Season & Savor: On Humility, The Kind that Finds You

Welcome to Season & Savor Sunday — because feeding our bodies is not enough.

We’ve spent the last few weeks talking about friendship around here, what it looks like to show up, to really listen, to be the kind of friend worth having. I had planned to ease into something related this week, maybe something about giving people the benefit of the doubt.

And then Thursday happened.

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I had been working on the Smart Cooky Club for months. My new membership had been a long time in the making, and I was ready. Checked every box. Tested every link. Ran through the whole thing start to finish more than once. Sent it off to my trusted teammates for them to review it all. I had that particular kind of satisfied feeling you only get when you are pretty sure you did not miss a single thing. Or so I thought…

The email went out.

And then the replies started coming in.

Not the “I loved this!” kind. The “this didn’t work for me” kind.

I spent the afternoon on chat with tech support, troubleshooting, apologizing, troubleshooting some more. For some people everything worked fine. For others, still a mystery. I did my best, apologized genuinely, and went to bed that night tired and more than a little sheepish, shoulders somewhere up around my ears.

Then the next morning, an email from my assistant, Courtney. Something else…

“Hey, the follow-up email went out with placeholder text instead of actual links.”

I stared at the screen.

I knew I had added every single link. I remembered doing it. So how on earth…

Come to find out, I had done it exactly right. I just hadn’t hit publish on the backend before the email deployed. One button. That’s all it was. One little button I didn’t push.

I wanted to crawl back into bed and let June try again without me.

Oh, and as of today? I still have not figured out why some people had zero trouble and others still cannot sign up. So there’s that.

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Do you ever have days like that?

When you worked hard, thought you covered everything, and the wheels still came off anyway? That particular mix of embarrassment and exhaustion and genuine bewilderment, all showing up before your second cup of coffee?

Here’s what I kept coming back to, though. Not right away. Once the scrambling slowed down a little, I looked at my husband, who had been so encouraging through the whole thing, bless him, and I said, “Hmmm. I think I know what this week’s Season & Savor needs to be about.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Humility,” I said.

He laughed. I laughed. And then I got quiet enough to actually hear it.

I don’t think God wastes these moments.

“Before a downfall the heart is haughty, but humility comes before honor.”
Proverbs 18:12 (NIV)

Not that I was strutting around full of pride before I hit send. But there is something in that verse that lands differently when you’ve just spent two days apologizing to your email list. The confident, well-prepared version of me assumed she had it handled. And she did not.

And that is, I think, actually the point.

Not to humiliate us. Not to punish us. But to remind us, sometimes gently, sometimes with a little more force, that we are not as in control as we like to think. That the most checked checklist in the history of email newsletters can still go sideways. And that our humanness, the full, glorious, forgetful, “I cannot believe I missed that” kind, is not a flaw in the design. It is part of the design.

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”
Proverbs 3:5-6 (NIV)

I wrote about this verse a while back, the one I have carried since I was sixteen. Lean not on your own understanding. I thought I understood it then. This week I felt it, which is a different thing entirely.

Because I had leaned hard on my own understanding. I checked, I tested, I was sure. And I still missed the button.

That is not failure. That is just being human. The question is what we do with it.

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“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”
James 4:10 (NIV)

What strikes me about that verse is the order of it. We humble ourselves first. Or on weeks like this one, He helps us along with that part. And then He lifts us up. Not before. Not instead of. After.

There is something in that worth sitting with for a minute.

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Here is the part I did not expect. The subscribers who emailed to say things weren’t working? Most of them were so gracious. A few were understandably frustrated, and honestly, fair enough. But the kindness that came back when I was clearly flustered, that felt like the friendship we’ve been talking about all month around here. People extending grace to someone who was doing her very best and still making a mess of it.

That kind of grace doesn’t come from nowhere. It moves through people, but it starts somewhere much higher up.

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Closing thought: Humility is not a personality trait for the naturally soft-spoken. It is an invitation, for every single one of us, to loosen our grip on the wheel a little. To admit we don’t have all the answers, can’t foresee every glitch, and were never meant to carry it alone. If this week handed you a helping of humble pie you didn’t order, good company is plentiful. He is not done with you. And friend, neither are you.

“He must become greater; I must become less.” John 3:30 (NIV)

~ With grace at the table, and beyond

P.S. If you’re curious about the membership that started all this chaos, you can find it here. Apparently, it does work for some people!

I read and respond to every email and comment, and I’m so thankful for each of you who comes back week after week. It means more than you know when you make my recipes and share your thoughts 💚