Musing 18

There are some things in life I just have never fully grasped – reading music, programming GUIs, quantum mechanics. . ..

You know, just normal stuff to struggle with.

That being said - I really hate developing GUIs for software. Despite trying in 4-5 different languages, frameworks, toolkits or whatever other verbiage you may use to refer to the software for building GUIs, it’s just never clicked for me.

It’s not that I can’t do it - I’ve supported a few Java Swing apps, and have helped develop a couple html5 screens for a few older webapps now.

And yet . . . so many of the conventions just don’t click for me. And such is life. Which, because I am more of a perfectionist than I like to be, annoys me to no end.

And it’s been a point where I’ve sought to grow from for over a decade now. When I was younger, it bothered me so much when I struggled to learn something, whether it was simple or complex.

And over time, that ego just became too much to bear. And so it needed deflating. Early on, the first major step in working to deflate my ego was my junior/senior years of high school where I was pushed way beyond what I had been prior to that.

And in the exposing of that weakness, I could start the process of growing in humility and learning to emulate Christ better.

Humility is so necessary for our walk, but I fear it is oft-neglected. Especially when ego so easily infects even good actions, it can be hard to see how we grow in humility. Killing sinful ego is hard work. Being humbled by the difficulties of life, whether it’s as simple as school struggles, feeling crushed by adult life, or failures at work, personal goals or whatever the cause is hurts no matter how mundane.

But even in the midst of humbling, ego seeks to point us away from Christ. It says our solution to our insufficiency is to be better or just to hustle more. But the true solution to our insufficiency cannot be found in ourselves or the world.

For everyone who feels the crushing weight of perfectionism, or the weight of being responsible for others while the costs of the world seem ever greater, come to Christ. There is rest for weary souls in His care. The burden He has is light. The rest provided refreshing, and despite a world ever more bent towards insanity, the security is healing for the anxiety.