Teach Your Children Well

“Teach your children well,” memorable lyrics by Graham Nash. Seems that kind of advice would go a long way to keep the court system a little more under control.

I finally finished my long tenure as a juror. It was a civil trial. That is, no real criminal laws were broken. It was a case of a business against a business, and more along the lines of poor judgment and iffy ethics. There was offense, to be sure. But a lot of it could have been avoided with some foundational principles established early, like in childhood.

During the early days of the trial I found myself musing on certain proverbs I came across in a book by the same name, like:

If a man digs a pit, he will fall into it. (26:27)

And:

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. (14:12)

I’m sure there wasn’t a person in that court, on either side, who didn’t feel justified in both thought and action.

I won’t go into details. In the end we jurors had to decide. I can say this: When it was finally over, not everyone was satisfied.

But I came away with the sense that, while the trial ended, it’s not over. The Lord has not necessarily had his say.

Here’s another from Proverbs:

A man’s ways are in full view of the Lord; he examines all his paths. (5:21)

We jurors will never learn of the ongoing fate of the parties involved. But we can know this:

The Lord condemns a crafty man, but a good man obtains favor from the Lord. (12:2)*

That will hold, whether we learned it in childhood or not.

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*Quoted in reverse order