beware the following is better defined as a journey and not a map I have been indulging in a guilty pleasure resently. Over the last few weeks I have allowed myself to watch the second season of the West Wing. Aaron Sorkin has a mastery of the english laguage that is rarely present in modern visual media. In a recent episode, a poll turns up unfavorable numbers regarding the publics opinion about a certain topic. The initial response by the staff is that they will have to "dial down the rhetoric" about the topic. One voice of wisdom speaks up and replies that they must dial up the attention the topic gets so as to convince those that disagree with them. To prove the point the wise one makes the comparison of a French Revolutionary who sees the masses running one direction and responds, " I must find out where they are running so I can lead them there." The conclusion is that this is a ridiculous attitude for anyone to take in leadership. There were many applications in recent events to which I began to apply this idea. Jump to a conversation I had in the car a few days ago. We were talking about CIU and preasures that are place on each other to perform in different ways. For those whose lives are more public than others, the pressure is even greater for if we "trip on stage" everyone sees for the spotlight is on us. Jump to the sermon at my church today. The example was given of a duck who was in school and at this school he recieved high marks for swimming average marks for flying, and low marks for running. As a result he was forced to spend extra time working on running. This wore down his webbed feet and caused his grades in swimming to drop from high to average. Jump back to visual media. As I think about great motivational moments in movies where a person desperately needed to influence people to act, I saw a connection between all of the above ideas. In Braveheart, when William Wallace needed to motivate the scottsmen to fight, he did not gain success by calling them cowards, holding them at sword point, or threatening them with condemnation. He appealled to their positive qualities. He appealed to their pride as Scottsmen. He appealed to their desires of freedom. Simply put he motivated them by accentuating the positive. Aragorn, at the last battle in front of the Black Gates, did not condemn the men for the fear they felt. Rather he connected with them, "I see in your eyes the same fear that would grip the heart of me." He acknowledged that their was the possibility of failure, "There may be a day..." But he appealed to their bonds of brotherhood and used his own resolve as an encouragement to those present, "...it is not this day." Where am I going with this increasingly scattered thought pattern? I feel that we have greatly missed a key concept as we relate to each other. That is, we fail to accentuate the positive. One wrong against us undoes a multitude of good. A person makes a mistake and we no longer show them trust or respect. A person says something or does something they shouldn't and the next time they are on stage leading worship we let that act dominate our thoughts. Rarely on a day-to-day basis will we let people know when we see them doing things right, however we feel the duty to correct them each time we see them act in a way that we feel they shouldn't. Worse, we do not approach them about it but harbor negative thoughts towards them. Psychologists have coined the idea positive reinforcement. Now I am not one to claim that negative discipline isn't necessary, but if we forget to be positive, there is little hope of a healthy environment. Finally, Jump to a beach where Jesus talks face to face with Peter who had denied that he had ever known Christ in his hour of need. If we are to be living out the life of Christ, shouldn't we also extend the same grace to those who have sinned as Christ extends to Peter? | 
