Core Values

I’m a little late in pointing it out, although I suspect many of you have read it already, but Gwynne does an excellent job over at The Shallow End of articulating her “core values.”

This is not a purely academic or literary exercise, either. We each need to be able to explain what we believe and why we believe it. Exercising the discipline to determine these things in advance makes it much easier to bring some clarity to situations that might otherwise seem ambiguous. One can avoid a lot of stress in life by working these things out.

I’m not going to provide my own version of Gwynne’s list (although it would look remarkably — or, perhaps, not so remarkably — like hers), but rather suggest that if you haven’t given thought to these things in an organized manner and are somewhat stymied by how to begin, a good starting place would be a seemingly simple verse in the Old Testament book of Micah (chapter 6, verse 8, to be exact):

I love this verse (I’ve used it plenty of times on this blog), because it cuts through all the junk we try add to either make God acceptable to us or vice versa. But once you wrap your head around the simplicity of God’s expectations, you’ve got a foundation that you can build a sturdy set of moral values upon, a foundation that won’t shift alarmingly even during the turbulent times we now live in.