Living My High Standard Life

Adages have a tendency to travel with us throughout our lifetimes. Little sayings they may be, but it doesn’t minimize the impact that may have on us or the meaning. One bad apple spoils the bunch. The early bird catches the worm. All that glitters is not gold. You’ve probably heard some of those or dozens of others. These sayings help teach us a moral lesson, some which have proven to be too true more than once over the years. Being an early bird, for an example, taught me the value of not allowing procrastination to get the best of me. It may have taught you something different. Either way, there was a lesson learned. That lesson influenced future decisions.

For most families, we begin teaching our children these moral lessons as soon as possible. Even before we embrace faith, there is this inbred need to simply be good people. Do unto others…  Even for those that are not religious, they may still experience a foreboding of landing on karma’s bad side.  What goes around comes around… History and our own personal experience shows many of us that there is some truth to those words. I’m sure we all know at least one person who can recall feeling like they got slapped by karma. Yet, it is such a struggle for people to simply choose kindness. Perhaps part of the issue is that some people aren’t genuinely kind. So it’s a bit more of a struggle to turn it on when it’s been off for quite so long.

we begin teaching our children these moral lessons asap...

Have you ever noticed how swiftly kids tend to pick up lying without being taught to do it? When that happens, we find ourselves needing to teach them the moral lesson of truth telling. That’s generally our first introduction to something like karma. We don’t want lies following us into the future. What that means is that we have to develop personal values. What is my standard when it comes to establishing trust? Do I have a higher expectation for others than I’ve set for myself? 

Another adage comes to mind. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything… Setting standards gives us a baseline for what we may allow in our personal space. If lying and being unkind is something that you condone, then it shouldn’t surprise you when you find that others in your circle have the same values. 

As a young girl, I can remember many a school day where my mom would make me and my siblings change our clothing when we got home from school. As kids, we were impatient and wanted to go outside and play. But the standard in my household was to not do so in our “school clothes”. This was a rule that went beyond my parents seeing us do it. It was expected that even if they weren’t around, when we got home from school, we were to change our clothes. We knew what the standard was. Now, we had to learn to develop values that aligned with respecting the rule. When Mom and Dad were at work and we were arriving home to Grandma, who didn’t enforce the rules, we had to learn that it didn’t change the rule. Whether it was being enforced or not.

As believers, we have to learn to develop a similar stance when it comes to our Christian values. There’s an old saying I remember many of my elders repeating. If everyone else jumped off the bridge, would you jump too? Would you? Hopefully, you are instead building up your values in Christ in learning to align yourself with the standard that he left for us. Like I mentioned with my parents, whether others are enforcing it or not, we have to decide as individuals where we stand. 

Stay Sunny!

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