perspective...

I had lunch today with a guy who is helping oversee the logistics for about 600 emergency personnel who are traveling from IL to Lousianna to help with the situation down there. It's a huge job for him and his crew.

Because of his involvement in emergency situations on a local, county, and state level, he has some great insight into what is going on down there. I just can't understand the confusion and why everyone is blaming someone else. So I asked him about it.

So as to not publish anything that he might prefer to be unpublished, let me just say that he gave me good perspective. All you need is someone to make a bad decision, which impacts the other decisions down the line, adding further compication to the decisions that need to be made. It's an illustration of the power of one.

This is me, not this guy...let's say that the mayor of New Orleans makes a decision to approve an emergency evacuation plan that doesn't include tens of thousands of people who don't have vehicles. That decision impacts the decisions that his emergency personnel have to make. So now, instead of having to make decisions about how to get water out of the city, they also have to make decisions about what to do with tens of thousands of stranded people in the Superdome. But because they were unprepared to make those decisions, the opportunity to make poor decisions increases exponentially. And on down the line until we have incredible chaos and disorder.

Boy, I'm sure glad that I don't have to carry that kind of responsibility and weight! Whew...I'm off the hook...or am I?

I make decisions every day. So do you. And the decisions we make will either create order and health in the lives of other people or they will contribute to choas and disease. When we short-change a decision, it impacts more than just us. There is no decision that can effect just me...none.

The way that I choose to communicate love to my son and daughter, will diretly impact their ability to receive and communicate love in the future. The decisions I make will play out generations...people who will only know me as "my great-great-great-grandfather, Matt Furr."

My decision to confront a person and bring healthy discussion to a fractured relationship will impact so many other people.

There are not too many casual decisions that we make throughout the day. It might not matter what color socks I wear (unless it's such a distraction that is causes a traffic accident as the person driving by stares while I walk down the sidewalk). But the choices I make about how I interact with others, how I give myself to my work, the corners I choose to not cut...these are all decisions that will ripple through the lives of other people for (potentially) generations.

We're looking at the result of some key bad decisions by people who should have known better. But every day, we live in the ramifications of key bad decisions that we and others make all the time.

It makes me pretty thankful for a mysterious thing called grace...

Peace on the journey,

M@