Monday, August 3, 2020
What kind of pie
Fills your sky
each morning?
Proverbs 3:34
Towards the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he shows favour.
Philippians 2:3
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.
Words of Grace For Today
Humble pie.
The recipe begins with light flour and butter mixed with just a sprinkle or two of water into a flaky crust, rolled thin and readied in pie tins. Fill the crust with sweet berries or fruit mixed with more butter and sugars to taste, and perhaps a bit of sweet cream, and spices appropriate to the berries or fruit and one’s taste, and bake on heat sufficient to set the filling, cook the bottom crust and just touch the top crust or custard with a browning of the sugars and butter/cream.
Then share and enjoy the delight one has created at any time of day.
Except that is not humbly pie, that is gloriously delightfully terrific pie.
Should one instead anonymously give away the delight so that one does not get credit?
Of course it is to miss the point.
Humble pie starts with reality: one’s own sins before God, even knowing and trusting that Jesus’ record has saved us from judgment. It continues knowing that today and all our tomorrows we will need God’s forgiveness again and again. It nears the final touches to the ‘pie’ with a continual resignation of our claim to pride and accomplishment. The final touch to his pie, like ice cream on pie ala mode, is to recognize that others’ sins are also forgiven which means they are at least as ‘good’ as oneself.
We can, having eaten our humble pie each morning for breakfast, approach other people knowing they are likely if not surely better than ourselves.
As God has received us, wretched sinners as we are, so we can receive others: without scorn, lest the scorn turn out to be of ourselves.
That makes for an interesting life, one where we can see the best in others, not in their worst, but in what God is able to bring out of them in spite of their sins.
There are so many people to share the ‘delightful pies’ of life with, once we start with ‘humble pie for breakfast’ each day.