Each Life’s Most Crucial Task

As a goal for the best life, my years have taught me this: 

Each life must take personal responsibility
for its thoughts, words and deeds…  

… not another’s responsibility,
just one’s own…

For many — those who are clearly disadvantaged — there is a preceding task to facilitate this; to heal from trauma that prevents them taking their personal responsibility.  

Taking one’s personal responsibility — and not one iota of another’s — is the key task to become a functional adult human being.  Anything that impedes such work needs to be identified and resolved or regret will be our life.  

Taking one’s personal responsibility is truly the key task and goal of the Christian life, where God helps us bravely face truth through insight.  

Sure, much truth is hard to face. 
But no truth that we face can break us.  

A precondition is vulnerability; courageously sitting with our emotions, knowing as Mr Fred Rogers would say, “No emotion is unmentionable or unmanageable.”  

When finally we can face all of life’s stark truths knowing none of them threaten to castigate us back into the debilitating shame outbound of trauma so we can live the abundant life we were placed here to live.  

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Let’s consider one example of the power in the abundant life available for simply facing and accepting one’s personal responsibility:

Why would we allow another person’s behaviour to influence our response?  How could we let another person — who seems to have no interest in us or our care — influence our response, simply because they’ve behaved a certain way. 

It would be easier to do the proverbial ‘smile and wave’ and to allow the other person to have no impact on us.  Easier in this way: once we get over the initial trigger to REACT, we simply “kick the dust off our feet” and let them be them.  

When we experience situations where people put us in troubling circumstances, we still have the agency of options.  

At least we still have the choice to rebuff them — and perhaps to be seen as taking offense — or we can choose to give the other person their way (letting them be irresponsible and face their consequences).  

But such a choice must come because we wanted to in our heart — otherwise we lie to and betray ourselves.  

However illogical it may seem to WANT to give a protagonist their way that has troubled us is beside the point.  The point is agreeing that we CAN do this, and that we WANT to do this – it must come from a heart in agreement or we betray ourselves.  

It comes from the decision beforehand to extend patience for crudeness, kindness for cruelty, love for hatred or indifference, peace amid conflict.  

This is about accepting and owning our response is up to us, it’s our choice, not allowing another person’s unkempt attitude and behaviour draw us into thoughts and actions that do not meet our own moral code.  

Ultimately, as a Christian, I see it as a power that comes from God, to extend a grace knowing all the incomparable graces that have been extended to me!  

Power for the abundant life is available to the measure of simply taking account for my personal responsibility — taking a lower place that I may gain a higher place by a choice of spiritual supremacy, giving up the material and temporal for the spiritual and eternal.