Humility is a strange thing

I remember a quote I read a long time ago (the Internet has many links that attribute it to someone named E. D. Hulse) that says, "Humility is a strange thing. The minute you think you've got it, you've lost it." Then, I made up my own quote to answer this, "It's easy to be humble when you've got so much to be humble about." I thought about this because of a recent firing at our office and because of this Sunday's sermon at our church.

The firing happened on Thursday. The fellow who was "let go" had been with our company for 19 years (I've been here for 21 years). He is a software engineer and was the first person to write software for this company that actually had a degree for that. Everyone else (myself included) who wrote software came at it from another discipline like electronics engineering or physics. He is also an accomplished professional musician (guitar and piano) and has a knack for learning foreign languages - he speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese with some other languages thrown in when he needs them. He wrote a book on using the Java programming language and published a number of magazine articles on programming over the years. How could they let someone like that go?

They felt he just didn't fit in. He had been moved out of the Engineering group a number of years ago to take over the maintenance of the company's database system that keeps track of inventory, customer information, parts and shipping information. He still had to use his programming skills but not with the mainstream programming languages like C, C++ or Java but with the internal language used by the database program. He wasn't working with a group but was working on his own. Our software group has progressed to needing to write specifications for our projects. We need to document everything for other members of the group to be able to pick up where we left off. We check all of the code we write into a software repository where everyone has access to it. He was learning to do all of these things but they felt he wasn't progressing quickly enough. So, they "let him go". It sounds so much nicer than "fired".

As I talked with him about it, one of the things we discussed was that he did a lot more things than most of the supervisors in our company really knew about. As he said, "I was always taught to be humble and not to brag about what you've done." I was brought up the same way. It is nice if people notice what you've done but you don't make a big deal about it. But that isn't the way it seems to work if you're working for a company. If you don't publicize the things you've done, it doesn't get noticed. My feeling is that, if supervisors are getting more pay, more prestige and more power in the company, shouldn't they have to accept that they should be taking the time to learn what the employees are doing? Well, I guess not. In the end, it is our responsibility to let it be known what we have accomplished.

The sermon this week as the second in a series on redemption. Our pastor spoke about hope and that it doesn't come in the form and at the time we expect. The verses we read were from Matthew's description of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday. The people were shouting Hosanna which means "save now". He was there to save them but not in the way they demanded. The citizens of Jerusalem wanted their Roman overlords to be defeated. Now! What Jesus had for them was for their sins to be forgiven and for them to return the love that God had for them. But another aspect of the story reminded me of my fired friend. Jesus chose to enter the city on the colt of a donkey. This was a humble way for the King to enter the city. But He wasn't hiding as He entered the city. He was telling the people what they needed to hear. He reminded them of the powerful miracles He had performed. He told them that he was God. I think we are wrong when we think we are being humble by not telling people what they need to hear. We need to be bolder to tell the truth. Not to brag but to explain what we are doing and why we are doing it.