Your Rules from of Old | Psalm 119:52
The lives and examples of the brothers and sisters who have lived before, especially as recounted in Scripture, should indeed comfort us. The road before us is hard, but it is well-traveled by those who now stand as a great “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). Let us take comfort and run our race with endurance.
When I think of your rules from of old,
I take comfort, O LORD.Psalm 119:52 ESV
In general, our roots are shallow. How many know the names of their great-great-grandparents? How many walk about with a knowledge of family history and the weight of a family legacy? In the modern West, we tend to live as historical orphans, as though our immediate family crept into existence as randomly as the Big Bang. Yet our failure to remember the past does not erase it away. We are each sequels to sequels to sequels to sequels to sequels… And there are likely to be many sequels that follow us. There is no comfort in viewing ourselves as islands floating alone on the sea of time, for then all of the world is both around us and upon us.
The psalmist points us toward a better comfort: thinking upon God’s rules from of old, considering the workings of the LORD in ages long past. How is such thinking a comfort to us? It reminds us that we and our circumstances are not as unique as we might tend to believe.
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Four Amazing Differences
Written by Donald J. Boudreaux |
Saturday, July 16, 2022
No one could possibly know – the exact number of persons whose efforts were devoted to producing your smartphone and keeping it operational. But I’m confident that this number is much greater than one million – in fact, it’s likely multiple times greater. When this number is added to the number of strangers whose efforts were devoted to producing your living-room couch, your HVAC system, the latest medicines that you ingested, your automobile, and the commercial-air flight that you’ll next take to visit your parents or to close that business deal, the number of strangers who routinely work for you likely numbers well over a billion.If there’s a particular purpose for my presence on this earth – other than being a loving and responsible father for my son – that purpose is to teach principles of economics. Even adjusting (as best as I can) for professional bias, I have no doubt that no body of knowledge is more important for understanding society than is economics, with few bodies of knowledge being as important. And the part of economics that, far and away, is most important is economics principles, popularly known as “Econ 101.” Probably as much as 90 percent of the many harmful government policies being pursued or proposed at any moment would grind to a halt if a majority of the populace had a solid grasp of basic economics.
At the beginning of each semester, I – unlike most teachers of economics principles – devote a couple of hours to the task of impressing upon my students (most of whom are still too young to purchase adult beverages) just how very different is the world they know from the world that was known to most of their ancestors. I identify four ways in which the lives of those of us in the modern, capitalist world differ categorically from the lives of almost everyone until just a few centuries ago.
Astonishing Prosperity
The most obvious way in which our lives today differ from those of our pre-capitalist ancestors is that we’re fantastically wealthier. Ordinary people today sleep beneath hard roofs and walk on hard floors in homes equipped with indoor plumbing and electric lighting, and featuring cupboards full of food, closets full of clothing, and garages or driveways full of automobiles. We’re so wealthy that it’s quite plausible that our pets today live materially better lives than did our human ancestors before the industrial age.
Although recounted frequently, this truth about modern standards of living cannot be told too often. We’re so accustomed to our spectacular wealth that we take it for granted. And that which is taken for granted is seldom appreciated and correctly understood.
Reliance on Strangers
A second way in which our lives differ categorically from the lives of nearly all of our ancestors is that we, unlike our ancestors, depend for our survival almost exclusively on strangers. Prior to capitalism, Jones personally helped to produce many of the goods that he or she consumed. Jones likely had a hand directly in the hunt, building the family hut, weaving cloth for the family’s clothing, or tending the crops and animals destined to become the family’s meals. Most of the other goods and services consumed by Jones but not directly produced with his or her labor, were produced by people known personally to Jones, such as the village blacksmith, cobbler, cooper, butcher, tailor, tanner, carpenter, and wheelwright.
Today in stark contrast, we denizens of capitalist economies not only do not personally directly help to produce the goods that we consume, we have no idea of the identities of nearly everyone who did have a hand in producing the goods that we consume.
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The Nature of Responsibility
There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it. The latter was a major component of the Fall. Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins. A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17). More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted.
And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006. To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic. This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job. To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership. In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinek pointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility. In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job. In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader. Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility.
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility. And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority. This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task. To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement. Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job? The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures. It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete. But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”.
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it? To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility. In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility. In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it. But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained. The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done. Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate. Therefore, they both share responsibility. So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities. We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence. We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions. In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over. Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders. This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job. When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers.
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents. In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence. At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable. Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions. But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable. Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well. To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole). Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for.
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years. Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well. This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility.
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The Crushing Yoke of a Deconstructionist Pastor
Alexander Lang sees himself not as a an undershepherd called to comfort his sheep with the message of Christ crucified but as a Christendom-scented psychologist charged with fixing his patients. For pastors, the compassion fatigue problem is easy to solve. Yes, it can be exhausting to carry the sorrows of your people. But that exhaustion fades with every word of Scripture reminding me that I don’t have to keep that weight. I get to transfer it into the pierced hands of Christ whenever I point my sheep to their Good Shepherd who has killed their every sin and promised to dry their every tear. Lang doesn’t want to hand that load over to Jesus. No wonder he’s exhausted.
In a recent post on his blog, Alexander Lang wrote a detailed explanation for why he chose to step down as pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, Ill. Like so many other modern pastors, Lang laments, he could no longer endure the typical shepherd-sapping burdens of the ministry, burdens such as “the immense stress of the job” and “feeling lonely and isolated.”
Initially, many of the personal challenges Lang describes lined up with my own experiences as a parish pastor for 15 years. However, the more Lang described these particular challenges, the less convinced I was that we were sharing the same afflictions. I know what it’s like to feel momentarily exhausted at the end of the day after praying with a member in his darkest hour. I don’t know what it’s like to feel as though I have nowhere to unload the weight of my parishioner’s burdens. While I’ve been frustrated by the unclear desires or unreasonable demands of idiosyncratic members, I’ve never felt as though my “boss” is “every person who walks through the door of [my] community.” I only worry about one boss, the Triune God.
Why have our experiences been so different? I don’t think it’s because I’m a better pastor than Lang. I think it’s because I’m a pastor and he is something else entirely. Read through Lang’s essay and you’ll notice he doesn’t mention Jesus a single time. Look at his website’s “about” page and you’ll see this is hardly an oversight. “Restorative Faith is a progressive Christian movement designed to rescue the Christian faith from antiquated doctrine and recast Christianity in a new light,” he tells us. “We are here to break down the Christian faith one piece at a time so we can rebuild it into something that is actually worth believing.”
The stated aim of his deconstructionist charge makes it easy to pinpoint why Lang found the pastoral ministry so much more exhausting than I do.
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