Rules!

Earlier, I came across some 'rules', allegedly given by Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame) to a class of school pupils. However, a check on Snopes.com, suggested that this is untrue - and also provides an additional three.  The full fourteen are here reproduced.   They make interesting reading! (I have edited the 'Americanisms'!)

Rule No. 1:   Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teenager uses the phrase "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realised Rule No. 1. 

Rule No. 2:   The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It'll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it's not fair. (See Rule No. 1) 

Rule No. 3:   Sorry, you won't make £40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn't have a Gap label. 

Rule No. 4:   If you think your teacher is tough, wait 'til you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it. 

Rule No. 5:   Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend. 

Rule No. 6:   It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of "It's my life," and "You're not the boss of me," and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it's on your penny. Don't whine about it, or you'll sound like a baby boomer. 

Rule No. 7:   Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the wardrobe in your bedroom. 

Rule No. 8:   Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn't. In some schools, they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and Dux has been scrapped, lest anyone's feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.) 

Rule No. 9:   Life is not divided into terms, and you don't get summers off. Not even an Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we're at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realisation. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.) 

Rule No. 10:   Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston. 

Rule No. 11:   Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

Rule No. 12:   Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts. 

Rule No. 13:   You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately. 

Rule No. 14:   Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realise how wonderful it was to be a child. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

Life, death, and victory.

It’s still Sunday! (well, you know what I mean!). This morning, I awoke unusually early, and listened to the final fifteen minutes of a radio programme presented by the well-known broadcaster, Fergal Keane. The subject of the programme appeared to be the inevitability of death, and the different ways in which particular people had faced up to it. I realise that I had missed the first half of the programme, but the thing that appeared to be missing in the second half was any concept of hope.

That, of course, is one of the central aspects of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus, the Christ. The New Testament never tries to deny that, until the Second Coming of the Lord, physical death is the appointed lot of each and every one of us. “… each person is destined to die once and, after that, comes judgement.” writes the author of the Letter to Hebrew disciples of Jesus (Heb.9:27). However, that same writer goes on to say that “… Christ died once, for all time, as a sacrifice to take away the sins of many people.” In other words, because of the death of Jesus, as the ultimate sacrificial Lamb of God, those who have placed their trust in Him have already passed from death to life – the very life of God, here and now!

Paul, too, speaks of this wonderful hope. Writing to the believers in Rome, he has this to say: “… we … also groan, even ’though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffereing. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as His adopted children, including the new bodies He has promised us .” (8:24).

That’s why, as one of my own daughters once put it to me, the one whose trust is in Christ Jesus may not relish the process of dying, but has no fear of death. He, Jesus, has already conquered it. So Paul can write, this time to the Corinthian believers: “But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed. It will happen in a moment; in the blink of an eye; when the last trumpet is blown. For, when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed. For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies.

“Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. But thank God! He gives us victory over sin, and death, through our Lod Jesus Christ.” (I Cor.15:51-57).