I am going to talk about something that I think is one of the things I
struggle with the most. It often hurts my ability to perform in the ways the
Lord would have me. Pride comes in many shapes and sizes. I am not someone who
thinks that I am better than people in fact it is really somewhat the opposite,
I tend to have a low confidence. So I will share a few examples from my
mission. First starting with when I first arrived in the mission field, I knew
that I was not good at the whole missionary thing but I was not really ready to
change. I liked the things that I did and didn’t feel like I needed to budge.
Wrong! It was pride I thought that where I had come so far in life was good
enough, that’s not how I would have phrased it then but in retrospect it’s the closest
description to the truth.
Secondly I was placed with a companion that was a
little less than diligent and I then decided that I needed to change to be
better. Humbled… no. I then repositioned my pride, with this companion I used
pride to push myself. My thoughts were “everyone knows he is not living up to
his potential so will impress people by doing better than him”. I needed/wanted
the praise of men. A song quote comes to mind, “Could you hold your head high,
when no one knows your name”! At this time I could only say no.
The last example is the most recent, as missionaries we teach many
lessons and a problem many have is teaching everyone a rote presentation of our
lessons. A cookie cutter lesson, with a one size fits all sort of mentality,
where we clearly just go through the motions and wonder why our friends that we
teach don’t keep their commitments. This one gets worse as missionaries get
older and think “I have seen it all”, with a memorized solution to every
concern or problem. We forget to rely on
the spirit because our pride says “you know how to do this now, you don’t need
help”. Pride is a terrible thing and it is some thing I still struggle with,
but I continue to work on. The scriptures are full of examples of pride and its
eventual outcome. The entire Book of Mormon shows the destruction of a nation
because of their pride which led to them forgetting God and losing His promise
of safety. “Behold, the pride of this nation … hath proven their destruction
except they should repent.”(Moroni 8:27)
