Summary: Humility is the root to spiritual growth.
Humility is a hard topics. It is widely misunderstood. It is easy to have a false view of humility. And how you do accurately write about humility as a particular person? One option is to write an anonymous book about it. But that isn’t really an option now that it has been done.
I have been listening to the Persuasion Podcast with Hannah Anderson and Erin Straza (Christ and Pop Culture podcast network) pretty regularly for about a year or so. One of the reasons that I like it, is that they are unabashedly podcasting as women. They are not limiting themselves to only “˜women’s topics’, although they do talk about things that are more female oriented at times. But listening to Persuasion, as well as Pass the Mic (African American males) and Truth’s Table (African American Females) all allow me to listen into different groups that are not directly speaking to me. They are speaking as themselves and they invite people that are not like them to listen.
Listening to the audiobook of Humble Roots reminded me of the importance of listening to different voices. Hannah Anderson’s take on humility is naturally impacted by being a woman and a mother and a pastor’s wife and all of the other things that are in her background. When I think about humility there are parts of it that are just different from what Hannah Anderson has written about. And that is part of the importance of humility. Humility as a spiritual matter, reminds us that we are created creatures and not ourselves God. We have perspectives that are limited because we as creatures are limited. That doesn’t mean that we can’t understand the larger issues around concepts like humility, but it means that no matter how hard we try, we can never capture the entirety of a concept.
Hannah Anderson’s approach to humility in Humble Roots is as a root to spiritual growth. There are lots of illustrations from gardening and growth and her life. As someone that doesn’t particularly like gardening and plants, although I am married to someone that loves them, a lot of the illustrations were not particularly evocative. But the content was good. I don’t have to have a book written to me in particular to get something important out of it.
I picked up the audiobook of Humble Roots because it was on sale at christianaudio.com. But I wasn’t really a fan of the audiobook. The reader was fine, but it wasn’t Hannah. And you can tell it wasn’t Hannah because there were mispronounced words and some of the narration was just slightly off of the point. But the book overall was well worth picking up and was a good introduction to the importance of humility as a spiritual issue, especially if you have not spent a lot of time thinking about humility as a Christian virtue.
Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes the Soul by Hannah Anderson Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook, christianaudio.com MP3 Audiobook