Supporting and Sustaining

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I do not know who wrote the following poem, but I have known it since I was a teenager:

I passed one day through a lonely town,

and saw some man tearing a building down.

With a “heave” and “ho” and a husky yell,

they swung a beam, and a side wall fell.

I asked the foreman ”Are these men skilled?

The type you’d hire if you had to build?”

“Oh no” he chuckled, “oh no indeed,

the common laborer’s all I need.

Why I can destroy in a day or two,

what builders have taken weeks to do.”

I thought to myself as I walked away,

which of these roles have I tried to play?

Am I a builder, who works with care,

making his tools a ruler and square.

Shaping my peers to a well made plan,

helping them be the best they can.

Or am I a wrecker who walks around,

content with the labor of tearing down?

We choose every day to either build or wreck people around us. I have found it interesting to watch people who are wreckers for the most part try to sell themselves as those able to build things in our lives. They are 'common labor'. It has always been easier to destroy than to create.

No matter whom you support in this election cycle, consider how they campaign. Do they build up others or only themselves? Do they admit their human failings or only attack others for theirs? What do they build? What do they wreck? The type of person they support and sustain tells you a great deal about their character. I'm not talking about those whom they claim to sustain, but I mean those whom they actually sustain.

It has been said that when we opt not to support and defend one another we essentially betray one another. I find it odd that the same people who will be the Brutus to the Caesar of your life will then expect you to turn around and enthusiastically support them. Many of them will leverage this on Christian charity, something they have not first shown to you. Likewise, many of our leaders get where they are by stomping on our backs and then want us to back them. Attitude reflects leadership, and when the leadership treats you with disdain it becomes difficult to support and sustain.

Good leaders build things and people. When I was trained as a young man in the principles of leadership, I learned that true leaders train up their replacements. However, most of the leaders I see trample people down and hold them there as long as they can. They think they are smarter and better, but even if they are correct that does not license them to treat us as refuse. They are wreckers- out to destroy in a day or two what takes many months or even decades to build. By contrast, good leaders look to the ruler and square, which are interesting tools to choose. They help you keep things straight, encourage exactness and honor, and maintain right angles. True leaders help the people they lead become the best they can be, even when that means some of their followers eclipse them and become better than the leader was.

For many men, that's a threat. In their arrogance and pride, they love not actually being the best but rather the pleasure of appearing to be the best. One thing they should remember is that a facade is easier to tear down than a building built upon a rock made of rocks. Good people are supported in the end by the earth itself, for they are grounded in truth.