Jason Albertson

In the last installment, we looked at what we should use our rights for. In this post, we’ll look at what we should do when someone violates our rights. There are several main options, I think, and they’re not necessarily exclusive of one another: Ruminate We can contemplate the wrong done, rehearsing it mentally and verbally. There may be several reasons someone might ruminate over injustice, including self-doubt (“Am I really sure of what happened? Might I have misunderstood?”) and anger (“I’m just furious that they would do that! How dare they [rumination commences here]!”). The danger in rumination is that people have a tendency to be shaped by what they think about. To paraphrase Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart , there are people who would not know who they were if they weren’t holding onto and ruminating over an injustice. The tendency to find our identity in how we’ve been hurt increases with time. Rumination is not a permanent solution; eventually, permanent rumina...

What are we supposed to do with rights? Rights are expectations that are backed up by authority, whether inherent or delegated. The ultimate authority is God. He set up the universe in all the ways that give people inherent or delegated rights. True rights come from Him. What we -- I -- should do with other people’s rights is  honor  them. That makes sense, doesn’t it? If I honor someone’s rights, I’m ultimately honoring the one who delegated the rights. I’m bowing to the power of the One higher than both of us. Rights give authority, and authority carries power. That’s an important connection, and it leads toward the answer to a harder question: What should I do with my rights -- that is, the power God has given me? The answer is shaped by the type of universe we live in: this particular universe was made by the God who revealed Himself through the Hebrew and Greek (and Aramaic, sometimes) Scriptures. He created the earth, its flora and fauna, and man, and He endo...