, look down on, distrust, and despise humility. The state of being humble (level with the ground) can seem like a risky vulnerability we both consciously and subconsciously avoid at all costs. Instead of it being our default setting as it originally was, it now must be willfully chosen to feel like the rich blessing that it is.
This is because when sin was first chosen in the Garden of Eden a new, self-protective default setting was established to replace humility and ease our fear of it. It’s called pride. We are all desperately and hopelessly plagued with it. And we all will be until death. Even those of us who live the most humbly.
The reason for this is that as creatures miraculously formed (from dirt) into reflections of the image of God, we weren’t designed to view ourselves through the lens of a hateful, loathing being called Satan. None of us feel OK with the ways sin has distorted our original, awe-inspiring, humble design. So we all turn to pride for comfort. Naturally. It acts as a shield against feeling invaluable and unlovable in the face of our God-given human limitations (that we now see as liabilities instead of blessings) as well as our sin-induced failures and brokenness.
But this is unfortunate because pride is only an illusion of safety crafted by our enemy to destroy us. It’s the root of our falling down under ground level - into disgrace (Proverbs 11:2 16:18). The word humiliation, which also comes from the root word, “humus,” could be described as being pushed into the ground against one’s will. You can easily knock a person down who is trying to unnaturally levitate above the ground. But you can’t knock a person down who chooses to stay on the ground. As Mother Theresa, one of the greatest modern examples of what it is to be a humble servant said, “If you are humble, nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are.” Dirt sounds like a better deal!
Because there is a force trying to keep us from recognizing this, misunderstandings about what humility is and isn’t abound.
Fortunately, so do many, many writings written to counteract them.
Here are some great quotes to inspire and encourage us to avoid humiliation and risk the adventure of willingly going down the better path to what is truly our best selves – rich, earthy, ground-level, humility.