Time with God – Lisa Keys

We’ve all done it. Someone pushes our buttons a bit too far…and we respond. That response was probably not our finest work!

Or we read something and we feel an urgency to hit the keyboard with our opinion, not stopping to consider the context, or the external factors, or that, whilst we may have a valid opinion, there might actually be more than one way to reach a desired outcome.

How often do we intervene with our boys, encouraging them to act with respect for the other boys? If we are really honest, we would all admit that that has been times when we would have benefitted from someone reminding us to treat each other with respect.

Recently I attended a training workshop where we participated in some role play. Firstly, we sat in one seat and outlined a scenario - a situation we were being faced with. We then moved seats and sat in the other person’s seat, outlining the situation from their perspective. Wow! It really made me think.

Matthew 7:12 says:

“So, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

This reminds me of the words my primary school Principal often said in assembly, I can still see him counting the words on his fingers as he said them:

‘Do as you would be done by.’

To tie in with our vision of raising generations of Christ-like men, BBNI launched new values in September 2024. These values are Courage, Respect, Integrity and Responsibility. Alone, we have no hope of living out these values every day, but we’re not supposed to do it alone. Through God’s grace we have a brilliant role model, Jesus, who not only told us how to live out those values, but he showed us, through the stories told in the Bible of his time here on earth. We can come to him every day, say sorry for the mess we made of situations yesterday and start the new day afresh, knowing he is right beside us, helping us as we strive to do better.

So, when those situations come, when our buttons are really being pushed, maybe we should pause, say a silent prayer for grace, and respond in a respectful way, just as we would want others to respond to us.