Pride

Does anybody else find pride a really debilitating thing?  So much so, that I hardly know how to write this note.

The short story is that today I had a column published in our local paper, The Sentinel.    I guess I'll know if it's any good if I'm asked to contribute again.

To be honest I didn't do much to get the original invitation.   In my first couple of weeks here I spent a bit of time with the director of Saltbox, a local parachurch organisation, who has contacts at the Sentinel.  About a month ago he sent an email to a  few of us saying that the paper was looking for contributors to its weekly "Yours Faithfully" column, and I stuck my hand up and volunteered. 

The thing is, just before I left college someone suggested to me that writing might be part of the ministry that God has for me.  Here I am, three months later with something like this falling into my lap.  It's almost like there is actually a God :-)

So, what has all this got to do with pride?  Well, I'm absolutely tickled pink.  I love the fact that I wrote something and now loads of people might be reading it.  On one level this is because I'm chuffed that I've had the opportunity to write Kingdom stuff in a public forum, but to be honest it's also about me having had something published.

I don't know what to do with this feeling, and I don't want it to stop me engaging with the stuff God has for me to do, so I'm going to keep going (if they ask me to).  The best I can do at the moment is to write this in a public space as well, and ask you to pray for me, that my pride might be at the level of a workman taking pleasure in a job well done, rather than that of a peacock.