“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (Matthew 23:12)

Humility is a central virtue in biblical teaching, often associated with wisdom and righteousness. In the cultural setting of Jesus’ time, humility was not always valued. Instead, honor and status were highly sought after. Jesus redefined the importance of humility as Servanthood (Matthew 20:26-28). In August of 2024, after a routine colonoscopy, my wife and I learned that she had a mass in her colon that was likely not benign. There is no more powerful way to be humbled than to be given news like this. It is the most incredibly strong reminder of the fact that we are not superior, we are not better, we are not different.

The title of this blog, Humilitive, came about in a conversation I had with my Stephen Minister. (stephenministries.org) I’m an elementary school teacher and within the course of one of our conversations, I happened to mention something using the word Cumulative, a term that’s often used in education when we look at the scope of an entire school year, a unit of lessons, and sometimes the name of the physical file that holds all of a student’s academic and demographic information. Since our meeting was online and sometimes that impacts what people can hear, he interrupted me and said “Wait a minute. What did you just say? Humilitive?” I was confused about his clarification so I repeated myself. He paused and smiled and then said “I have to tell you that for a minute, I thought you had coined a new term relating to how we should work on being humble. I said if this guy is coming up with this, why am I even here?” We shared an incredibly strong laugh together, but as we began to peel the onion a bit more, we realized with great clarity that Humilitive is the perfect description for the way in which we should strive to be each day with one another and as we learn to serve God whereby we slowly build up the amount of humility, the amount of time we spend serving others in order to serve our God. I decided this was the perfect title for this blog because I feel it is part of why I began a year-long journey beside my wife who was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. One of the reasons for entering the darkness we did was so that we would be made aware of the light. In my own case, I came to realize with the help of my Stephen Minister that my God-given talents were to be put to use to share my faith and to minister to others who may be on a similar journey as mine. My journey was one where I felt, heard, and perceived the very real presence of God in a way that I never had before, in a way I had prayed for but had never imagined would be realized in this way. Along the journey, my eyes were opened to the understanding of how God uses the love and faith of everyone you know to help guide you on a path. The path is dark, but each one of the people that were sent by Him carried light so that I not only never felt alone, I was able to see my way through. Not only did He send people I knew but people I didn’t know. He even sent a Saint to me in a most unusual way. Part of the reason I am putting this online is in no small part due to the intercession of Blessed Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Italian boy who taught himself to code and then developed a website to catalog the miracles of the Eucharist. How he interceded continues to be a mystery to me and one I will provide more detail about in a post, but suffice to say I had no idea who the young man was before this and despite multiple attempts at ignoring posts online that detailed his story, I finally clicked on one and was filled with chills at the fact that he had appeared there after a conversation I had had about documenting some of my journey online.

My desire to share this path is, in part, to provide hope to anyone who is on a similar path as my wife and also for anyone who is a caregiver for someone who has been diagnosed with colon cancer. It is my prayer that your path is lit like mine by those around you that you know and those that you don’t know yet.

God Bless,
Joseph