Vanity of Vanities

I don’t generally consider myself to be vain. Perhaps I have a sort of intellectual vanity, but physical vanity doesn’t usually seem to be my downfall. There was an article I read that said my personal hell would be that every time I open my mouth to say something intelligent, something completely idiotic would come out instead. Based on how strongly I felt that, I assume I must have a rather decently sized strain of vanity when it comes to if people think I am smart or stupid.

A few weeks ago, I asked some of my family if they would rather have people think they were smart or beautiful. For me, the answer was pretty clear—I don’t care too much about beauty, but I care a great deal about intellect. So it seems I would be rather virtuous when it comes to physical vanity.

Fast forward to the present day: now I must make several video recordings of myself so as to continue to teach from home. And the first one was kind of difficult to get over mentally because I did not want to film myself and post it for ALL of my classes. Aha, vanity there you are! I didn’t want to look bad, I didn’t want the videos to be awkward, and I was uninterested in the quality clearly showing that I was deficient in making smart-looking video clips.

Here we are in Lent and the Lord is using every means possible to continue to push me. I get to live a semi-introvert dream and be at home all of the time and yet He is still managing to push me outside of my comfort zone. After struggling over the first video, I stopped caring a lot about the particulars or if it was perfect. (It also helped that I had to record the first one about four times before I managed to get the audio to work.) I don’t have the time to make each lesson or video a perfectly recorded masterpiece. There is a death and a life found in so many of these circumstances. And the first must be passed through before the second can be experienced.

However the Lord is stretching you these days, I hope it is causing you to become more the saint that He desires you to be. He will use everything for good and nothing will be overlooked or forgotten. Wrapped in that grace, may we venture together toward the cross, the ultimate crux of death and life.

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Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash