Humility

In the most recent "Spoken Word," what's-his-name quoted a rabbi (I've forgotten his name, too): "Humility is knowing that everything's not about you." That created an epiphany for me. If everything is about someone, it must be about God. He's the ultimate reality. That makes our joys and miseries, our successes and failures, our glories and shames pretty much insignificant. The only thing we can do is fill the hole into which God has stuck us and do it as competently as possible. In that way we can share a tiny portion of His joy, success, and glory.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Is that true? Someone famous (don't remember who) wrote a short story suggesting that this well-known and oft-quoted saying is not necessarily true.

In the story, a man was shipwrecked on an island and discovered that the people who lived there were blind. I will be king here, he thought. It didn't quite turn out that way. He learned that people do not like someone who appears to be cocky and arrogant. They don't like to be given advice they don't ask for. They don't accept information that disagrees with their prejudices. They especially don't like it when someone catches them in illegal acts. The community, who in the beginning received him warmly and kindly, came to consider him to be an anti-social trouble maker and decided to surgically remove his eyes.

This has a moral for both sides. I'll leave that to the reader to determine what they are. This ties in with our "humility" theme.

Eyring and the Three Nephites

More than once Elder Eyring has talked about humility in the sense of purification-of-motives. It's clearly a topic which worries him.

He's a great speaker. I love to hear him talk. I suspect he gets a lot of praise for his talks, and he is tempted to speak in order to get that praise rather than to serve the Lord. That worries him. That's why he expresses his concerns publicly. Such expression is cathartic. It helps him to clarify both the concerns and the possible strategies for addressing them.

I recently read through the BofM where Mormon and Moroni talk about the three Nephites. "They will be among the gentiles and the gentiles will know them not. They will be among the Jews and the Jews will know them not" (3 Nephi 28:27-28). And, of course, both Mormon and Moroni were looking to our day. For them, the entire population of the world would be divided into these two groups and everyone would be a member of one or the other. So that means that the three Nephites will be anywhere in the world and no one will know them.

These three gentlemen are powerful. They can't be killed. They move freely between the mortal plane, the Spirit-world plane, and the Celestial plane among others. They know (see) a great deal that we don't. Such men must be wonderful tools in the hands of the Lord for accomplishing his work.

But they do it anonymously. No one knows them or knows what great power they have or what wonderful secrets they could share. They are free of arrogance. They help wherever help is possible and they don't care who gets the credit. They go about quietly doing whatever the Lord wants. There is no honor, no glory -- just the knowledge that the Lord is pleased with them. The Lord is their ultimate reality -- even their total reality.

That's where we should be, how we should act, what attitude we should have.

And it is possible -- for each of us.

And, to hear Elder Eyring talk, that's where he wants to go -- difficult for him, being so in the lime-light as he is.

It would be easier for us.