Nicole Unice

5 min read ⭑

It took me longer than most people to realize that I couldn’t be successful enough or perfect enough to get out of humbling experiences. I held on to the lie that somehow I was smart enough to avoid suffering; that when others were rejected, passed over, or pushed aside, there must have been something they could have done to avoid it. My parents raised me with the mentality that there’s always a way to make something happen: If you get creative enough and pray enough and — for sure — if you work hard enough, it will go well for you. And although on the whole I’m glad I was raised to pioneer, it did mean I had a steep slope to descend when I began to realize life doesn’t always work that way.

I remember the specific moment when I realized I had not been chosen to fill a position I’d been excited about for years. I believed the person selected was less experienced, less educated, and less skilled than me, so I could discern no reason I was passed over for this role. I did a searching inventory on my own pride (wounded), examined my own performance and feedback I’d received to try to understand the decision (I couldn’t). I began to spiral, first into embarrassment and then anger. I constructed an imaginary courtroom in my mind where I could prosecute everyone standing against me — my boss, my leaders, the world in general. I rapidly cycled through so many emotions before realizing what I was experiencing most deeply was disillusionment — my deep-seated belief that I could work hard enough to control every outcome had been shattered.

I had three choices: I could continue to blame others for my misery and allow the fast-growing weed of bitterness to take root and begin to poison my soul. I could blame myself and heap more shame upon my own head, leaning into my workaholic tendencies even more. Or I could take the third way — the way of humility. To be fair, I ping-ponged between the first two choices for months after this moment. Okay, I ping-ponged for years. The heart is a deceitful thing. We make progress one day, regress the next. But what I’ve come to understand is that these experiences can be a gift that can actually lead to freedom — a painful but necessary deconstruction of inaccurate beliefs about ourselves, our God, and the world.

But here’s the rub: There is nothing more slippery to grab on to or more difficult to measure than humility. When you are struggling through an unexpected season, examining your humility feels like a fool’s errand. After all, as you attend to your real and present needs during a period of loss, anger or grief, taking time to ask whether you truly understand humility sounds almost laughable.

Yet what if humility is not only a virtue God loves, but also the number one survival tactic for unexpected seasons? When a rogue wave of life catches you unaware and off guard, you are already doing your best to just hold it together. That is precisely the point: Humility is about letting go of holding it together so you can release it into God’s hands.

Humility is about rightsizing your expectations about who you are and how you show up in the world. But humility is not self-condemnation — after all, when your ego is humiliated, it feels pretty close to death. It’s easy to get humility and self-judgment confused! Humility is not condemnation but a beautiful form of self-love. It’s where respect for God’s way and radical honesty about reality meet. It’s the ability to hold loosely your sense of what you deserve while holding tightly to the way you can show up for others. In some ways, it’s about losing yourself, but only losing the stuff — pride, resentment, and the right to be offended (not to mention the right to be right) — that’s best to burn anyway. Humility is about displacing yourself as the most important thing in the universe and seeing yourself instead as one small being with an important role to play in a big, beautiful, mysterious world.

Humility also reorients our vision of what leads to a rewarding and meaningful life. We are steeped in a culture that (often unknowingly to us) shapes our dreams and defines the good life very differently from the way God intended. Most of us develop a me-centered mindset because we want to “get ahead” and be happy. But what if there’s a better dream to carry, one that can sustain us through even the worst of times?

Humility will come to us all. Anyone who has stood at the bedside of someone who is dying understands deep in their core that we will all be humbled eventually. But there are two paths to humility. The first is to humble yourself. It’s the decision to wake up to your reality, to say to God, “I don’t know why this is the way it is, and I don’t know when it will end, but I trust you. I want to serve you. I will humble myself to show up today with joy and obedience and a heart to serve others.”

The other way is to be humbled. I don’t know about you, but even my worst day with God is better than an hour against God. Living against God is rejecting him and living in pride. And God will ultimately oppose the proud (James 4:6). God will stand up to whatever is proud in us, and sometimes he will use our struggles to humble us. This is why even our worst season can bring us the greatest gains. The pain that makes us desperate can also make us real. It may make us weak, but it can also make us whole.

The test of humility is the invitation to joy. To receive joy is to receive gifts from God that allow you to prosper even in your worst pain. To receive joy is to believe that God still has intentions for you today, that God can bless you abundantly with his comfort and presence in a way that allows you to live joyfully for others, yes, right in the midst of your pain. But in order to do that, you have to let go of what was, and replace it with a new dream.

Living out your new dream is about living out your story with Christ, especially when the story takes a turn into what you never would have signed up for. And at the crossroads, where you realize this season you are in is difficult, uncertain, and has no easy resolution — the decision between walking with Jesus or walking alone comes down to this one thing: humility.

Nicole Unice is a pastor, the author of several books, and a featured speaker through RightNow Media and Punchline. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Nicole and her husband, Dave, live in Richmond, Virginia, with their three children and two pups. Visit her online at nicoleunice.com.

Adapted from Not What I Signed Up For by Nicole Unice. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.

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