Quotes about Standards

The fact is, you can't marry the best when you're dating the runner-up. While you're searching for Mr. Right, don't settle for Mr. Right Now.

Legalism lowers, rather than raises, God's standards. Loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, bringing about justice, forgiving enemies—none of these reduces to a set of rules. Indeed, any list of rules narrows the breadth of what God wants done in the world. It moves the emphasis away from dispensing God's grace to sinners toward a pointless competition with pseudo-saints. It makes faith petty and irrelevant, not something that urgently matters.

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.

Some people need a targeted kind of learning. They need a different approach, like charter schools. There are virtual classrooms that some will do well in. The reality is, if there are no options, if there is just one particular standard, then someone is going to fall through the cracks, as we've seen.

God tests His servants with obedience. He deliberately places us in situations where the standards of religion and society would appear to justify our actions. He allows others, especially those close to us, to encourage us to protect ourselves. We may even think we would be noble and protect others by avenging ourselves. But this is not God's way. It is the way of the world's wisdom. It is earthly and fleshly.

When we filter everything through past hurts, rejections, and experiences, we find it impossible to believe God. We cannot believe He means what He says. We doubt His goodness and faithfulness since we judge Him by the standards set by man in our lives. But God is not a man! He cannot lie (Num. 23:19). His ways are not like ours, and His thoughts are not ours (Isa. 55:8—9).

Don't settle for poor performers. Keep in mind that one great person will always out-produce and out-perform two mediocre people.

I believe that quality level is determined primarily by the actual design of the product itself, not by quality control in the production process.

I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education.

The worst kind of businesses are ones where there are no expectations set out for employees.

For Alinsky, morality is a scam. Morality is the cloak of power. Activists appeal to the language of morality but recognize that it is a mere disguise. As Alinsky puts it, "Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times... In action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent with one's individual conscience... You do what you can with what you have, and then clothe it with moral garments."

In the meantime, it's unfair of me to use my expectations as the standard for their behavior or hold it against them when they don't live up to my hopes.