Bus Stop Pride

I can complain about it being early, or enjoy the sunrise :)

So, although I live in Springfield, my job is a whole two towns away. This wouldn't be that far if I could just drive there. Unfortunately I can't. I don't have a car. Although I would be able to afford the initial down payment, the insurance for a vehicle would put me under. I would go broke, and in a very expensive part of the country, that really isn't an option. So, what do I do? I take the bus every morning and every afternoon to get to and from work. Unfortunately there is no bus that goes straight from my house to my job. There is, however, a bus that goes from around the corner to the Pentagon. And then from the Pentagon there is a bus that will take me to the correct neighborhood. Unfortunately this requires some back tracking, but I suppose I can't be too picky with the public transit system.

My first bus leaves at 6:20 in the morning, and normally I am pretty good about making that bus. Granted, I wake up incredibly early every morning to make this connection, but I am never worried about making it. (Actually, I don't know what I would do if I missed that one. The next bus that leaves from that stop is at 6:45, meaning I would be almost an hour late for work). Catching this bus is entirely within my control. If I am late, then the bus will leave without me. But it is within my power to not be late. The connecting bus at the Pentagon leaves only a few short minutes after my first bus normally arrives. Whether I catch this one or not depends on the bus I have just taken. Was it on time? Did we make any extra stops? Was traffic bad? Were there more people to drop off before the Pentagon station?

So, what can I do? I can either run and try to catch the early bus, or I can watch it drive away and wait for the next bus that comes in twenty minutes. Normally the first bus arrives with just enough time for me to speed walk from one end of the station to the other, and I am just able to catch the bus before it pulls out. The reason that it matters if I take the early bus or not, is that my job technically starts at 7:00. The second bus doesn't leave the station until 7:02, so I will be late to work. Even though that still gives the woman I nanny for enough time to get to work, the morning is so much more rushed when I don't get there until 7:20.

Sometimes I see the bus leave right as my bus pulls in. These are the less stressful mornings in one sense (I don't have to run to catch the bus), but is much more stressful in others, (I get anxious when I am going to be late. Even if I am not early it stresses me out immeasurably). So I normally try to catch the first bus, but most often I need to wait for the later one.

Yesterday morning, as I sat at the bus stop, waiting for the later bus to arrive, a lady walked up to the seating area to wait for the bus that comes in between the two buses that I can take. She looked around for a moment and realized that she would have to stand because there were no more dry seats available. (Since Tropical Storm Karen came through, it's been pretty wet here). So, this older woman stood right next to me, and began waiting for the bus.

Now, I tried to ignore her as best I could, because what was I supposed to do? There were a few younger men sitting in the seats next to me, shouldn't they get up and offer her their seats? None of them moved. So, that left it up to me.

"Would you like to sit down? I'll move if you like."

The woman looked at me for a moment in complete shock. After a few seconds she told me that she would be alright, but thank you for offering. She told me that there aren't very many people like me around any more.

The conversation continued, and then ended a few moments later when she had to catch her bus. It was a lovely conversation about allergies and moving. She asked me why I moved to Virginia, and I told her that I just woke up one day and knew that the Lord was calling me there. This seemed to cheer her up. As a pastor at her own church, she had seen how many young people were not finding Jesus anymore. It was an enlightening and positive conversation to have early in the morning, and made me glad that I had run in to her. But that sentence about there not being many people who would offer a seat to someone else struck me, almost more so than her openness to the Lord, and I thought about it all day.

There aren't many people like ME around anymore? At first I felt pride at what I had done, and even though she had refused the seat, I felt that I had done her a great service. I felt myself to be better than the people around me, the ones who had neglected to offer her their own seats. I began thinking that I was such a great person that I had thought to offer her this common courtesy. I began thinking myself rather grand.

Before this woman had come up to me and needed a place to sit, I had been reading C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity", which I had been avidly devouring all morning. Ironically, I had just started reading the section labeled "Pride". When I was done congratulating myself on how selfless I had been, I began reading again.

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, 'I have pleased him; all is well,' to thinking, 'What a fine person I must be to have done it.' The more you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming".

The Lord is not one to be subtle, is He?

I immediately saw that I had just committed the very thing that Lewis writes about. I had gone from feeling well about pleasing someone else, to stroking my ego in less than two minutes. I had jumped from pleasure in the act, to pleasure in myself almost instantaneously. The scary part is, I hadn't even noticed.

Today, pride is a difficult topic to discuss. In elementary school I was taught that to take pride in one's actions was to be prideful. To be admiring of someone else's gifts might inspire pride in them and self-degradation in yourself. To have a gift was to smother it, for fear that one would catch you in the act of pride. I feared being prideful more often than anything else, but I didn't truly know what pride is.

On the other end of the spectrum, I later learned from observing others, that building oneself up was far superior to knocking others down. So, taking pride in things you did was far better than feeling better than another person for things you did better than they did. In my mind, pride in myself for doing something good is equivocal to the pride that comes from doing a good work for the sake of the action.

I had never realized that this was incorrect.

The popular saying of today's generation is "Chivalry is dead"; but that is not strictly true. We were just never taught what chivalry was, and in our search to defy these allegations of rude behavior, we attempt to become chivalrous and kind out of spite and in defiance of the social norm. We become more prideful than we ever intended in our seeking to be selfless. Our actions reflect our goals, but not our motives. Even though the action is good, the incentive is skewed.

Is me offering a seat to an older woman still good, even though I kindled my own pride while doing so? Is that really any better than not offering her a seat at all?