Author: watchstandpray

232 – Leading as Sons Who Love Fathers

In Heaven, there will be no younger and older generations, only one people where all are brothers and sisters without aged bodies. When confronting the normal frustration with any older or younger generation, it can help to envision others at your own age and also to envision yourself at their age. But, there is much more that can also be done to strengthen intergenerational friendship.

At times, your elders will look to you for leadership—especially when they contend with you. When an older person fights with you as if they were your peer in age, they are unwittingly sending the message that they think they are immature and need leadership from you. Don’t object, give them that leadership. Instantly imagine yourself as the adult in the room and be patient, respectful, and instructive as you must be with anyone younger than yourself.

Even when not acting younger than their age, older generations always appreciate leadership from younger generations. Be worthy of this respect. Be kind and tender, don’t act like people can take your wrath merely because they have more gray hair. You, be the leader, clean up their generational trash left behind. Be gentle as a servant with the authority of a butler to have any guest helped or removed from the house. Don’t be cold or uncaring when you are required to lay down the law.

Hopefully, people in the older generation have leadership to provide you. If so, accept it, be respectful, and act like you thoroughly understand that you are under their oversight without complaint. Thank them, be cooperative, follow procedures, and give them honor worthy of a king.

Of course, always learn from everyone and anyone in any situation. Whether you need to be the adult in the room, the child in the room, or if everyone is mature enough to act timelessly and agelessly—learn from the older generation’s wisdom. Even when you have innovative insight that will help, your innovation must be coupled with wisdom. Even when an older man is wrong, he knows elements of history, so listen to his explanation for his opinion. You will be there one day, make the journey painless as possible.

231 – Mind Your Own Morals

Neither Job nor his friends had much Bible background to go on. Based on what little knowledge the Book of Job demonstrates about God, Job’s main source of information about God was the Book of Enoch, where he heard about God in the heavens with the “hearing of the ears”, but had never seen God Himself. Abraham likely learned “righteousness” from Job’s example.

Job knew what it meant to be a “righteous man” and he sought to be “righteous” himself. But, until Elihu rebuked Job and his friends, and until God showed up, neither Job nor his friends understood from personal encounter. Throughout most of the book, Job and his friends develop their own self-made ideas about why God does what He does and, of course they accuse Job. Job’s error was his indignation. Job’s friends’ error was their accusation against Job, becoming “accusing satans” themselves. The truth they all missed was their need for guidance from above.

People may try to impose their self-made moral code onto you—partially dismissing morals from above, partially imposing their contrived morals, always accusing you of both intolerance and immorality. Don’t join them. Don’t help them. Speak up, represent yourself, don’t quietly agree to be agreeable.

If others want a moral code for themselves, that’s their business, their choice, their results, and their prerogative; but so is your choice of a moral code.

One of the most shameless impositions of proven-to-fail, man-made morals is the outlawing of basic spanking to discipline children, yet at the same time spending public funds on government programs to help children behave better when they grow up. Another imposition is the social taboo of being naked for simple bathing purposes in public bathhouses, but encouraging evermore sexual encounters with multiple people under the mask of “liberation”. Spanking is not abuse and being naked with like kind is not strange, but as societies confuse and reverse these, crime increases, immorality and related diseases spread, and birthrates decline.

You don’t need to criticize the evident results of self-made morals, but you don’t need to hail them either. Job prayed for his friends who criticized him with their self-made standards. Follow his example as Abraham did.

230 – Let Prayer Have Its Day

You don’t know other people’s problems. You may be aware that there is a problem, at most, but only God knows what everyone’s problem truly is, including your problems. We’ve all been in those situations where someone misjudged us, don’t be the one who misjudges.

Living at peace will all people, especially your enemies, makes for a smooth life and uninterrupted work. More than you proving a point to the idiot next door, you need to get your own work finished. Find a way to have no conflict with your neighbors, regardless of what idiots their parents raised them to be. Just make everything stay smooth. Swallow your pride. Bite your tongue. Actively cover for his flaws. Do whatever it takes to prevent his fits of lesser importance interfere with the far more important work you need to complete in your workshop and with your family.

Problems beyond our control are much easier to solve if we let God solve them. You don’t know your neighbor’s problem. Hurt people hurt people, so people who hurt people are hurting people. Don’t judge; lift it up in prayer. Keep the peace and invite God to go rooting for the root of your neighbor’s problem.

Prayer is a powerful thing. If you pray often, all the time while driving for example, you will find new breakthrough and “luck” in your life. Almost no one will tell you no. Even your enemies will be too worried from your evident strength of joy or too distracted with problems of their own to pursue you. But, beware the repercussions of prayer.

If you live a strong life in prayer, spiritual warfare will increase. Cars will cut you off more than five times the amount of a month, all in a single trip to the grocery store. People will argue with you about “little nothings” for no reason at all, but none of it will have any bite. The only response is to ignore it. Don’t take the bait. When we pray, angels get the power to work for us, and the devils need us to “react”.

Let prayer rise in your life to be your first, best, and last response forever.

Romans 12:18, Ephesians 6:12-15, Philippians 4:6-7, Hebrews 12:14

229 – Fidelity

The way to hire quickly and be a fast judge of character is to have fidelity yourself and thus quickly identify whether other people live with fidelity or with conflicting values and morals. You cannot recognize fidelity in others unless you have it yourself. You cannot have fidelity yourself unless you treasure it in others.

People are made if the same stuff all the way through. If a person can live in conflict with his own values then he can also live in conflict with yours and your company’s. Morals are a fast way to where where someone stands. Where fidelity is concerned, there are two types of people: the deviant who maintains internal moral conflict and the immature who seeks to expunge as many internal moral conflicts as possible. No one is perfect, but some of us want to be.

If you want to be perfect then you will run well with those who also want to be. But, if your coworker, supervisor, or employee is hiding some secret, ongoing scandal—and thinks that scandal is not immoral—then you are bound to have “teamwork” and “compatibility” issues when you work together; and you might never figure out why.

Just because we travel in the same ramp lanes on an expressway cloverleaf doesn’t mean we share the same destination. One might be merging on and the other merging off. Know where you are going, be honest with yourself about where you are going, then you will easily recognize whether other people know where they are going and are honest with themselves about where they are going.

Someone who is actually going where he thinks he is going is a rare person indeed—rare enough that he just might be the kind if person someone like you can work with. Don’t be like Samson who kept flirting with Delilah as she tried again and again to make him weak, vexing his heart until he let her take away his power. Had he been honest about where his foolish heart was taking him, he would have saved himself years of pain and would likely have lengthened his life. Know where your path leads, then lead others.

228 – Leading as Fathers Who Love Sons

I write not about biological, 24/7 fathers. Parenting around the clock is an experience to itself. I write about love, respect, and care for any younger generation.

Older and younger generations feel a tension. The older we get, the more we become who we are at our core. Some become better, many become worse. There is more to leading than grumbling about youth doing things that youth do. There’s more to growing up than spiting one’s own behavior merely for being young.

People in younger generations need space. Sometimes it makes no sense, but it is necessary. Resistance comes from younger people softly, but it must be heeded. Even when a young person misunderstands the older, he must figure out basic rules of concluding and communication on his own. There’s enough advice in this world to know not to hold a grudge about an unconfirmed offense. If a lad or lass needs to wander off and fret about a big nothing, just let it be.

There are steps that can be taken to approach and invite friendships, just tread softly and happily and don’t impose yourself. Drip ideas, lay down the law if it is your place, but check your condescending tone at the door. Youth under punishment rarely want an explanation, but one or two good sentences will give them enough to chew on to make it educational. When they come slinking back, don’t push them away.

And, for Heaven’s sake, don’t hold a grudge against someone younger than you. Grow up and at least pretend to be an adult. Adults don’t quibble with children.

Care, concern, value, respect—whether you harbor these virtues toward the younger generation, your true colors will show when you face each other’s differences. Elders have wisdom, youth have innovation and energy. God put us together and He wasn’t a fool in doing so; the old man complaining about the youth is the fool because he implies his own failed leadership.

Provide, govern softly, lay infrastructure, encourage, drip nuggets of teaching that help interpret the moment, and give space when quietly signaled to. Be the one initiate patient understanding. Maintain love and give respect to everyone younger than you.

227 – Higher Standards

God holds each of us to a higher standard than everyone else does. At times, other people around you will get away with terrible choices, but you will be scrutinized for the smallest, simplest, pettiest errors. When it seems that you are held to a higher standard, you are. God is holding you to that higher standard.

It may seem to others like they are held to a higher standard than you are. Their struggles and the small things they notice may be different from the things you notice. But, in some things, the standard of what God expects from you is indeed higher than what He expects from others—for those specific things, and vice versa for other things.

Then, there are people that God does not hold to those standards because, sadly, they have inwardly chosen to throw away any chance of even considering God’s morals and the higher, more enjoyable results that they lead to. Perhaps they never heard of God’s higher road of morals and enjoyment, but they never cared to go looking for any higher roads either.

Once a person learns about a higher road, a better life, sees someone “choose” happiness for the first time, or recognizes any evidence that life can get better—then pursues and chases after that better life—everything changes. God will instantly send that person both useful advice and added trouble that needs the useful advice. That person is now held to a higher standard because that person wants to be held to a higher standard. So, God is glad to oblige.

Your potential cannot be explained by the lives, skills, and results of those around you. If your potential could be understood by observing other people, we wouldn’t all be unique. When life seems hard, don’t complain about the unfairness; be thankful for it!

It is indeed, quite unfair that God honors our choice to seek a higher standard, which He then holds us to. Life dolls the same sun, rain, reward, and winter, yielding whatever is sown, and standing before God, none of us measure up. But concerning your uniqueness, God’s higher standards will make you become more than you though possible.

226 – From Men to Women

Men need women’s help, but only with half of the things anyone is capable of recognizing, and only one quarter of things we are all capable of recognizing. Respectable men will not, under any circumstances, continue being around a woman who does not give them respect, even when they don’t deserve it. That is male DNA, how God made men: Those who want respect give respect first. We have to learn it because life doesn’t work for us until we do because we can’t function without respect. A woman who understands men half as much as she thinks does understand and agrees with this 100%.

Paul commanded men to love their women, but for women to respect their men, all because that was how God designed men. So, helping a man means respecting him until he’s respectable. Everyone, man or woman, who presumes to know “all” the needs a person has does not respect that person.

Respect begins with the heart-level belief that no one can fully understand another person. Anyone so capable of being fully understood by another human, even after a thousand years, is not worthy of respect, and certainly not worthy of relationship. Whether you are a man or woman, if you want a relationship without strife, stay away from any relationship until you understand this deeply and the person in the relationship does also.

Too many women live in misery because they thought they could change their husband or that there were things she could accept if he didn’t change himself. Thirty minutes at a bookstore could have taught her otherwise. Thirty minutes at a bookstore could have taught her husband that they weren’t ready yet for a relationship. Strife develops among people who believe that they don’t need to learn from others first, who do not seek to begin by learning the easy, obvious advice already widely available.

Respectable people, however, are teachable and expect their friends to be the same. Men need to be ready to work, to take out the garbage every day and buy flowers and diamonds on holidays, not the other way around. Women need to look for men who don’t need to be told that.