My Dad (BTW // Happy Birthday Dad!) sent me this article written by Mark Rutland, the President of Oral Roberts University. He wrote it for Charisma Magazine, and I find much of what he writes to be perfectly said. He writes on the “10 things I Wish I’d Know when I was 21.”
I especially liked #3 and #9…
3. Kindness is better than being right. Just before my friend Jamie Buckingham died, I asked him for a word of wisdom. He said, “It is better to be kind than to be right.”
At 21, I advocated my positions too aggressively. I argued with an eye toward winning, unconcerned about the heart of my “adversary,” who may not have been adversarial at all. I made debate a contact sport. In preaching I let the bad dog off the chain, to the applause of the gallery.
Should time travel be mine and were I to be back in the land of 21, I would be kinder and less concerned with being right. Too many young adults give little thought to kindness.
They Twitter hurtful words like poisonous birds. Their humor is mocking, acidic and unkind. And they are more concerned with being thought clever than with being kind. The value of gentleness has declined on the world market; if I were 21 again I would wish to know the worth of a kind word.
9. Forgiveness doesn’t fix everything. Not the happiest truth I wish I had known, but it’s among the most sobering. Had I known this I might have been less callous, less reckless and more mindful of the cost.
There are things, relationships and hearts that once broken cannot be fully “fixed” by forgiveness. The wound, the uncaring and insensitive word—they may be forgiven, but the damage from them may never quite be right again.
When I was 21 I just wanted to be forgiven. I wish I had known to do less damage.
Read the rest of the article HERE: http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/component/content/article/1078-features/26518-10-things-i-wish-id-known-when-i-was-21#ixzz0kc95Oe0O
