Respect

I paid a huge price for you: all of Egypt, with rich Cush and Seba thrown in!
That’s how much you mean to me! That’s how much I love you!

Isaiah 43:4

This word is still on my mind: Respect. It seems the fundamental problem in my life, and it is certainly a problem at my job. The Staff has to routinely talk to the children we take care of about respect for things and each other.

We used the word so much it seems to have no meaning. Then I read the dictionary definition of respect, and then I found God talking about it. I had never thought the bible talked much about it. And yet right in Isaiah (and elsewhere) he does.

Its about valuing something or someone. Or at the very least acknowledging their value.

That made me think of respect in a whole new way, one that was far more practical. For example, I readily cast blame on others. Its kind of my thing. On the doctor for not knowing how to diagnose, on past bosses for being uncaring, or on my wife for anything really.

But one day I was prompted to look up blaming on the internet, because it seemed inherently disrespectful for some reason. One the Wikipedia page for Blame it says this:  Blaming is also a way of devaluing others. 

This stopped me in my tracks. This is not valuing others, this is not showing them (especially my wife) how much they mean to me, this is vicious. We get mad at China for their currency manipulation, but show little regard for the fact that Blaming is currency manipulation of the worst sort: it devalues another person. A person who is the very image of God. Everyone of us is, whether or not we take the name of Jesus.

Amen.