I heard the main reason the Israelites spent forty years wandering in the desert looking for the Promised Land was because Moses refused to ask directions.

If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you're giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

I have come to believe that humility is the mother of all virtues. Humility says we are not in control, principles are in control, therefore we submit ourselves to principles. Pride says that we are in control, and since our values govern our behavior, we can simply do life our way. We may do so but the consequences of our behavior flow from principles not our values. Therefore we should value principles.

Humility is the mother of all virtues.

Vanity is the natural weakness of an ambitious man, which exposes him to the secret scorn and derision of those he converses with, and ruins the character he is so industrious to advance by it.

A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.

A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of. It heightens all the virtues which it accompanies; like the shades in paintings, it raises and rounds every figure, and makes the colours more beautiful, though not so glaring as they would be without it.

Woe unto thee if after all thy profession thou shouldst be found under the power of ignorance, lost in formality, drowned in earthly-mindedness, envenomed with malice, exalted in an opinion of thine own righteousness, leavened with hypocrisy and carnal ends in God's service.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general-staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when the solutions don't work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility.

The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory.

But if we take the energies that make for aspiration and remove God from the picture, replacing him with our own crudely sketched self-portrait, we end up with ugly arrogance.