#38 Character, everyone needs some, nobody should be one.” January 2015

#38     “Character, everyone needs some, nobody should be one.”                              January 2015

LT is one plucky gal. Okay, not an adjective common to our lexicon of descriptions so if I add spirited, audacious, or bold you can add it to your vocabulary.  I fondly admire this quality about my wife’s sister-in-law (please, don’t let LT know I admire anything about her; it’ll disrupt four decades détente). I’ll wager that RT married her for a list of reasons with pluck at or near the top.  A fairly active Facebook friend, there is no ambiguity about LT’s values as evidenced by her posts. Many months ago, LT shared a Facebook post of Micah 6:8 and I have been chewing on it ever since.

Micah 6:8   He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

 

About a month after that post my bride and I attended a surprise celebration at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy to honor RT’s thirty years of service.  RT has risen from staff to The Right Reverend, Mon senior, Ph.D., Dean, President, CEO or whatever the hallowed halls of academia call him there; he’s the boss.  While listening to the remarks of his friends, peers, board, staff and family, Micah 6:8 was unsaid, but mingled with the many kind words. As the event concluded and RT took the podium, the seeming coincidence of LT’s earlier post and a celebration of RT’s work life no longer could be considered an accident.

RT is a student of history so in keeping with his discipline, we look to the background of Micah’s book. The prophet is a contemporary of Isaiah and witnessed a dark chapter in the account of Israel between 750 B.C. and 686 B.C.  He both presents the prosecutor’s case against the nation to explain its defeats as well as foretells a greater glory to come. In the middle of this he tells the folks that God has already told them how to act in the clearest of terms.

                             …act justly …love mercy …walk humbly

To move to modern vernacular, Micah may have written:

…just do the right thing…cut the guy a break…get over yourself.

Act Justly

Everyone has values but unfortunately a growing number among us have poor values.  A core commitment to ‘do the right thing’, the righteous thing, the intrinsically correct thing, at every opportunity, is rare in our world today. While most might do right when someone is watching, C S Lewis wrote, ”Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching”.  

In addition to doing the right thing in secret, there is doing the right thing no matter who we interact with. This encompasses matters of race, religion, creed, color, gender and any other trigger to a common prejudice. A high threshold of ‘right’ is found in answering whether everyone you encounter is treated identically.

Acting justly includes the battle of greed with generosity.  Growing up, if I whined about dad’s pronouncement of justice in our home, Dad reminded me that in all our transactions I never got the short end of the stick.  He’d say, “Maybe the ‘stick’ isn’t as long as you thought it should be but I have never given you the short end of the stick.” God’s measure of right includes a component of generosity that exceeds the minimum requirements of a contract. God is at his nature, generous, and if we claim to follow him the fruit of generosity should be handed out to everyone we meet.

Score one for my Dad and RT. The story of my father’s life, all those testimonies about RT and decades of observations prove a life of acting justly by these two men.

Love Mercy

Receiving mercy is not getting the punishment your actions dictate. For example, somebody has a right and an opportunity to punch you in the mouth for some reprehensible remark you’ve made and they forebear from doing so. Giving mercy is deciding to withhold justifiable wrath. Loving mercy is a commitment to a world where mercy is given freely.  Christ adds a practical reason to live a life of mercy:  Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy    Matthew 5

Forrest Bailey, was merciful. If he had not been merciful, tons of punishment would have been administered for my behavior over the twenty-one years we shared.  Understanding God’s mercy in Sunday school wasn’t hard after experiencing Dad’s mercy at home. Just like Christ’s admonition, dad was even more merciful when his kids were, themselves, merciful towards each other. Candidly, I was often more considerate of, more merciful with, my work staff than my own family.  My failures are made clearer by men like my dad and RT who seem to understand this breakdown but somehow avoid it.

There is one more facet of mercy to consider. A manager frequently receives a rebuke from their superior[s]. A merciful manager absorbs, like a car’s shock absorber, the intensity of the reprimand to isolate their people from the destructive elements contained therein. Being the shield means you get the dents, being the shock absorber means you get the bumps, and loving mercy means, like Christ, you takes the punishment without complaint to love mercy.

Forrest bore the weight unfair rebukes and they took him to his early grave at fifty-five. Being the shock absorber brought four heart surgeries from my thirty years in corporate America and RT readily confesses the ‘dents’ from shielding his flock from the predators throwing rocks at them.

Walk Humbly

The most profound part of that command is ‘walk’; not talk humbly. Humility can only be walked, patiently lived out, displayed in deliberate silence. Anyone who proclaims their humility is at once eliminated from this exclusive attribution. The label ‘humble’ can only be conferred upon you.

Like most things we classify as virtues, humility is often thrown into the box of things we consider so far from our reach that we relegate these qualities to people so pious, so other worldly, that we consider them eccentric at best and out-of-touch, more often. In this way we absolve ourselves from ever attempting to reach, put on, many virtues. Let’s be honest, it’s little more than a lame excuse to be content with status quo.  In truth these qualities are obtained by an intentional life of practiced discipline. Said a little differently, what we frequently choose to call a virtue is just a behavior that takes a measure of practice, over time, with discomfort, to include in our repertoire.

What humility often looks like is a process in decision making where you acknowledge the reach of the decision, determine the scope of people affected, calculate the impacts and consider the interests of each group as important as those of the decision makers. Admittedly, all but unheard of in modern corporate settings. It sounds like, “Who else is going to be affected by this change that we haven’t considered yet?” or “How can I help my staff grow in their career and financial future?”  “What can we give up to lessen the impact?” Closer to home humility says, “What’s best for my family?” “What is best for my spouse?” or as simple as “Where do the kids want to go this weekend?”

Humility links arms with mercy and never says, “This is just like the last time you screwed up!” or reminds a child or spouse of a failure in the past to manipulatively shame them into obedience. No, humility chooses overwhelming love to cover a multitude of sins.

Score three for Dad and RT.

No, there was no coincidence between the Facebook post of Micah 6:8 shared by plucky LT and the celebration of RT’s thirty years at CVCA.  Micah’s words resonated with LT because she has been holding hands with that verse for almost forty years. The words ring loudly with me because they remind me of my father’s legacy and challenge me to live in concert with them for my remaining days.