Gravity is a physical law. The universe we live in teaches us early on that this is not one to be messed with. As a child I remember jumping off our front wall, the Church steps, rows of bleachers and testing the law of gravity. I wanted to see how high I could go before it really hurt. This is typically the way a child learns about most of the laws that govern us. We do the same as young adults when we push up against the political laws and social conventions. We tend to see how far we can push things before it hurts, kinda like the way I set my car’s cruise at 9 miles over the speed limit. Funny, huh.
Humans, I believe, are also governed by a moral law. In BTL practices I illustrate this by way of the “justice thread.” We don’t really have a justice thread running from our chest to our abdomen but we do have a muscle called the transverse abdominus that does. This is the muscle that holds the rest of the core muscles together. I think of the justice thread similarly. Picture your justice thread running right down your midsection. When you were a kid playing on the playground with your favorite toy and somebody bigger pryed it from your tiny fingers, you knew that wasn’t right. In fact, you had been wronged. You cried, you called for help, you sulked, or you fought back. Your justice thread had been tweaked. I like to pull at that imaginary thread to demonstrate to the team that when somebody is tweaked, they literally “go sideways.” This is why.
Humans want justice. We are wired to want things put to rights. We live in a world filled with humans whose justice threads are sideways. When your sense of justice is sideways it’s really tough to see straight. And yet sideways humans, govern our systems and serve as judge and jury. Sideways humans run our companies and our countries.
Sideways humans have another problem. You see, our justice threads tell us when we’ve been tweaked like having a four alarm fire siren erupting inside our heads. We practically explode when we’ve been done wrong by another. We heard the siren and felt the explosion. Reverse the equation. When we wrong another what happens inside of us. We may hear something faint, our conscious may slightly provide a nudge, and we may feel saddened for the plight of another. We rarely thinks it’s a big deal, afterall it’s not like they’re bleeding to death or cut to the bone. “Get over it,” we say to ourselves and oftentimes to others. We are, naturally, overtuned to “me.” A learned “second” nature is required…
Today, as you lead whatever team you are leading,, understand that each teammate has a justice thread and it’s, most likely, gone sideways. Your job is to set things to rights as best a sideways human can. You are responsible. You are the law. You are the head of some system and there are sideways humans counting on you making it fair. Ignore this law at your own risk. Ignoring the law of gravity may not hurt when you take a leap without thinking from the first floor, quite different when you jump from the top of the building.
It’s no different when you ignore the moral law. The higher you’ve risen, remember, the harder you FALL.
God, help me understand why you’ve wired us this way. And, give me your wisdom to see beyond me.
God, help me…
BUILT TO LEAD 