Category: dignity

The very act of making any kind of threat means the threat-maker has become unhinged. Listen, understand, make your case, then accept and confirm their response. Let your actions in the days and years to follow be your rebuttal. Develop a reputation for meaning what you say the first time. Make sure people know, by your actions, that you respond without second warning—your initial conversation was the first and only warning.

If you catch a murder on tape, don’t walk up to the killer and threaten to go to the authorities if he doesn’t turn himself in. He already knows he did what is wrong. Lay low, keep quiet, survive, and report the crime as soon as you can. If a police officer is wrong in his work on the street and you can prove it, never tell him. Suggest that he do what is right once at most. After that, be diplomatic, be respectful, say, “Yes sir,” as often as you can, then go home and make sure he never works in law enforcement again.

This does not work the same relationships. A police officer has authority and force, which he can use. Never interfere with a police officer’s work on the scene, the same goes for any authority or criminal. Catching criminals safely and surely requires due process. If a revolution is in order, that must involve action on a larger, legal, respectful scale. Don’t just be a bumbling rebel. Like “tank man” who stopped the parade of tanks in China, wave around your grocery bag, then be on your way, he didn’t demand that anyone abdicate.

The Bible is clear about conflict in relationships: first one-on-one, then four at most, then the assembled authority. In a command structure, there are supervisors who must carefully review and verify at every step along the way. But, in that first one-on-one confrontation, don’t threaten to use that system; just use it. Kindly explain the right thing, the right reasons, and the right action. If the person doesn’t listen, go home and move to step two. When you must escalate, neither threaten nor warn. After all, a warning is a threat to the person being warned.

If you keep your peace, you give up all claim to complain about being ignored. If you don’t make a fair case in your favor, you have no right to appeal. If someone doesn’t agree with you, but you don’t let them know, you are a coward to make known your final decision after the fact.

Learn to identify people with these “quietly hot tempers”, who don’t speak their minds, but then want to flee across the ocean to give their rebuttal where no one can dissent or object. These are revenge-driven weaklings. Do not be one and do not work with them. Their lives will be petty and small as will be the things they complain about.

Only hardship can teach them; do not try to counsel them. Let them be alone and constantly extend the one thing they lack: ongoing relationship. Send them a Christmas card every year. Drop off a box of blueberries when blueberries are in season. Extend benign, reasonable, harmless, and normal acts of an average friend and neighbor. Make sure such people know they are not alone. Don’t give up on them the way they pretend to give up on the rest of the world. And, don’t ever even once invite their wrath of one-way silence by trying to solve a disagreement in a useful manner. Just be a non-threatening friend from the closest distance they accept.

But, you yourself, never become that person. Speak your mind—kindly and diplomatically of course. Act with dignity in every way that you can. But, give people a chance to reason with you. Allow everyone the opportunity to persuade you. You don’t know everything. Even if the other guy is wrong, allowing him to speak persuasively—and engaging him in discussion while he does—will you help to strengthen your own opinion if nothing else.

Take the high road where disagreements are concerned. Be strong enough to welcome dissent. Let people know where they stand with you, simply for their information and without being hostile. Let others tell you where you stand without feeling resented. Thick-skinned, strong-standing people, after all, are naturally more effective and have few worthy adversaries to contend with.

Mom often said, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you think you know that ain’t so.” Life will sneak up on you less if you live by this rule: Two points make a line; three points make a truth.

Accidents happen closest to home for a reason: We assume more things the closer we get to home. Never back up without looking—in your own driveway especially. This is also for a reason: Babies might crawl in your driveway without sending prior notice, especially our own.

Things sprout legs, move, then drop their legs before you can notice. Earthquakes and lightning strike unannounced. The IRS might seize your rubber ducky, so don’t take a bath before at least verifying it’s there. You know a door is closed not when you hear the latch click, but when you try to open it. Tap your pocket keys before closing locked doors. Never turn right without looking left. And, never trust a turn signal until the driver is committed to the turn. Whenever my father saw a dent on the driver’s side door he’d say, “See that, son. That’s what you call a ‘clue’.”

Don’t be like the son who wouldn’t talk to his father the rest of his life after receiving a Bible instead of his dream car on his 18th birthday—only to open the Bible 30 years later after his father died to find a check inside for the price of the car when he was 18. His mistake was not that he held a lifelong grudge without opening the Bible first, but that he should have checked each page thrice.

Ask your friend before begrudging or forgiving; maybe you should be thankful. It happens with possessions, accounting, relationships, and even God. Everything moves except God, yet we still don’t understand Him. It’s not God we need to verify the truth about, but our ever-shifting misunderstanding of Him. There is no reason in the universe, plasmaverse, underverse, or oververse that every fact shouldn’t be checked three times. However offendable, expectable, dependable, predictable, or routine your routine is, triple check. Remember that “assume” is a compound word and that double checking just isn’t good enough.

Pay for things. Make others pay you for things. Work for money. Pay what work is worth. We only value something as much as we pay for it. Don’t train people that you or they are worthless. Handouts make people dependent and eventually they die from weakness. Help, but helping a chicken hatch will kill it.

Sometimes we don’t have money, but we can always pay with effort. So, work for things, whether you are rich or poor. In His wisdom, God hardcoded this into our programming: If we don’t work a thousand hours for only one hour of pay, we just don’t understand money. Working for money is the only way to “pay” for money, “earning” it.

The more you work for money, the more you will understand it. You don’t want to stay there, working hard for very little. But, many people remain there because they never learn about money, so God keeps them there to keep teaching them. If God meets your needs as you work too hard for too little, He is making you rich in wisdom, which is more valuable than money.

Don’t get into judging yourself or others about why who has how much. Try to earn and understand as much as you can, then God will give you the perfect suit for your needs. Even if God makes you dirt rich, that also is intended to teach you some kind of valuable lesson, such as the dangers of laziness and monetizing inflated confidence.

Whether you’re rich in wisdom or rich in gold, God wants you to use your riches to help others. That doesn’t mean becoming the all-saving charity who solves problems by dolling out what on one appreciates. Only Jesus can save the whole world. Whether you help someone by giving them money or wisdom, don’t make it cheap; make them appreciate it.

Don’t just tell people all the wisdom you know; give them some pointers—something to ponder—and then let them work for it by having to ponder it. That will keep your friendly distance, staying out of their personal space. People will respect your wisdom if you make them earn your respect for theirs.

Life’s resistance points are like choppy waves. They can knock you off your personal watercraft or capsize your boat, but with time you can learn to read them, even read their unpredictability.

That person taking extra time in front of you at the bank, the guy in the lobby who keeps making noise while you need to focus on work, the bus driver who won’t let you put your feet in the isle to stretch after five hours—think of it all as chop.

The more you ride in chop, the better your skills. As a writer, I get a better idea what to write when I have some nuisance; it’s just part of a good writing environment. Sometimes I need quiet and peace, other times I need noise. My coding projects finish more quickly when I’m either under pressure or finishing them as a way of procrastinating from doing something else.

If you are trying to get anything done with your life, you need the frustration of chop to train you how the oceans flow to hone your skills. It always comes when you least want it and it leaves you tired, wet, cold, and perhaps minus a few articles of clothing. So, it’s always good to just button down the hatch and keep a victory cigar handy in case chop bestows upon you a lucky learning day at sea.

Don’t fall into the trap of saying things that begin with, “But, good service is…” That’s little more than an excuse to act like an incompetent royal. Demanding good service and providing good service are two different oceans. If you learn to expect smooth sailing—and you file a customer service complaint against an ocean for being choppy—you’ll end up at the bottom. Don’t complain, don’t give the bad review, don’t even go there.

There is a time for customer suggestions and negative consumer reviews, but never, never, never think that they will air lift you out of good, fun chop. When a wave comes for you, take it head on; never turn to the side. You’ll especially encounter chop on the “higher life” voyage of delivering excellent customer service to someone else.

Life can’t be hoarded, goodness must be shared. Spread your knowledge liberally with all who ask.

Evil tries to contain knowledge for power and so-called “ascension” into levels of life that God has made freely available to everyone. This is achieved by anyone merely through mediating on God’s Word’s words, understanding God as He describes Himself in God’s Word through the personalities of the writers, praying for requests and fellowship with God, and obeying God’s Word’s simple, useful commands for delayed gratification and self-control. Anyone can do this, so spread your knowledge freely.

The same applies to administration and leadership. Don’t hoard people, not even your family. Hold everything with an open hand. Professors lose free research labor when they allow a student to graduate with a PhD. Religious groups are notorious for leaders being territorial with their people, as are MLMs by definition of the LOS.

Whether hoarding knowledge or people, failure to share knowledge is a form of control. God is Light and He shines everywhere; it is up to each if us to respond to His light. But, hoarded light will kill you. If you want more of God’s light, you must pass on whatever light you have, otherwise God will put you in the shade, safe from His light, so you won’t get burned by hoarding. This is why so-called “leaders” and “mentors” who hoard knowledge and people hit a glass ceiling on what they can teach and achieve: They don’t pass on everything they know to all who seek. As with knowledge and people, share your money.

Give healthy tips—not too much, but better to be generous than stingy. Pay subscriptions for “premium” features, don’t only use a service that comes free of charge. You can’t pay for every single service you ever use, but if you pay for premium versions of the services you enjoy most, you will sow good chivalry that will come back around. When you pay for something, you respect it more.

Likewise, charge others for work, but share freely what you can give without cost. Pass on the light you have, encourage, drip teachings, then the Light will shine on you all the more.