Series: 365

337 – Routines

Know life’s routines—food, exercise, sleep, study, work, whatever. Know them in yourself, know them in others, keep them, change them, always respect them in others. If changing your routine proves a difficult necessity, tell yourself that changing your routine might be part of the routine. Still, changing and managing routine remains an individual task. The most important thing in having a routine is to know that one has a routine and to then respect it.

If you get fat, miss your exercise, lose needed nutrition, skip a Sabbath rest, lose sleep, oversleep, don’t read your daily Bible, fail in your commitment to positive entertainment, or don’t add the daily brick to your road—you will have many more problems than you thought you saved yourself. Staying true to necessary steps of your routine is one part in keeping your personal integrity and staying true to your values.

You can’t always keep normal routines. In travel and holidays, routines can get upset, which will test your resolve. So, you must be prepared to return to your routines after those disturbances. Moreover, you must structure your routines in such a way that you can keep them going to some extent, even during irregular times. Itinerant speakers and highly productive people have very sporadic schedules, but their routines must stay maintained to some extent in their travels. The key is to be low-budget and scalable.

Resourceful routines endure. You do not need to buy super expensive food to eat healthily or to get minimum nutrition supplements. Convert some junk food money to Calcium or change “beer to sleep” time into exercise time. Learn to do push-ups on your bed, and include multiple skills in your exercise repertoire, including street dance and martial arts. Buy the cheaper, smaller computer first, if computing is part of your routine, then you can take it with you. Sometimes your only place to work or exercise is at the airport and your only place to buy food is a gas station. Some shoulder freezes at the train station will draw YouTube likes and a chili dog with sour kraut, extra ketchup, and double mustard might compensate for a day without vitamin tablets.

338 – I Didn’t Notice

You are only as big as the problems you ignore. Anything that rents free space in your mind is only bigger and stronger than you because you allow it to be.

Our problems don’t have power over us because they dominate and overwhelm us, but because it bothers us when they do. There will always be a bigger fish who eats what it wants, but you can choose whether to allow the bigger fish to get under your skin and irritate you while you should be sleeping or whether to just not notice. Sometimes it helps to remember that God’s Sovereignty means that God decides which fish are bigger and smaller. God might have sent a big, evil fish your way just so you can practice not caring.

No matter how big, strong, resourceful, or vast your obstacle may be, never give anything else the power to control your will. You are always and always will ever be responsible for your own choices. This includes your choice to be angry, regretful, or grateful. Don’t give your foes the power to select your level of happiness, they don’t deserve that much credit. This means you must also reject the lie that you must dominate foes in return before you can be happy.

Even while a larger force harasses and disturbs you, even before you bring “justice” or “hit back” or otherwise stop it from doing bad things—before you take any action at all, you can and must choose happiness in your heart. Until you do, you will never have the mental, psychological, emotional, and spiritual clarity to confront the heart of the problem. Jesus explained this by saying, “First remove the plank from your own eye, then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother’s eye.”

I was driving my motorcycle down a street just after a ten minute rain. Puddles lined the road when a semi-truck-sized flatbed pulled in front of me and charged at top speed. While I passed him, I think he splashed a puddle on my shirt because it seemed a little damp when I arrived. But, I’m not sure if he did because I just didn’t notice.

339 – Teaching, Criticizing, Helping & Self-Indictment

The purpose of teaching is to help.

As with distinctions that don’t make a meaningful difference, criticizing without helping indicts oneself. If you know about a problem, your first responsibility is to help with it. If you are aware of a problem, but don’t prevent or fix it, you are at most an accomplice or at least a Bad Samaritan.

Teaching must never be from mere theory, but only from the teacher’s own experience. People who give destructive advice—whether they are teachers, consultants, or “well-meaning” friends—give destructive advice because they teach “truth” from either theory or failure.

“I tried and tried, then I finally had to learn that you just can’t change that system. You need to accept that if you want to move on with your life.” His is the “wisdom” from failure. He presumes, “If I can’t, no one can,” but he’s wrong. His instruction only teaches you that he failed and became what conquered him.

The other kind of bad teacher teaches from theory, not experience. Theories are good, but they must be presented as “mere theory”, neither “truth” nor “wisdom”.

Only teach what you have tried and actually done. Share observations as mere observations. Anything else is evil, especially with “good intentions”. Teach people however they learn. Push, encourage, but also understand and illuminate their difficulties and challenges, guiding them along. Don’t ever ask people to change who God made them to be.

God invented rules and teaching to liberate and empower people. Rules that burden and weigh people down are self-made morals, not from God. God’s commands keep people alive and protect them from the oppression of disease, anarchy, and not belonging to a loving home. Once our misinterpretation of “Biblical morality” steals the joy of morality, it is no longer “Biblical” and we have probably created our own “fence laws”. The same is true with any teaching.

Don’t make learning a burden. People have enough to-do lists, don’t give them more. Demonstrate the more excellent way yourself. Guidelines empower and liberate. Help strengthen others by example; demonstrate that good choices can also be an option.

Teaching means this: For goodness sake, go and live a thriving life!

Psalm 119:32, Matthew 23:1-15, Luke 11:28, 45-52, Ephesians 4:29, 1 Timothy 3:1, James 3:1

340 – Law of Faith

Faith is “belief” or “trust”, using the same word in the New Testament language, Greek, where faith is explained so well. Faith means counting on and anticipating that wind will drive the sails of a vessel at sea—without first demanding an academic journal to document every molecule. Wind has enough evidence to prove its own existence and nature. So, any seaworthy sailor has “faith” in the wind.

The wind won’t always be there, but knowing this is also part of the sailor’s faith in the wind—knowing the wind’s behavior, its strength, and our ability to harness it.

Trust, faith, belief—choose your word to express the same idea: There is a point where the self-evident become too obvious to ignore. One can always cast doubt, but arguing past the point of “reasonable doubt” is known in legislatures as a “filibuster” and in the courts as “exhaustion”. Faith does not cross this line because it knows when the truth has proven its own case.

Justice and fairness and “righteousness”—choose your word to express the same idea—require faith in order to thrive. The “righteous” and fair people live my faith; they must—it’s the Law. Faith itself is an act of justice toward God, recognizing His goodness, presence, redemption, governance, benevolence, and His Laws that govern our existence and continued safety.

To live a life of happiness and strength one must recognize the Laws of life, but we can only acknowledged and accepted these Laws through some level of faith. Believing that the Bible’s evidential value requires faith rather than filibuster with unreasonable doubt.

Living by faith carries a sense of risk, but accepting risk merely accepts the truth that risk exists everywhere. One can die while “safely” at home. The safest place is the place God calls us to, so go, live, and thrive.

This is faith—when we need God and have no other hope, falling into His hands, being fully dependent on Him as a bird’s flight depends on the wind beneath its wings. The greatest and most satisfying level of faith continuously trusts in God and His Laws more than the empirical evidence before our senses. Life is faith.

Genesis 15:6, John 20:30-31, Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, Hebrews 10:38-11:40

341 – Forty Is Too Young to Have a Baby

Maturing takes centuries. The lifelong process of learning means that we barely get started before we grow geriatric. Unless we take drastic measures to disrupt the natural ignorance of our inborn sin, our skin will shrivel and fall off before we ever grow up.

There’s more to understanding babies than simply having them. During normal child-bearing years, we still aren’t ready to raise children. No parent can ever be perfect. Don’t wait to become perfect, don’t hold it against your parents for not being, and never, under any circumstances, allow yourself to think that you’re perfect merely for becoming a parent. While no parent is “perfect”, we can each be “ideal” by inviting others to help us along the way.

Raising children together as family helps to instill a strong work ethic and respect across generations. For millennia many Eastern cultures, from the Mediterranean through the Far East, had three generations under one roof—the grandparents raising the children while mom and dad ran the family business. In Vietnam, it’s not uncommon to become a grandparent at only 35 years old. These societies flourish because they master the art of “imperfectly ideal” parenting. Simply put, the “perfectly ideal” parents know they are not perfect and therefore welcome help.

The more children we have, the more we all learn. God created both humanity and Earth; only Satan needs a population small enough to centrally plan. If every population on Earth flourished as God commanded, we’d have more scientists and thus might have already developed the technology to colonize Mars a century ago.

Every society relies on a growing birthrate in order to survive. Over-fascination with entertainment and surrender to immorality will plunge a population into nothingness, being overwhelmed by societies that have many children. Growth and strength in family are in direct conflict with entertainment and immorality. As imperfect as everyone of us is, it helps to have fewer problems, not more. Whatever your household situation is, seek to have more help and fewer distractions.

Even fifty years old is too young to raise a family—if we try on our own. Drop the delusion of household “independence”, welcome help, then families will flourish much easier.

342 – It’s not Enough to Be Angry

It is remarkably, notably, strangely, and uniquely boring, unoriginal, and universal for humans in their youth to determine to be different from the generation before.

Things aren’t as good as we like them. Perhaps something truly terrible happened—which happens all too often. Or, we might just complain because things aren’t better—which is good because good parents want their children to improve the future. Whatever we decide in the earlier years of life to make different in the future, that decision makes no one special since it is instinctive for every human. Accordingly, that determination itself isn’t enough to make any difference at all.

If we want to make a difference, we must determine to do more than make a difference. Especially among poorer families in whatever country or economy of the world, many who are eagerly determined to improve things for the future never want to learn and figure out the right way—they don’t want to learn how—they presume they already know how—to make the future better than the past.

Perhaps they decide that they need a college education—or that their children need a college education. College can help, but it’s not the way for everyone’s education and there is no universal guarantee that it is one way or even a possible way to help the next generation. Parents who blindly decide their children need college in order to make life better may raise hyper-wealthy children who never go to college, but whom they alienate while trying to force them to.

Some may decide they need hard work, without a care for “smart” work. Some may decide that “innovation” is a waste, that consciously becoming fat is a healthy way to be “strong”, or some other nonsense. Usually, our emotional response about “how” to make the future better is no more than a reaction to a specific past, while the future always surprises. Past failure can warn us or fuel our resolve to improve, but it’s not enough to navigate the uncharted waters ahead.

If we want to improve the future, we must resolve to learn how improvement must be made. Getting help is vital. And, never stop learning.

343 – No One Is Perfect, So What?

No one is perfect. You aren’t perfect. I’m not perfect. None of your teachers, mentors, or roll models will ever be perfect. You will be an imperfect role model, teacher, leader, mentor—you already have been whether you know how or not.

Being “not perfect” is universal. But, being universally imperfect isn’t an excuse to be as imperfect as possible. Many leaders make excuses for themselves saying, “No one is perfect,” but they never specify exactly how imperfect people and institutions must be in order to warrant making new friends and new institutions to replace the old ones. The signatories of the Declaration of Independence certainly thought England was imperfect enough. So, how imperfect is “imperfect enough” for you to change and do a better job?

Your own imperfection means that you have an ongoing, ever-developing laundry list of problems to clean up. So, don’t make excuses, clean up after yourself. But, while you do your own laundry, never stop learning from everyone you can.

The universality of the imperfection of humanity is a double-edged sword: 1. You have your own mess to constantly clean up. 2. Learn and gain from everyone, no matter how bad; if someone’s problems make it impossible for you to gain from them, then you have every reason to look for someone else—but you still can learn from that person.

Imperfection is actually a question of whether you can put up with other people’s garbage long enough to get what you need from their help. As for you, keep your garbage to yourself as much as you can so that you help others a lot more than you annoy.

The double-edged sword of the universal imperfection of humanity comes with a sheath to keep it from injuring people: Restore sinners gently.

When you are forced to deal with someone else’s imperfection, deal gently. Don’t confront with an open blade, keep your sword in its sheath. When you must leave or fire someone, there’s no way to do it that will avoid all hurt feelings always. But, you can at least evade injury and, when your imperfect swordsmanship causes injury to others, at least don’t pour salt on the wounds you caused.