#10 Your One Rule

Batman has one rule to keep him from becoming a bad guy: he doesn’t kill people. I believe that this one simple rule truly does make up the difference between good guys and bad guys, but in more ways than you might think. So today we are going to look at the one rule and see what we can do with this idea in our own lives. Off we go!

First off, you might be thinking “if rules are such a good thing, why not make a lot of them? He’s called the dark knight, right? Why not create an entire knight’s code of superhero chivalry?” I’ve got several reasons why this is bad. The first is that the more rules you have, the easier it is to bend and break them. I mean, Batman has just one, and his enemies test it constantly. How much longer would he be able to stand if he had lots of rules? It probably wouldn’t go well for him.

The other reason is that it’s hard to have good motives when you are trying to follow a bunch of rules. Jesus knew this well. He broke rules left and right because he cared more about people’s intentions than their actions. That’s the important thing about our lives: we need to keep one or two rules so that we don’t go off the deep end, but the rest needs to be about our intentions. We need to stay in touch with our “why” so that we are able to adapt and be flexible with all the craziness of life. 

Think about the last few years of your life. Do you think you could have predicted exactly how they were going to go? If your answer was “yes,” then try to predict the next five years and see how well you do. Life throws us curveballs, problems, and situations we couldn’t have possibly predicted. We need to be able to react on the fly, and the best way to make sure that we follow the right path is to make sure our intentions are still good. 

And that doesn’t just mean we don’t have too many rules, but that we deepen our understanding of our why. Batman doesn’t just say “I don’t kill because my parents were killed.” It’s because he believes that once he gets a taste for murder, he will like it too much, turning himself into a villain who does whatever he pleases in the name of justice. It’s about understanding why we keep that rule, and why it needs to be sacred. 

Ultimately, our one rule is like a wall that keeps us from going where we don’t want to end up. And usually, it’s worth worrying about ending up there because it’s where everyone ends up. It can be easy to be a “meh” person with a “meh” life. Oftentimes reaching for anything more will feel like swimming against the current. But our one rule is just to keep you from completely falling down. Maybe you’re in a workplace that doesn’t work very hard. You could make a rule that you will never spend an entire day doing nothing. Maybe you are driving down a highway that’s going really fast. You could make a rule to make sure the speedometer doesn’t go over 150mph.

Whatever your one rule is, make it the place you want to make sure you never go. Make that rule serious, make it sacred. Here are the three questions that you want to ask yourself to help understand what your one rule should be:

1 Where do I want to be going?

2 Where is the opposite direction of that?

3 What’s a line that I could draw to never wind up in that opposite direction? 

Let me give you an example from my own life.

1 In my career, I want to always be growing. Learning new things and getting new skills that make me worth more of a paycheck. 

2 The opposite of that is complacency. If I do the same things the same way every day, saying “screw it” all the time, then that will be me getting complacent. 

3 I could draw the line of never working in retail. It won’t give me growth and I can’t make a career out of it. So I will say that I will never work retail. 

And Boom! You have your one rule! And, just to be clear, I didn’t have this one in mind before I started writing. I came up with this for the sake of explaining it to you. I have, however, done one for resting on Sundays. Let me give you that one as another example:

1 I want to be resetting all the parts of me that get over-used during the week so that I can be the best me, working with pride and joy again on Monday. 

2 I lean towards being over-active until I crash and burn, pushing myself until I drop at the most inconvenient of times. 

3 A line I could draw is to be at home on Sundays. If I’m out and about, I will get tired, so I will stay home. 

Like I said, these rules won’t push you forward, they will just keep you out of the deep ends of bad. Think of them like those bumpers that some of us like to use when we go bowling. Rules keep you out of the gutters. And once you’re in the gutter, it’s really hard to come back out. It’s not impossible, but it will be a pain to try, so don’t do it!I pray that God points out your gutters to you and that you have the strength, courage and wisdom to avoid them like your city of Gotham depended on it. 

Until Next Time

May Peace be your Guide.