Open Hands · Week 3 · Tuesday · INSECURITY

He is nine weeks into his first job managing people, and he has not given a short answer in a meeting since he started.

Somebody asks where a number came from. The true answer is about two sentences long. What comes out is six minutes: the method, the second method he considered, why he discarded it, the edge case nobody raised, the thing he checked on Sunday night in case it came up.

He is not showing off. Anyone watching closely can tell the difference, and the difference is in his shoulders. He is submitting evidence. Every meeting is a hearing, the question of whether he belongs in the chair is still open, and he is still making his case.

He fills a notebook before every one. Not notes — defenses.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves.Philippians 2:3 (BSB)

The Hollow Kind

Empty pride is the phrase I want. We read pride as swagger, as the man who thinks too much of himself, and that man is in the world and the verse covers him too.

But empty is a different word. Empty pride is hollow — it is loud because there is nothing inside it holding it up. It is the pride of a man talking because he is frightened, which from the outside can look identical to arrogance and on the inside is the exact opposite of it.

And notice what the verse offers as the alternative. Not better self-esteem. Not a reminder of his own competence. It points him outward: consider others more important than yourselves. The cure for being consumed with your own standing is not raising your standing. It is having something else to look at.

Too Many Men

There is a passage in Judges that I find genuinely strange, and it belongs here.

Gideon has finally raised an army. Thirty-two thousand men. And God’s response is that the army is too large.

Then the LORD said to Gideon, “You have too many men for Me to deliver Midian into their hands, lest Israel glorify themselves over Me, saying, ‘My own hand has saved me.’Judges 7:2 (BSB)

Twenty-two thousand are sent home. Then another nine thousand seven hundred. Three hundred men are left to do the thing thirty-two thousand were assembled for.

The stated reason is not tactical. It is to make a particular sentence impossible afterward: my own hand has saved me. God removes the evidence a man would use to file that claim.

He was building a case nobody had asked him to make, in a hearing that was not being held.

What It Cost

Thursday morning, somebody asked him something he did not know.

He had the move ready — the adjacent thing he does know, delivered confidently enough to cover the gap. He has used it before and it works.

Instead he said: I don’t know. I’ll find out and come back to you.

Four seconds. He has rehearsed single sentences for longer than that.

He still fills the notebook. He says he used about a third of it this week, which he reports as a failure and I would not.