Apparently, being shown your blind spot doesn't mean you stop having blind spots. Rude.
For years after Asbury, I thought I understood the lesson God had taught me about pride. I had seen something in myself I didn't know was there, scrubbed what looked like black tar from my body in the shower, and walked away determined that I never wanted to become that person again. There was only one problem. I became afraid of pride.
Not just the obvious kind. I wasn't particularly worried that I was going to start walking into rooms announcing that I was God's favorite and everyone should probably take notes. I became afraid of believing anything about myself that might make me important.
Maybe my testimony wasn't that important. Maybe my writing wasn't that significant. Maybe I wasn't called to anything particularly big. Maybe believing I had been given certain gifts was itself prideful. And whenever something inside me whispered that there was more—that somehow my life, my testimony, my writing, all these ridiculous threads I kept finding might actually be leading somewhere important—I immediately questioned myself. Is that God? Or is that pride?
It turns out that when you've once discovered pride hiding inside something you thought was good, you can become suspicious of just about everything.
Then recently, I found myself in 2 Corinthians 12. I've read that chapter plenty of times. Paul talks about extraordinary revelations, about being caught up to the third heaven, and then about a thorn in his flesh. He says that because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, the thorn was given to keep him from becoming conceited. Three times he pleaded with the Lord to take it away, and God's answer was not the answer Paul was apparently hoping for.
My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.
I'd read it before. This time, I saw myself in it differently.
Now, let me stop before somebody sends me an email with seventeen commentaries attached. I don't know what Paul's thorn was. Scripture doesn't tell us, and Christians have been arguing about it considerably longer than I've been around to add my two cents. I'm also not claiming God handed me a note that morning saying, Congratulations, Jenny. Here is the official name of your thorn.
What I am saying is that I suddenly began wondering if I've spent years begging God to remove something without recognizing what it has been producing in me. Because I think I'm beginning to understand what mine might do.
It keeps me unsure enough to need Him.
And I hate that. There. I said it.
I would much rather reach a point in this healing journey where I finally know what I'm doing. I want to recognize the wound, trace the root, identify the loop, hand the whole thing to Jesus, pick up my mat and graduate. Apparently there is no graduation ceremony.
Every time I think I've figured something out, another layer shows up, and I find myself wondering whether there was another motive underneath the one I just identified. Was that obedience or control? Discernment or assumption? Humility or fear? Was I following God, or did God show me one little glimpse and I immediately grab the steering wheel and decide where we were going? I've done that one before.
And that's when I started realizing that maybe pride has more than one reflection. For most of my life, I thought pride looked into the mirror and said:
Look how important I am.
After Asbury, I became so afraid of that reflection that I started leaning toward another one:
There couldn't possibly be anything that important about me.
For a long time, I called the second one humility. I'm not so sure anymore. Because both reflections have something in common.
They're both staring at me.
One exaggerates who I am. The other diminishes who I am. One says I am important because of what I carry. The other says I couldn't possibly carry anything important because I'm not significant enough. Neither one stops to ask God what He says.
That's uncomfortable. Because what happens if God actually did put something significant inside me? What if He gave me a gift? What if He really did call me to write? What if testimony really is woven into who I am? What if that thing I've felt deep inside for years—that there is something bigger coming—isn't automatically pride? Do I have to reject all of that to remain humble?
Paul didn't. That's what stopped me.
Paul talks about extraordinary revelation without pretending it wasn't extraordinary. He doesn't make himself smaller by denying what he experienced. But neither does he make himself the source of it. He acknowledges what God gave him while simultaneously acknowledging the weakness that keeps him dependent on the One who gave it.
Maybe that's the middle I've been trying to find. Humility isn't saying, I'm amazing. But maybe it isn't saying, I'm nothing, either. Maybe it's being willing to say, God gave me something, and whatever He chooses to do with it belongs to Him.
That sounds simple when I write it. Living it? Different story.
Because there's another passage from Paul that has followed me straight into this healing journey. Romans 7. The one where Paul basically describes the most irritating human experience imaginable: knowing what you want to do and then watching yourself do something else anyway.
I know that feeling. Oh, do I know that feeling.
You would think that once you identify a pattern, you're done with it. Aha! That's rejection. I know where that comes from. Wonderful. Then somebody rejects you. And apparently all that brilliant insight gets temporarily misplaced.
You can understand a trigger and still get triggered. You can recognize a loop and still step right into it. You can know something is rooted in an old wound and still react from that wound before you realize what happened. You can know better and still find yourself asking Paul's question in your own considerably less elegant language:
Why the heck did I just do that again?
That's the part of healing nobody puts on the brochure. Knowledge doesn't automatically become transformation.
And perhaps that's another reason this uncertainty has become such a thorn for me. I want understanding to equal mastery. If I can just figure out why I do something, surely I can make myself stop doing it. Then I don't. And I'm humbled again.
I learn something about trauma and realize how much I don't understand about spiritual warfare. I learn something about spiritual warfare and realize how easily fear can affect discernment. I learn about discernment and discover my motives aren't always as pure as I thought. I learn about motives and realize I can become so obsessed with checking mine that I'm right back to staring at myself again. Round and round we go.
Apparently, I missed the exit.
And maybe that's where Paul's two passages collide for me—not because I'm claiming his struggle in Romans 7 was the thorn from 2 Corinthians 12. Scripture doesn't say that. But because both passages confront me with something I desperately don't want to admit.
Knowing isn't enough.
Paul eventually cries out, “Who will rescue me from this?” And his answer isn't more self-awareness. It's Jesus. Then in 2 Corinthians, when Paul wants the thorn removed, God's answer again points away from Paul's ability and back toward God's sufficiency.
My grace is sufficient.
I'm beginning to wonder if I've been so determined to understand myself that sometimes I've accidentally made understanding the goal.
Find every root.
Identify every wound.
Break every loop.
Check every motive.
Make sure there's no pride hiding under the couch.
Those things matter. I believe God has been using this healing journey to expose things I carried for years without realizing they were there. That's part of picking up the mat. You have to know what you've been lying on before you can carry it. But the mat was never supposed to become my identity. And the mirror was never supposed to tell me who I am.
God does that.
Maybe that's why this current season has felt so uncomfortable. I came to Hart believing I came here to heal, and I still believe that. I just didn't understand how much healing would require me to discover things about myself I didn't particularly want to know.
Every time I think I've reached the bottom, somebody apparently hands God another shovel. I'm kidding. Mostly.
But underneath the joke is something I'm only beginning to appreciate. Every new layer has given me another opportunity to become dependent instead of certain. And maybe that's what my thorn does.
I still can't tell you exactly what it is. Maybe someday I'll look back at this Chronicle and laugh because I was staring at another branch while God was working on the root underneath it. Wouldn't be the first time. But I think I'm beginning to recognize its fruit.
It keeps me questioning my motives. It keeps me examining my heart. It keeps me from getting too comfortable with my own understanding. It reminds me that revelation doesn't make me the source, gifts don't make me the Giver, and knowing something about God certainly doesn't mean I've figured Him out.
And yes, sometimes it makes me so uncertain that I wish God would just hand me the answer key. But maybe I don't need the answer key.
Maybe I need Him.
I spent years believing humility meant making sure I never thought too highly of myself. Now I'm wondering whether true humility is simply agreeing with God—even when what He says about me is bigger than I'm comfortable believing, and even when what He shows me about myself is smaller than I'd like to admit.
Maybe my thorn isn't that I don't know enough. Maybe it's that every time I think I finally do, I discover another reason to need Him.
And perhaps, for now, His grace really is sufficient.
Humility isn't thinking highly of yourself or poorly of yourself. It's being willing to agree with God about yourself.