R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I’m not sure why but most of my life, I’ve been extremely respectful of authority. Sometimes to a fault. It wouldn’t matter who it was. It could be a police officer, teacher, my parents, crossing guard, meter maid or even the manager at the local Taco Bell. Like I said…to a fault. Sure, my parents probably beat it into me (not really, they’re great people…and my dad reads this blog 🙂 but I also think the atmosphere/culture was a little different.

I’m doing my best not to be one of those “back in my day” people but here I go. It seems like there has been a complete degradation in our society of our youth’s respect for authority. Let’s own up to something first, we need to accept some of the blame here. This generation has seen: a president commit adultery and become a hero, political parties act like children and tear each other apart verbally, gross abuse of power from financial institutions, divorce reach an all time high, and a significant break down of the family as a whole.

In short, many of our students have not had someone to look up to and respect. That is on us. We need to change that. Let’s resolve to be those people. However, there is another piece to the puzzle. We also need to instill in our kids a desire to respect others regardless of whether or not they deserve it.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think our kids should look up to people that behave badly. I’m saying they should at least respect them, even when they don’t deserve it because that emulates that God we serve and believe in. God gives us love though we don’t deserve it. God gives us eternity with HIm even though we don’t deserve it. God gives us abundant life in the here and now, even though we don’t deserve it. I could keep going.

Lets do our best to make respecting authority cool again and model that for our kids the best we can. Peace.

“Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.” 2 Peter 2:13-25