514. Honor Your Agreements
Don’t change the deal. Whatever you agreed to, honor it. This is one way you gain honor in the eyes of others.
Don’t change the deal. Whatever you agreed to, honor it. This is one way you gain honor in the eyes of others.
You will be at many parties and functions with alcohol. The easiest way to not be pressured into drinking is to always have the drink of your own choice already in your hand. And if you put it down and look away, don’t drink out of it again. An uncontrolled drink is an opportunist’s Trojan horse; their aim is to brutalize your dignity for their own savage desires.
Discussion and debate never hurts. Have the discussion. More importantly, do your best to understand the other side without sarcasm or hyperbole, but in fairness to their position. Be confident in your stance, clear in your presentation, and congenial in disagreement.
“Vice does not lose its character by becoming fashionable.”
—John Wesley
Better to restrain for a time than regret for all time.
What’s been seen can’t be unseen. What’s been done can’t be undone. They are only accompanied by shame, doubt, guilt, regret, and the like.
In this, restraint is the highest liberation you can know.
The human heart is massively hungry, much more so than the stomach. Our longings are true and profound. Yet we have only been offered the shallow sense of momentary satisfaction instead of being given something that would truly sustain. In the absence of such an answer, most of us have bought into the futile pursuits of our society, and we are still utterly bored.
If our primary desire was material or physical only, it could somehow be satisfied physically. Pleasures and pursuits of an earthly nature cannot ultimately satisfy the human heart because our desire is not limited only to the physical realm.
The hunger doesn’t go away and the longing doesn’t disappear, it just finds new ways to resurface. With all the stimulation offered, it is easy to find a new thing each week until we are both overloaded and bored with life at the same time — overloaded with what’s available and bored with every last ounce of it.
Something is fundamentally wrong if you give yourself fully to something and it still leaves you wanting . . . or even worse, ashamed.
This is one reason why Jesus Christ is so intriguing: He is simultaneously too much and never enough, both inexhaustible and overwhelming, nearer than our very breath but categorically distinct from anything conceivable.
Justice is always couched in the language of measuring something against a perfect standard. If the thing falls short of what is right and good, we call it unjust; if it upholds what is right and good, we call it just.
But unless a theistic framework is used (and, I believe, specifically a Judeo-Christian one), no individual can level accusations of what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, and of what we ought or ought not do.
The two options then become:
When Marcus Aurelius wrote that injustice is impiety, I believe he was being perfectly rational and I think he was right. Injustice is an affront to a perfect being. But be certain of this: that thought came from the seedbed of theism. It could not have come from anywhere else and it cannot find its ultimate expression apart from an eternality imbued with perfect justice.
Social justice without an eternal anchor in futile.
If justice is real, then eternity must exist.
If there is no eternity, then there is no true justice.
We may gain slightly better circumstances in our life, but gaining true justice in life is exceedingly rare, if it even occurs at all. Yet we all long for justice, hope for it, believe it is a real thing, and fight for it. So if we do not gain it in this life, then we must acknowledge the possibility of its fulfillment in the next. This also means that “the next life” will not be in this world, as some propose.