With Pride As Our Guide (Section One)

Section One:  With Pride as our Guide

Exploring the strange new world of another country, cross-cultural missionaries have often needed trusted guides to help them understand their surroundings. Books, documentaries, testimonies of people who have lived in their adopted land are helpful resources. But nothing compares to a national taking a foreigner under her wind and helping them navigate language, customs, history, and geography. In like manner, what better guide to explore the land of pride than Pride itself?

The essence of humility is illuminated by the shadows cast by its opposite – pride. For to understand what humility is, it is important to take ample time to reflect on what it is not. In securing Pride as our guide, we will be reminded that our scout is not external to us but resident within our souls. He has always been with us, sometimes nudging but often cajoling us to immerse ourselves in his world.

As we shall see, our guide is not neutral but utterly enthusiastic about the world he inhabits. Our guide Pride is after all the best advertisement for desiring to live in his country. It is the land of opportunity where the sky is the limit, and nothing is forbidden. In the land of pride impulses and feelings rule its people. “It can’t be wrong if it feels so right”, is stamped on the coinage. In the land of pride living for today; the present tense, trumps past and future tenses. It is a land free of such pesky restraints such as shame and guilt. Becoming conversant in this new culture starts with rejecting those moral handcuffs that inhibit personal happiness. For happiness can only be attained, says our guide, as we jettison that which makes us sad, angry, depressed, moody. There are morals, but they are relative to our own sense of well-being. In the land of pride, people are loved and valued conditionally – as they serve to feed our hunger for personal fulfillment.

Our guide is winsome, persuasive, suave, and entertaining. He will leave us wondering how in the world we would want to live in any other world than that which he inhabits. As he navigates us through the terrain of the land of pride, we will often have a sense of déjà vu; this terrain feels familiar as if we have lived here before. Indeed, we have. The land of pride is not a foreign country. It has been our homeland.