Just wanted to share something with you after we had that short conversation about your feeling bad about not graduating with honors.
The Lord dropped these thoughts into my spirit for you. Some professions require a certain excelling of knowledge, and hence the honors from men. The path God has for you He requires you to be humble, as the honor needed, to minister to the needy. This is His "Master degree" of training you are to be under. This particular ministry requires something altogether different. You will find after looking back upon all you went through from His eyes, that there was no waste in all you endured.
How appropriate that we should eat in the Popes room. This word pope comes from the Latin word "Papa" or Father. As He so identifies in our own weaknesses and life in this world that he "humbled" Himself and took on flesh and blood also. This humbling of Himself, meant he put off who He is as God to be so identified with our humanity to help us, that as you know from the world He was dispised. It was his compassion and love for us that He humbled himself, to come to serve not be served. To be born as one in the natural as a illegitimate child, from the worlds point of view, and it says in Isiah of him,
Isa 53:2-3 "
"For he shall grow up before him as a tender sapling, and as a root out of dry ground: he hath no form nor lordliness, and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were [our] faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not."
There was nothing about Him that one could boast in. Even his physical appearance was such that it says "there is no beauty that we should desire him", a very plain man. Yet he also knew what it meant to sorrow, to lack, and not even have a place to call His own to lay His head. He was despised by the very people whom He created. Now Humbleness is something far different than what we realize today in the world and its view of what this means.
J Preston Eby once wrote that helps to give a glimpse of what this means;
(quote);
"The high and holy One, the omnipotent and omniscient Creator and Lord of the universe HUMBLED HIMSELF! Yet, it could not be otherwise. Let me state it this way: God is humble! Have you ever thought about that? If God were not humble there would have been no babe in Bethlehem's manger, no Son growing up in dusty Nazareth, no Redeemer dying in agony upon the cross. If God were not humble there would be no indwelling Spirit, no habitation of God in temples of clay. If God were not humble it would mean the destruction of God Himself. He would then have almighty power without the balance of mercy, love, compassion, and identification with His creation. Thus, He would be a tyrant, and tyranny holds within itself the seeds of its own destruction...." (end quote)
Humbleness is the identification of what it means to be down trodden, lacking, helpless, oppressed, knowing full well our own weakness in order to help others. Until we know in a small measure what this means how can we help another?
Humbleness is like a plate that food is set on. You can have all the best tasting, most healthy food in the world, but if you have nothing to put it on so others can eat, it will not help. Most people who are hungry, in need of help, need that plate that food is put on to be feed and helped.
Just remember that you are the plate that the food of help is placed upon. The plate is never greater than the food. Humbleness is what this plate is made of.
Love ya,
Dad
