Author: watchstandpray

127 – Sow Virtue

No matter how busy your life gets, take time to sow in virtue. There are many ways to sow virtue; the more virtue sown the merrier your life.

Virtue is a kine of foundation. As much as we value the roof during a heavy rain, without a firm foundation there won’t be a roof at all. It’s arguably a “mentally referable” state of mind if someone tries to build a roof before laying the foundation. Just as much, it’s “mentally referable” when someone focuses on producing a product directly while leaving the factory that produces the product in disrepair.

One classic example of this in Christian business was Big Idea Productions. The simple summary goes something like this: They originally promised their small distributor, only verbally, that they would always use them as a distributor. Around the time the Jonah movie was coming out, Big Idea supposedly reneged on the verbal promise, lost a lawsuit in which verbal promises were judged to be legally binding, and that was the end of Big Idea.

The founder of Big Idea didn’t give up; he continued his life and got back on a good track. After losing everything, he had the harder lesson to rebuild. But, it might have been easier with a moral compass prioritizing personal promises above profit. Learn from the Big Idea story, but don’t judge it.

Sometimes the foundational needs are “basic”—hygiene, taking out the trash, balancing financial accounts, and normal “sustainer” activities that we humans reflect, being the Image of God and all.

But, just as important—even more important—is the foundation of virtue. That goes back to building on a rock rather than on sand. A foundation is only as strong as the ground on which it rests.

Give a “tithe” somewhere to something that helps advance God’s justice. It doesn’t need “Christian” branding, but it must serve the Creator God Most High of the Bible if He is Whom you want kudos from. “Tithe” can be any percent, amount, or resource, even time. Dripping kindness, compassion, and fairness to people around you is more important to God than sacrifices. One way or another, prioritize sowing virtue into your fields.

Genesis 14:17-24, Hosea 6:6, Matthew 7:24-27, Hebrews 7:1-10

126 – Lean into Chop

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.

125 – Case for Regulation

Roads and bridges are part of governance, deciding where bridges should be built, trails blazed, and directions of travel on which sides of what roads. This leaves it up to drivers to remain within the lines and decide their own courses and speeds. But, with lines and limits come regulation—policing of rules with ongoing evaluation, one case at a time. Bullies are regulators’ biggest and oldest problem.

The need for regulation is a two-sided, single edged blade. On one side we have the problem of anarchy, seen in Hong Kong’s Walled City—made entirely without planning, dirty, disease infested, drug dominated, and structurally dangerous. On the other side we have the housing development companies that want to evict the local residency, crushing them under gentrification, merely for profit. Politicians ride the fence, seeking both votes and money. Good regulation slices through these issues.

Capitalism conquered aristocracy, but it could never eradicate it. When elitists cannot defeat their enemy, they join him. This led to the aristocratic shape-shifting into “crony Capitalism”, an impostor, resulting in “corptocracy”. It’s the ongoing game of the old aristocracy seeking to regain control through what Capitalist economics labels “monopoly”—total control over the market.

Capitalist free-markets are not without their criminals who need policing and regulating. Monopoly is anti-Capitalist by definition. Government’s role includes the regulations of wealthy people and businesses that get close to monopolizing an entire sector of the market.

Regulation is a mid-level of governance and management. Times change, as do technologies and strategies of Men both good and evil. Regulation is an ongoing work, requiring standing committees and revolving officers who oversee constant creation of new rules and retirement of old rules. They are the watchmen who protect from dangers inside the walls.

As aristocrats sneak about and devise evil plans to seize power once again, regulators must stand ready to stop them. New roads must be dozed and old structures razed, so must regulators proceed tenderly as to injure no one in the name of “eminent domain for public good”. Politicians, officials, and even regulators themselves can become corrupted, meaning that ultimate power of regulation must remain in the hands of the people at large.

124 – God the Chastener

God chastens and chastises His children because He loves them. Like well groomed lawns and gardens are clipped and watered, God rears His children with boundaries, rules, rewards, and punishments.

Punishments make us cry, as do any hardships, deserved and unfair alike. If we cry from punishment guiding us to accept what we can’t control—including God’s decisions about how He wants us to live—then when the normal troubles and hardships of life come our way we won’t be disheartened.

Life has its challenges. The path requires effort to travel, overcome, finish a project, or dig through a mess to find gold—just the effort itself can lead us to tears.

If our parents punished us for being disobedient as children, we are not only obedient and self-disciplined to more formidably face our challenges; we won’t cry as much when tall challenges might otherwise wear us out.

God is the perfect parent, which means that He will spank us and put us on lockdown, of course to train us in self-control, but also to de-sissify us. His rules and desires on how we should live are, of course, incredibly brilliant, wonderful, ultra-desirable, and so good that no one could possibly have a better idea than His morals from above.

But, even the wisdom of God’s morals aside, just giving us pain to toughen us up is what any loving father should give.

The last thing a child needs is to get bit by a mosquito while crossing the street, lock up from the pain, and thus get run over by a car. Having thick skin is part of living a safe life. Good parents don’t pamper their children so much that the slightest hiccup leaves them emotionally undone.

Strength to bear hardship also means we’re strong enough to help others with their burdens. When someone near you has trouble, you may need to carry a double load; you may need to take a bullet or get whacked with a falling log to save someone. Your strong spine could save someone’s life.

Our own hardship is no license to “chasten” everyone around us. God Himself chastens His beloved because good fathers chasten their beloved children.

123 – Paying for Appreciation

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.

122 – Triple Check

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.

121 – Case for Capitalism

Every good thing gets counterfeited and exploited. The devil’s greatest game is to convince people that he is Jesus—that wicked men might ease their guilty consciences and that good men would blame Jesus for the devil’s mischief. So it is with economics.

Populist ideals are no way to devise a working economic strategy.

Socialism is proven by repeating history to be the populism of economics, mainly because it is a pioneering financial philosophy trumpeted by those who were neither financiers nor pioneers. The first known experiment in Socialism arrived with the Pilgrims of 1620, imposed by aristocratic European investors upon the pioneering Pilgrims who abandoned Socialism in order to save their starving people. As if one failure were not enough, Socialism became one evil exchanged for another when the impoverished masses overthrew the heartless aristocrats of Russia, again ending with the same failure where basic needs are always in short supply. Socialism is history’s most predictably repeating failure. Even today, some theoretician seeks to establish an experimental commune with compelling theory as evidence, presenting none of history’s everlasting failures to learn from.

The Pilgrims finally escaped Socialist starvation and a dying population when everyone’s survival became no one’s responsibility but his own. Everyone “rose to the occasion”; the colony had a surplus of goods for the first time and was finally able to pay back its aristocratic investors only by breaking their Socialist bylaws. When Governor Bradford settled with those investors, the deaths of more than half of the colonists at the hands of their Socialist bylaws surely came up in the negotiation.

Early America was founded on this new experiment—that individuals are responsible for their own work ethic and their own corresponding results. Neither aristocracy nor investors nor society have any right to claim the credit for another’s hard-earned labors. Each one is a steward of one’s own capital—one’s own property. That self-responsible, self-reliant, freedom-based economic philosophy founded the Northers colonies that defeated Southern slavery two centuries later. It was called “Capitalism”. Ever since, disenfranchised aristocrats have sought to commandeer the very Capitalism that defeated them while Socialists blame true Capitalists for the evil deeds of aristocrats who are anything but.