It was Lord’s Day morning, and I was one divinely happy four-year-old girl. I was wearing a pretty blue dress, but my delight was in the brand new Buster Brown patent leather shoes that twinkled on my small feet. I couldn’t wait to get to church to show them off.

I loved the way the shoes clip-clop-clacked on the wooden stairs to my parents’ basement bedroom. These stairs were tricky. They were made of planks with gaps between each step. I held onto the gray painted railing as I clanked down them.

All of a sudden, those shiny, slippery shoes slid out from under me and I fell between the steps into a jumble of dusty boxes and an old bicycle. Mom came running from her room and extracted me. I had managed to whack my lip on the way down, and it was swelling fast.

I was horrified! How could I be a grown-up, beautiful lady with a fat lip?

“Mommy,” I said, through sniffles and the puffy lip, “I don’t want to go to church!”

“Why not, honey?”

“Everyone will laugh at me! They’ll stare at me.”

“Of course they won’t, Avery.”

I was not convinced. My lip felt like a jumbo marshmallow. How could it be overlooked? I had wanted people to look at me and notice me for my new shoes, not for a pudgy lower lip.

Staying home wasn’t an option. When we walked into the North Hills RP Church, I held the ice cube Mom had given me, wrapped in a navy blue washcloth, close to my lip to hide it from any gawkers. I was mortified, embarrassed, self-conscious. Down the long hallway to my Sabbath school class, Dr. Maribel McKelvy, our doctor, looked at the damage and reassured soothingly, “You’ve got yourself a good one! But it’s not too bad. It will heal soon.”

This was a comforting thought. Armed with this hope, I soon forgot my embarrassment and walked across the tan linoleum to my class in my treacherous but oh-so-nice shoes. No one laughed at me, and my lip did heal eventually.

Looking back, I learned a good lesson that day. We shouldn’t be so focused on how we look on the outside to other people. There’s nothing wrong with new shoes, of course, but my little problem came when I wanted so badly to be noticed because of them. The problem got worse when I was embarrassed to be seen with a swollen lip.

How easy it is to fall into this pattern, not only with our appearance, but also with our actions! On the outside, we might look like the perfect RP young people. We go to church twice on Sunday. We are involved in Bible studies and prayer meetings. We are preachers’ kids and elders’ kids and deacons’ kids. We know the right Sabbath school answers and can quote the Westminster Shorter Catechism like a seminary professor. These are wonderful things, but who are we doing them for? Are we focused on bringing glory to God or to ourselves? Ouch!

I struggle with this all the time. It’s so much easier to polish my outside, which my friends and family see, than it is to clean the inside, which my God sees. God does notice too! He is not pleased with a self-righteous or prideful attitude. Jesus says in Matthew 23:27-28:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

Those are strong words! They show how seriously God takes the condition of our hearts. Instead, we are instructed in Romans 12:3:

Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.

This is the kind of attitude God wants in us as RP youth. God wants to see humble servants working for Him in His church. Sounds hard, doesn’t it? Here’s where the Holy Spirit comes in, working in our hearts to make us humble like Jesus. It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn and re-learn!

Falling down the stairs on that Lord’s Day morning was just the beginning of God teaching me this lesson. It did, however, make the meaning of Proverbs 29:23 a little clearer: “A man’s pride brings him low, but a man of lowly spirit gains honor.”