Category: dignity

God made each child with certain talents and abilities. We naturally hunger for those things God made us able to do best. We discover those talents and abilities by sniffing them down through the nose of our desire for them. It is a thrilling mystery every time, for every person, for all of everyone’s life.

As children it’s easier to see, but it repeats throughout life: We misbehave when we have lost the scent trail in pursuit of our inborn talents.

A child who was born to be an entertainer will seek attention in all the wrong ways—especially if his quiet, orderly family denies him positive, proper, and constructive attention. Of course, the child also may lack practice with peers, but that’s a separate, related discussion. Then, there is proper discipline to explain the boundaries of respect and accepting the things that we cannot change.

People who grow up to be disrespectful probably were not disciplined when they were children to accept whatever things they cannot change.

When we hunger for love and healthy attention, our need is love and healthy attention, not discipline and correction. But, when we just don’t want to accept things that we cannot change, that’s when we need a swift, immediate, firm, well-explained, hand-on-skin, redness gone in thirty minutes, and, in all other ways, proper spanking—so that chasing the wind loses its pleasure. Neglected grownups don’t know whether children need love or discipline nor do they know the difference between discipline and beating.

Accepting what we can’t change is hard. Sometimes the entertaining child needs to practice being quiet in the presence of others—sometimes, not every minute spent at home. Those moments are difficult for everyone, especially the child. As much as the spanking hurts, it’s harder to let go of what earned us the spanking in the first place.

It’s hard to accept that we can’t change things we don’t like. Life isn’t fair. That’s one of the things we can’t change, so we must accept that unfairness will exist somewhere within our universe.

We get to be that child at times. God is right to spank us because He always holds us while we cry.

Leaders must make tough decisions, which means leaders must be tough.

If there is a department in an organization or a child in the family who makes trouble for others—whether through passive-aggression, overt bullying, absenteeism, poor quality work, or otherwise—the leader with the power to intervene must intervene. If the leader does not intervene, then the troublemaker will make more and more trouble, making the leader an indirect—but nonetheless real—endorse of the trouble maker.

Having the “power” to intervene and stop a troublemaker does not mean that a leader has the emotional trust of the organization or a 50%+ popularity rating—it only means having the legal right to raise the issue and address the matter. If a peer has the right to raise his hand at a meeting, that peer could initiate discussion to stop the troublemaker.

Of course, a “troublemaker” must be defined as someone who actually makes trouble, not someone who irritates lazy and incompetent teammates while doing good work. Many talented people are mislabeled as troublemakers when they are the only competent people on a team. “Not playing well with others” is the lowest priority in labeling a troublemaker.

…And a good leader must know this.

By being strong, everyone will interact with a strong person when they interact with the leader. This will make everyone else’s skin a little thicker, their spines stronger, and the talented person who smells funny and talks out of turn won’t be so irritating. It’s the leader’s responsibility to set that tone.

A strong leader will talk frankly and harshly at times, get irritated into ranting and raising his tone of voice. Whether a man or woman, loud or soft -spoken, each leader has his own style of “strength” and must follow that style, but still be strong. A leader who is weak and calls it “style” is not only weak, but an excuse-maker.

Sometimes people need to be fired or downsized. Children need proper, calculated spankings to stop fights among siblings. Peers need to be told truth from others.

The tough leader will be feared at times, but will thus be trusted as a safe protector during the toughest of times.

At times, you will need to lay down the law. It’s never fun, especially when the law has been ignored. It makes people feel constricted and oppressed, no matter how valuable the law may be to people who obey it. Painting lines where we once roamed freely isn’t fun.

Some laws, however, should not be implemented. No man-made law anticipates every scenario, this is one reason for courts. The purpose which a law was written to achieve is the common question asked by every judge and debated by every lawyer. Once enforcement of a law serves against the initial purpose of the law, even a hard line judge will want to throw out the court case.

This is much more normal in legal courts than among friends, family, and corporate hierarchies.

Companies will often enforce their own rules long after they have out-served their purposes. Unbending parents will refuse to give circumstantial flexibility to their own rules, even under comparable circumstances that highway patrol would let someone off on a moving violation. Don’t be so rigid in enforcing rules that you rule yourself a fool.

Sometimes, the hard line law to lay down relates to basic respect to humanity. Those are the rules you should lay down everywhere you go. If a shop keeper insists that an old lady stand in the rain rather than in his store, step in and tell him that the lady will stand out of the rain and he will have to figure out a way to deal with it. If he is “only” a clerk fearing the wrath of his boss, tell him that his boss should fear your wrath if he doesn’t act with humane decency.

Lay down the law, mainly the humane.

Sometimes you must firmly stand for your own rights, even if you’re the old lady needing a dry place to stand. It could be password-only access or policies about giving information over the phone. Beneficial laws need enforcement for everyone’s sake.

You may need to enforce a “shoes off” policy, even in someone else’s house. We step on all kinds of filth and disease. As inconvenient as cleanliness is, somewhere shoes must be taken off.

God’s Word is a book, not a cudgel. It’s guiding principles and lines on the highways of life are not a license to boss others. God’s Word’s rules are for your own self-enforcement.

God’s Word doesn’t have all that many rules, it mostly teaches about understanding how God thinks and works. The more we understand God and His ways, the more we will understand whatever happens in our lives—both why God does what He does and what we can do as His Image by responding in this life. The best way to know what God would do as a human on Earth is to study the life of Jesus. As you slowly transform to understand how God operates, hold yourself to the “God standard” of how to think and operate.

There are rules in God’s Word, of course, but they too must be studied and contemplated in order to be understood. A classroom can familiarize one with the words and their locations in God’s Word, but actually understanding God’s Word is a personal, life journey. This takes time, both regular dripping and intense downpours.

God’s Word’s rules are paradoxically simple; remember this every day. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” is an overly simple concept to grasp, but implementing it can never be perfected, even in a thousand lifetimes. You are certainly going to fail and transgress.

Keeping God’s rules does not mean “never breaking” them; it means that we keep pressing toward the destination. God’s Word is an ethics compass, a moral orientation. You know in what direction you must go; go there! When you stumble on the jagged terrain, get up and keep going. Don’t lie down for dead under the misconception that Heaven only accepts those who never fall down.

Heaven accepts everyone who can stand it. Heaven is awesome, partly because everyone loves everyone else as themselves, also because everyone there knows that God loves them. That’s a hard law to lay down. But, if you lay down Heaven’s law in your own life every day—love others equally, worship God only, and keep going—you’ll prepare yourself to enter Heaven, be transformed there, and then usher Heaven throughout the universe.