Rules Exist to Serve People, Not the Reverse

A note to young leaders.

Indulge me in a hypothetical.

You stand on the edge of a precipice. You hold in one hand a baby, and in the other, the oldest surviving manuscript of the Bible. You must let go of one. Which do you drop?

The answer, I hope, is obvious. You’d drop the Bible and save the baby. The sacred outranks the holy every time.

But the cliff is a fraud, or at least a flattery. In real life, we almost never stand at its edge, making one clean terrible choice while the wind howls.

What you get instead is a Tuesday – and Tuesdays are more subtle and more treacherous than cliffs. Let me tell you about one.

An Australian couple planned their wedding reception in a church courtyard in Milan. But it rained on the day, so they asked the priest if they could move inside. He agreed, reluctantly, on one condition: a little cake, a little wine, one song, then home.

Instead, the wine flowed, the songs multiplied, and before long, the church was full of din and laughter.

The priest paced the sacristy, appalled. His assistant, meaning to calm him, said: “But even Jesus attended a wedding feast.”

“I KNOW Jesus attended a wedding feast,” the priest snapped. “But they didn’t have the Blessed Sacrament there!”

The priest heard the din. The assistant heard the laughter. One guarded the holy; the other glimpsed the sacred.

And all along, the book you dropped off the cliff had the answer: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”