It takes humility to admit when you overreacted
…to admit you were wrong
…to ask for help
…to be thankful and content for what you were given
… to allow someone else to be wrong.

One of my burdens is to teach our children to be humble. Part of teaching humility is teaching what humility looks like, so I’ve begun identifying humility (and the lack of it) with these statements. I read once about one life-lesson gifted children have difficulty with: the willingness to “suffer fools gladly,” that is, the ability to allow others to be wrong without succumbing to the compulsion to always be correcting. Gifted children often have knowledge enough to correct their teachers and parents, let alone their peers. It’s a difficult responsibility teaching them what to do with this knowledge. I believe the key is teaching humility.

So David and Bethel are cutting out airplane pictures together. (I’ve got an old airplane-a-day calendar. David cuts the square picture out and pastes it on a sheet of construction paper.) Bethel can barely get little cuts in the paper, let alone actually cutting something out. David is beside himself. “No, you can’t cut the airplane.” “No, you’re holding the scissors wrong” “No you are not doing it right”

I just told him “Humility means allowing someone else to learn just like you learned” and told him if he continued to criticize, he would lose cutting privileges.

May God give me the grace to heed my own words.

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