Avoid Grandiosity

Whenever you feel the need to reboot your spiritual life, or reignite some spiritual practice such as prayer, it’s best to consciously avoid grandiosity. You may feel the need to compensate for your previous lapses or failures by pledging some extraordinary practice, either in intensity or scale. (I’ll pray an hour every day, fast twice a week, etc.) This urge toward grandiosity should be noticed, named, and resisted. The simple practice is to be preferred.

Grandiosity is problematic if you fail, because you’ve set yourself up for disappointment and frustration when your new practice doesn’t come through. Further, there’s a great chance it will fail if it is coming out of nowhere without first building the maturity needed to sustain it. And all of our journeys will have seasons of lapse along the way.

Grandiosity is equally problematic if you’re successful, anyway! Success in a grandiose practice makes us prone to developing arrogance, or imagining that our relationship to God is due to our practice rather than God’s grace.

Take the simple, humble path. Simply choose to begin your spiritual practice again. lean back into the simple things. Just begin walking again, with one foot in front of the other.