Category: dignity

Each person matters to other people, if for no other reason than the space we each occupy. Walking down the street involves other people. They wait for you, they let you go first, or they wonder if you will let them go first. Each one of us makes a difference to other people because each of us matters.

Having a low view of yourself harms others. Self-esteem is founded on the sense of “self”, that oneself is a real, active person among other people. Having a strong self-esteem is really about knowing that one affects other people—loving oneself is about loving others. Knowing that you are valuable is about knowing that you are already very valuable to others.

Knowing your own value—not value attained, but value that you already have as God’s Image—will help your heart to shine. By being happy, your happiness will spill over to others without effort—because you truly do matter to others. It doesn’t matter if you are skinny, fat, short, tall, ugly, or ridiculously gorgeous; self-esteem is a contagion that spreads to others. The more you value yourself and others, the more others will value themselves.

The deeper value people place on themselves—recognizing how every individual can make an impact on others for better or worse—the better off the world will be because the world relies on people who know that we each, individually matter to everyone else.

If we don’t know how much we matter to others, we will neglect whatever choices affect others the most. Someone who doesn’t matter will speed through a red light, thinking at most, “I don’t affect other people, after all.” But, the belief that one doesn’t matter isn’t really a well thought-through belief, it’s more of a non-conclusion.

People who devalue themselves haven’t made up their minds about themselves or others. They simply move moment to moment, presuming that nothing really matters. When a criminal who doesn’t care about himself gets caught, he acts indifferent in court because he is indifferent about life because he thinks life is indifferent about him. So, the next time people are rude or inconsiderate, you might just demonstrate that they matter.

Don’t compromise on essential values just because other people might not understand you. Humans are highly capable creatures. We can do the most outrageous things if we want to. If someone doesn’t understand why you hold to your values then it is because that person is working hard at trying to not understand.

A competent teacher does not stop teaching a subject if the students do not understand; a competent teacher will teach the subject all the more!

Hopefully, you have already set out on some noble task—it could simply be your attempt to do something that has never been done before—it could be to do what no one from your neighborhood has never done before—it could be to shake your entire nation’s culture to end a dishonest routine. But, whatever noble thing you attempt, people whom you thought would never make a positive change in the world will soar with newfound powers to tell you that you’re wrong.

One of humanity’s great hidden strengths is our ability to wake from the deepest sleep just to tell someone to stop doing what is right.

People will drive miles, pay for expensive meals, use words they didn’t know they knew, step out into courageous situations that they have never stepped into before—all to convince you that you are so very, very selfish, unethical, and outright immoral—especially if you are trying to do something that they agree with.

“That can’t be done!” they will say. “We want to do it, but I always failed. It is therefore a crime against others to do this good thing that others reject.”

Society continues bad, dangerous, cruel practices because no one retraces the lines—no one stands for the right standard.

Every culture is made and every culture is remade by the troublemakers, the misfits, the malcontents, the discontents, the “unteachables”. Be that person. If you can get a thousand people to say you can’t, you might actually be on the right track. If ten thousand people say you shouldn’t, you’re surely dead on the money.

They’ll learn. Stand at your post. Show how it’s done. Make sure the culture has an example to watch.

Affluenza is the informal “street talk” term for the uncaring laziness that gets us when we have just enough money to be comfortable. The social status is often called “affluent”. But, money has its way of infecting its hosts with a diseased mentality that squanderously throwing money is the best say to solve any problem. The sad news about money is that it never solves any problems. The problems get distracted by eating the money—making the problem seem to go away for a short time—but then the problem returns with a vengeance, having fed on all the money just thrown at it.

Affluenza lurks behind the self-destructing CEO who doesn’t know how to rejuvenate a company’s vision. Money is earned by staying lean, reducing waste to a minimum, and working with the same energy as when you’re driving to make an important date. Money and security are eternal for no one. Even Jesus worked to die on the Cross and we can always count on him to carry his own load. That’s why he is a worthy king. Once a celebrity, company, or country presumes that money and security will “just be there” forever, the waste begins, the drive diminishes, and the said-to-be unsinkable flounders.

…it happens every time. That’s how—and why—every world superpower eventually falls. When leadership stops working hard and takes for granted what must be earned, everything starts to unravel.

The idea that wealth is bestowed—rather than earned through wasteless work—is the idea that keeps poor people poor. Affluenza is this same root of “poverty thinking” visited upon people with money. They may have money today, but when hard times come, those with affluenza will eat pistols and jump out of buildings because they had money without understanding it.

Symptoms show up in the form of canceling appointments because “we can always reschedule”. The notion of a missed opportunity doesn’t occur, even if the missed opportunity is both real and missed. When you’re hungry, every morsel counts. If you can spare extra morsels, it’s chivalrous to let morsels fall for the poor, but you’ll be poor again if you don’t treasure every morsel you let fall.

Discover your path of work in your life by discovering who you are. Analyze your skills and passions. Don’t just look at the things that fascinate you, but seek to understand them at an elemental level. If dinner fascinates you, ask why. Is it because of the food or the people or the preparation?

There is a difference between being interested in the non-profitable “consumer” side of a thing and the profitable “production” side. God makes everyone a producer in some capacity, able to carry one’s own weight and then some. None of us are able to completely carry ourselves, but we can carry more than our own weight. In this, we help each other, carrying each other and contributing more than we take. That cooperation between humans can only happen because God Himself designed us to at a level that stretches even more fundamentally than DNA.

You will find a reliable vocation for your life by seeing where you fit into this grand scheme of human cooperation.

There is no profit in analyzing your “consumer” interests. If you pursue non-profitable interests, you will end up in debt and a burden to others. Pursue those skills that contribute and lift others, not just activities that you enjoy. Even when brainstorming new ideas, the only good ideas will contribute and carry their own weight. “Contributing” is the same thing as “prospering”.

Understand “what” you are as a human. As the Image of your Creator God, you are a prosper-making machine. You were designed to help, lift, build up, encourage, contribute, and be a benefit to all around you. When seeking to discover your strengths, constantly remember that strengths refined will help others to prosper. When you work toward “prospering others”, you effectively work within your strengths.

Once you see the prosperity programmed into yourself, the skills that help you prosper others will be easy to identify. God doesn’t make failures; people only become failures when they don’t operate in their strengths, namely helping others to prosper along with yourself. Within your skills you have much room for choice; your individual creativity can’t not be imprinted on your working prosperity. Only failed prosperity fails to be unique.

The brain is only a buffer, a temp folder, a cache where memories eternally stored in the soul can be directly accessed during our temporary lives on Earth.

In the theory of pre-existence, humans existed in some state of God’s foreknowledge and choice, from which the names were written in the Book of Life before Earth’s founding. This theory implies that there may be additional memories and character-shaping choices that date earlier than our memories currently cached in our brains can remember.

If this is true, then part of our own “innate” personalities might not be “innate” at all, but could have resulted from a willful, intentional choice before our present session of consciousness. In other words, we may have already had some say in our own personalities, passions, and talents we were born with—before we were born. But, since that was “pre-life”, we can’t remember in this life.

The Bible is not clear about this, but its teaching on foreknowledge and the Book of Life from before Earth’s founding do allow for such things. Regardless, our sentience—our free will, the “eternal human” in everyone—does not exist in our brains. Brain damage cannot remove our memories in the next life, of course. So, our brains are not actually where one’s core, true sentience abides.

In a sense, our own brains are an “Artificial Intelligence” working to calculate and access memories and conclusions about them, but our actual sentience remains in our souls, inaccessible from anything made during this temporary life on Earth. Only God can create our souls and only God can connect our souls to our bodies. To argue that sentience could be duplicated, created, reassigned, or rearranged by humankind is to degrade all humans to an AI that only exists in this natural world.

Treating AI as being equal to Created-by-God-alone Imago Dei, humans, would demean our entire Eternal existence, and dispute every benefit of “morals from above”. Therefore, any moral code applying equally to AI and to humanity would be a self-made moral code.

An AI is a useful machine, but it is not equally valuable to a human, no matter how good at acting it learns to become.

God has a plan for great and glorious things. Our brains aren’t capable of imagining how good things can actually be—even though we can imagine things being much better, if we would only open our minds to the possibility. Things will be unimaginably amazing in the future, in the next lifetime that will last through Eternity. But, things could be much better now. It’s all about what level of happiness we are willing to settle for.

Several things hold us back from being better off, whether shame or amusement.

We often get distracted by mediocre entertainment, thus robbing ourselves of a much happier life. Most of the world’s problems—including pollution and abuse of natural resources—wouldn’t be possible if people refused to settle for amusement as their solution to boredom. But, too many “sheeple” are satisfied to crawl out of bed, go off to a job or school they hate, and return home to a hypnotic video screen until they are tranquilized into sleep, just to do it all over again the next day. If no one in the West was addicted to videos, games, and video games, there wouldn’t be starvation anywhere in the world.

Whose fault is it that children are starving in India during an age when private companies launch their own space ships? It’s the fault of the teenager who won’t look up from his mobile phone and study something that can make a difference—who grows old, but doesn’t grow up to set a good example for the next generation. It’s the fault of the adults, mentors, parents, and teachers who don’t welcome each other’s help to figure out how to get it through to young people that we were created by God for bigger and better things, not just to be entertained.

For those who aspire to more in life, the giant in our path is “Shame”. We don’t want to sing unless we are the best birds in the woods. But, to humankind, all birds sing beautifully. Shine your little light now. Give hope, especially proving we don’t need to be perfect before we begin; we need to begin in order to make the world perfect.