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Respect

December

What do you do when you are in the hospital recuperating from bilateral knee
replacement surgery and Carroll County Times leaves a voice mail reminding you that
your religious column article is due in 4 days? Panic, you say? Well, panic was certainly
my first option! The second option was to bite-the-bullet and write the article. However
a topic for the religious column seemed very distant from my brain that had been put on
half time from the anesthesia only four days earlier. When a tech entered the hospital
room to take more blood tests, I interviewed her to test if I could think clearly. I asked
her the question, “ So…, with all that is going on in the world today, what is the one
thing you think is a real problem in our society?” Her reaction was surprising to me.
First, she admitted that she did not have a lot of years wracked up age-wise to compare
the past with the present and humbly she stated that she may not have enough learned
knowledge to give an educated answer. I immediately assured her that her personal
opinion was valuable and important to me.
Then she surprised me again with an answer I thought to be near-ingenious! She said
that the one thing that was lacking with people today was “a lack of respect” for one
another. As she took the first vile of blood from my arm, I asked where people learned
respect in today’s society! “Do they get “respect education” from home, or at school?” I
asked. She said, “Yes, we are taught not to lie or steal in school and at home, but people
ignore the training and do whatever they want!” I asked if she had read the Bible, ‘our
life training, policies and procedures manual’. The tech answered that she could not
understand the Bible. Right away a flag went up telling me that many churches could be
of more assistance to society by teaching the public about the Bible rather than having
in-church Bible study for believers. As I mulled over her comments, she filled the last
vial and departed. Delores, my roommate, confirmed that the “respect” conversation was
not a figment of my anesthesia-ladened imagination and even added some fine examples
of episodes in her own life where the “no respect” syndrome showed its ugly head in
public.
Webster defines respect as: to take into thoughtful regard; giving particular attention
to.
Rodney Dangerfield joked about respect:“I played hide and seek, and they wouldn’t
even look for me!” Tina Turner sang R- E- S- P- E- C- T; “We’ve got to show some
respect…” And many Bible references outline “respect” but perhaps the most
enlightening is: Jeremiah 1:4-5 (NRSV) in which Jeremiah states: “Now the word of the
Lord came to me saying, Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;” Can we obtain
any greater respect than the respect from our Lord, who planned for us before we were
born?