CHECK YOUR EGO

"Moses was...more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth."  Numbers 12:3

It took 40 years of living like a shepherd [and oh, how the Egyptians despised shepherds!] to discipline Moses' ego.  Only then, at age 80, was he ready to live life on God's terms.  The man who emerged from the desert was decidedly different from the man who entered it.  It is our "desert experiences" that keep our egos in check.  Without them, we start believing our own press and get into trouble.  God told King Saul, "When you were little in your own eyes I was able to use you" [See I Samuel 15:17].  When Colonel Samuel Logan Brengle of The Salvation Army was once introduced as "the great Colonel Brengle," he wrote in his journal: "If I appear great in their eyes, the Lord is most gracious in helping me to see how absolutely nothing I am with him.  He does use me. But I am so conscious that he uses me, and that it is not of me that the work is done.  The axw cannot boast of the trees it has cut down.  It could do nothing without the woodsman.  He made it, he sharpened it, he used it, and the moment he throws it aside it becomes only old used iron.  Oh, that I may never lose sight of this."

A young English man once came to live in the community led by Gandhi.  When assigned to clean latrines, he protested, "Don't you know who I am?  I have great things to do."  Gandhi replied, "I know you can do great things; what I do not know is if you can do little things." Check your ego!