be HUMBLE

What does it mean to be humble?

Why We Do It / Be Humble

Our First Core Value

We started Moment Architects because we recognized two things: first, architecture is a service industry; and second, most architects treat their clients as if the client is the one doing the serving. 

This is a problem in our industry, and it is for this reason that our first core value is “be humble”.

What does it mean to be humble? 

To understand what something means it is often helpful to first understand what it does not mean.  Being humble is not the same as belittling oneself.  Humility is not found in thinking yourself inadequate, worthless, or insignificant. 

C.S. Lewis says that “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.” 

Humility is Truth

Saint Thomas Aquinas said, “Humility is Truth.”  It is living out the deepest truth of things.  It is easy to misunderstand humility as an unwillingness to acknowledge our own unique talents.  As if a man who excels at tennis can only be humble if he never admits how good he is at tennis.  In the light of the statement by St. Thomas, though, this is not humility at all.  If a man is truly good at tennis, it would be truthful to admit he is good.  Not to boast about it, but to admit it. 

True humility, though, goes to the deepest truth.  The deepest truth is that the man is good at tennis because God gave him a unique gift, or combination of gifts, that allowed him to excel.  Therefore, the humblest thing the man could say about his talent is to admit how good he is, and give the praise to God for his unique ability.

Humility is a virtue

Humility is a virtue, and every virtue has an opposite vice. The vice opposite the virtue of humility is Pride.  We can understand a little more about humility, then, by learning more about pride. 

What is pride?

Pride is the sin of idolizing oneself; of behaving and believing that I am above reproach, that no one, including God, has any business telling me what to do.  Pride, in its emptiest form, is not necessarily a denial of God, but a denial of God’s authority.  A denial of God’s right to tell us what we should and should not do.

Humility, being the opposite of pride, can therefore also be described as an attitude of openness to being corrected.  Humility is the willingness to admit that I don’t know everything, and even those things I think I know, I could be wrong about. 

Less of Me…

Further than that, though, to embody a spirit of humility is to treat every person we encounter as if we are his or her servants.  Going back to the quote from C.S. Lewis, if humility is thinking of yourself less, we can deduce that if we’re thinking of ourselves less, we are then thinking of others more.  The more we think of others, the easier it is to anticipate their needs, and to provide what they need before they even ask for it.  This is the level of humble service we should strive for, to anticipate the needs of others. 

What does humility look like in our workplace? 

For us, being humble in the workplace starts with recognizing that our unique talents are gifts from God, given to be used for the good of others.  Therefore, when we do anything for work, we should ask ourselves, “Who am I serving, myself, or my client?” 

The homes we design will one day return to the dust from which they came, because like it or not, the physical products of our work, what is seen, is transitory, and no amount of kick-out flashing or continuous insulation will ever change that.  But the choices we make, the way we love and serve, what is unseen, will have eternal significance.

Saint Paul said, “Whatever you do, do from the heart, as for the Lord and not for others” Colossians 3:23, and I believe this to mean that when we serve others, we are in fact serving our Lord.

Put Our Service to the test

So we invite our clients to put our service to the test, and at the end of the age, when the newest design trends are out of fashion, and the latest advancements in building science are proven to cause more problems than they solve, I hope the final remnant of our work will be the sound of the words we all long to hear, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” Matthew 25:21

be EAGER

What does it mean to be eager?

Why We Do It / Be Eager

first things First

The second core value, Be Eager, must come after the first. We must be humble before we are eager.  We must recognize our strengths before we can pursue them.

what does it mean to be eager?

So, what does it mean to be “eager”, and why is it one of our core values? A few synonyms for the word eager include Enthusiastic, Ready, Willing, and Fervent.

Going back to our first core value, be Humble, we deduced that being humble means recognizing the things we’re good at and recognizing that God has given us the ability to be good at them for a reason.  But the gifts God gives us are raw, and they’re optional.  Each one of us is probably endowed with unique talents we haven’t even discovered yet, and those we have discovered probably haven’t been developed to their full potential yet.

This is where the value of being Eager comes in.  Once we’ve discovered our unique gifts, we must cultivate a spirit of eagerness to develop, train, practice, and pursue those gifts with all that we have.  We should be eager to become the best we can be.  Not for the sake of personal fame, fortune, or vainglory, but for the simple fact that putting in the effort to improve ourselves is the best way to say ‘thank you’ to God for the gifts he’s given us.

I WAS HUNGRY

Starting with servant’s spirit, we should be anticipating the needs of others. But is it enough to anticipate their needs? Should it stop there? Does it help if I know what you need, but I don’t do anything about it?

Jesus said, “I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison, and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:35-36) Notice what Jesus did not say. He did not say, “I was hungry, and you knew about it.” Recognizing a need is only the first 1%, doing something about it is the other 99.  Just as “faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” (James 2: 17), so too is a humble recognition of my strengths and weaknesses, without an eager desire to do anything with them, is useless.

the eager architect

At Moment Architects, we are good at what we do.  But being good is not enough.  We refuse to settle, and we refuse to believe we will ever be as good as we can be.  A common theme in our office is that there’s always room for improvement, and a common sentiment is that we’re eager to improve.  We view a weakness as an opportunity, an obstacle as an invitation, and an inconvenience as an adventure.

be INSPIRED

What does it mean to be inspired?

Why We Do It / Be Inspired

We are inspired

Our third Core Value, Be Inspired, is not something we do, it is something that is done to us; but only if we are prepared to receive it.  Our first two Core Values, Be Humble, and Be Eager, are what prepare us to receive the third. Being both humble and eager is the gift of a tenacious desire to improve in the areas we humbly recognize can be improved.

Inspiration comes from without

The word “inspired” is most often used in the sense of being motivated, encouraged, or moved by something outside of ourselves.  However, the word’s origins give us a slightly different perspective.  The word can be traced back to the Latin “inspirare”, which means “to breathe or blow into”.  In the biblical sense, we know that when God created Adam in the Garden of Eden, He “formed man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)  The word for “breath” in Latin is spiritus, which is where we get the word “spirit” from, and so we see in Genesis that God gave Adam life by inspiring him with the Holy Spirit, the Breath of God, and in that act of receiving the Holy Spirit Adam went from being dust to being an eternal creature made in the image and likeness of God.  But I digress.

Being mindful of our sources of inspiration

As architects, our inspiration can come from many sources.  We may be inspired by a space we visit, a trip we take, a piece of art, a piece of cake, or a song by the alternative rock band Cake.  Listen to “The Distance” by Cake and tell me you’re not inspired.

Wherever our inspiration comes from, it is clear that it comes from somewhere outside of ourselves.  It is important, then, to be aware of our sources of inspiration, because inspiration can be both positive and negative.

The reciprocity of our core values

We started with a humble recognition of our unique strengths, followed by an eager pursuit of those strengths as a way of thanking God for giving them to us.  But one of the great things about God is that He doesn’t need anything from us, so everything we give to Him, including our eager spirit, He turns around and gives back to us in the form of inspiration.  Therefore, our core values are reciprocal in nature, we give back to God that which He has given to us, and He, in turn, gives it back in a way that moves us to accomplish more than we could ever have accomplished on our own.