There has been much crow consumed by me lately.

Crow is not my favorite thing to eat. It’s one of those things that is good for you, but you wish you didn’t need for your personal growth and development.

And crow has different flavors. It can taste like an argument where you’re proven wrong. It can smack of hypocrisy. It can sit heavily upon your emotional and spiritual stomach like a load of bad perogies.

Yep, not my favorite.

But, crow gets easier to choke down as you get older, if you recognize that you’re in a season of steady diet. It’s almost like a cleanse, in a way.

A cleanse of pride, misguided certainty, overabundant sense of one’s own virtues, misjudging some else, all of those things.

It’s something we all wish we could eat in silence. In the secrecy of our own quiet spiritual space. But, unfortunately, crow is often eaten in community.

Now that’s the part I don’t like. Because if people know I’m wrong, then they might not like me so much, right?

If I can’t be perfect and right all the time then will they want me around?

Old songs from my childhood are one of the ways that God speaks truth into my life. “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up, higher and higher.”

The older I get the more I realize a lesson in humility is not the punishment I once thought it was. Because when people see me fail, they don’t seem to love me less. We’re told the lie that acceptance comes with perfection. It’s not true.

It’s the people who have seen me eat the most crow that know me best. And they’re still around.

When we’re known, really known, by others, it means that they know all of us. Our failings as well as our successes. It is through their grace, grace in accepting our imperfections and calling us forward from them, that we see a true reflection of Christ’s grace to us.

As I experience this grace, there is a slow shift within me. A knowledge that eating crow is not for my punishment but, can it be so, for my benefit? As I humble myself, admit where I’m wrong, can God pull me more deeply to who he knows I can be? Can I indeed be lifted higher in my humility?

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, with integrity and godly sincerity. We have done so, relying not on worldly wisdom but on God’s grace

2 Corinthians 1:12 NIV

It is through grace that I learn to seek God’s wisdom. Learning to say I was wrong, learning to say I’m sorry, willing to learn from others and to accept their loving correction.

Acknowledging that it’s not bad to be wrong, but unwise not to learn from it. Crow tastes bad in the moment, but learning from it transforms us, higher and higher as we humble ourselves.

I can’t say this makes me happy, but it makes me more willing to step into the learning and transforming, into the relationships that see me as I am and see me as Christ knows I can be.

I’m willing, but if it doesn’t have to happen that often, maybe that’s ok with me too.