Slow MoverSince I Have Been Raised with Christ, Why Do I Still Make Others Feel Small?
There is a peculiar grief in recognizing that one has been given a great gift and yet still lives so often beneath it. There is a sorrow that belongs especially to those who know the language of grace, who have sung resurrection hymns, who have confessed Christ, who have spoken of new life, and yet who still discover in themselves an ugly tendency to diminish others. Not always openly. Not always with shouting or cruelty. Sometimes it is done with a tone. A look. A correction too sharp to be loving. A joke that lands like a knife. A silence meant to chill. A habit of always needing to be the wiser one in the room. And afterward comes the question, heavy and humiliating: Since I have been raised with Christ, why do I still make others feel small?
The question matters because it is not merely psychological. It is theological. It is spiritual. It touches the nerve of discipleship itself. If resurrection is real, if new life is real, if the old self has died with Christ and the new self has been raised with him, then why does so much pettiness remain? Why does pride still rise so quickly? Why does the self still reach for superiority as if it were food?
Part of the answer is that resurrection is both gift and calling. Scripture speaks in a strange and beautiful double voice. On the one hand, the believer has already died and been raised with Christ. This is not an aspiration but a declaration. On the other hand, the believer is also commanded to put to death what belongs to the old way of life and to clothe oneself with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. In other words, what is true in Christ is still being worked out in us. The risen life has begun, but it has not yet fully overtaken every chamber of the soul. We are new, but not yet wholly healed. We belong to Christ, but many habits still belong to fear.
That may be the most painful truth of all: making others feel small often has less to do with strength than weakness. It can look like power, but it is usually a defense. We reduce others in order to protect some fragile place in ourselves. We feel uncertain, so we become cutting. We feel unnoticed, so we dominate. We feel ashamed, so we become severe. We fear our own inadequacy, so we magnify the inadequacy of someone else. The impulse to make another person shrink is often the frightened self’s attempt to avoid disappearing.
This is why belittling can wear so many respectable disguises. It can appear as discernment, when it is really contempt. It can appear as honesty, when it is really impatience. It can appear as theological precision, when it is really the pleasure of standing above another. It can appear as leadership, when it is really insecurity in clerical dress. It can appear as humor, when it is really aggression with a laugh track. One does not need to curse someone to make them feel small. One only needs to remind them, subtly and repeatedly, that their words matter less, their insight is thinner, their mistakes are more visible, their presence less weighty. There are many ways to wash one’s hands while still leaving another diminished.
For this reason the question is not simply, Why am I like this? It is also, What am I protecting? What wound, what vanity, what fear, what hunger in me reaches for elevation by lowering another person? The old self does not die gracefully. It flails. It bargains. It borrows the language of virtue. It even tries to make holiness itself into a platform. The ego can turn anything into a ladder, including religion.
And yet there is mercy in the asking of the question. The fact that one feels pierced by it may itself be evidence of grace. There was a time, perhaps, when making others feel small brought satisfaction, or at least went unnoticed. But to feel the sting of it, to be unable to rest in one’s own superiority, to hear in one’s own words an echo of something un-Christlike, is already a sign that the conscience has not been abandoned. The Spirit is often most present not when we feel triumphant, but when we are unable to escape the truth about ourselves.
The raised life in Christ does not make us impressive. It makes us honest. It frees us from the exhausting labor of having to appear larger than we are. The gospel does not inflate the self; it crucifies the need for inflation. To be raised with Christ is not to become grand over others, but to be joined to the one who took the form of a servant. The risen one still bears wounds. The exalted Christ is still the crucified Christ. Therefore any resurrection that makes us harsher, more self-certain, more dismissive, more addicted to being right at the expense of being loving, is not resurrection in the shape of Jesus. It is merely ego with religious lighting.
Perhaps that is why humility is so difficult. Humility is not humiliation, but it often feels like death because it requires surrendering the illusion that our value depends on being above someone else. Many of us have learned to live by comparison. We know how to feel secure only when we are more faithful, more intelligent, more discerning, more moral, more wounded, more enlightened, or more correct than another. Even our suffering can become a form of superiority. But Christ does not raise us in order to place us on a pedestal from which we can look down. Christ raises us into a life where we no longer need the pedestal.
To make others feel small is to forget the shape of grace. Grace does not approach us in order to embarrass us into transformation. Christ does not stand over the weak and smirk at their incompleteness. Christ stoops. Christ touches. Christ restores. Christ tells the truth, certainly, but never to annihilate the person standing before him. Even his rebukes open a door toward life. How often ours merely close it.
This is not to say that all correction is wrong or that all clarity is cruelty. Love does sometimes speak hard truths. Pastors, parents, teachers, friends, and prophets cannot avoid this. But there is a difference between helping another stand and needing them to kneel. There is a difference between truth spoken for healing and truth used as an instrument of self-exaltation. One can tell the truth in a way that enlarges the soul of the hearer, even in pain, and one can tell the truth in a way that shrinks them. Christ seems always to do the former. We too often do the latter.
So what is to be done? Not self-hatred. Self-hatred is only pride turned inward, the ego still fascinated with itself. Not despair. Despair is another refusal of grace. The better path is confession joined to watchfulness. One must begin to notice the moments when the spirit tightens, when irritation becomes an appetite, when another person’s weakness starts to feel useful, when one’s own cleverness becomes too pleasurable, when the urge rises to interrupt, correct, expose, or diminish. These are holy warning signs. They are invitations to stop before the damage is done, or to repent quickly when it has been.
And repentance in this matter may need to be very plain. It may mean apologizing without explanation. It may mean resisting the impulse to add one more clarifying comment that keeps oneself in control. It may mean listening longer than feels comfortable. It may mean asking whether someone felt dismissed, and then enduring the answer. It may mean learning silence not as withdrawal, but as restraint. It may mean praying before speaking in rooms where one is accustomed to ruling by tone. It may mean letting another person be bright without feeling dimmed by it.
Most of all, it means returning again and again to Christ, not merely as the one who raises, but as the one who lowers himself. The church rightly loves the language of resurrection, but resurrection can be sentimentalized unless it remains joined to crucifixion. One does not rise with Christ without also dying with him, and one of the things that must die is the craving to secure oneself by making others smaller. That craving is old self business. It belongs to the tomb, even if it keeps trying to crawl out.
The good news is not that those raised with Christ never again wound another person. The good news is that Christ does not abandon them when they discover they still can. He exposes, convicts, forgives, and continues the long work of conforming them to his likeness. He is patient with the slow unmaking of our pride. He is not surprised by our unfinishedness. He knows how much of us still needs to come alive.
So the question remains a worthy one: Since I have been raised with Christ, why do I still make others feel small? Perhaps because some part of me is still afraid to die. Perhaps because the old self is more deeply rooted than I imagined. Perhaps because I still confuse being Christlike with being impressive. Perhaps because resurrection has entered my life, but I am still learning how not to live by the old hierarchies of ego, power, and fear.
But the question need not end in condemnation. It can become prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, if I have been raised with you, then raise also my speech, my reactions, my habits of thought, my hidden motives, my need to tower, my secret pleasure in being above. Show me where I make others small so that I may finally become small enough to enter your kingdom rightly. Teach me the humility that does not need to humiliate. Teach me the strength that does not need to diminish. Teach me your risen life, which is never domination, but love.
And perhaps that is where the answer finally begins: not in pretending that resurrection has already finished its work in us, but in yielding ourselves again to the Christ who is still raising the dead.
Intentional Faith
Bryan King