Why Do Nice Guys/Girls Finish Last?

Why Do Nice Guys/Girls Finish Last? 

by Allen Laudenslager & Bryan Neva

The last will be first, and the first will be last.

     - Jesus (Matt 20:16) 

     

So why do nice guys/girls finish last?  The short answer is that nice guys/girls don’t really finish last but appear to finish last because they play by a different set of rules than the world does.  The world's standards of success are the polar opposite of God's standards of success, and nice guys/girls play by God’s rules for living a decent and wholesome life.

The world says you’re a winner if you’re financially wealthy; God says you’re a winner if you’re spiritually wealthy by laying up treasures in heaven through kindness and generosity.  The world says you're a winner if you're powerful; God says you're a winner if you serve others.  The world says you’re a winner if you’re smart and articulate; God says you’re a winner if you use the gifts and talents he has given you in order to live up to your full human potential. The world says you're a winner if you earn awards and accolades; God says you're a winner if you earn the "crown of life" by spending eternity with Him in heaven.  The world says you're a winner if you're popular and well-liked; God says you're a winner if He's pleased with your behavior.  The world says you’re a winner if you’re physically attractive; God says you’re a winner if you’re beautiful on the inside. 

In a worldly sense, playing by God's rules is just not as exciting or immediately satisfying as playing by the world's rules.  As human beings, we're wired to enjoy that lift and sense of well being that a “hit” of adrenalin gives us.  Almost everyone can remember that high they got as a kid every time they rode their bicycle as fast as they could downhill right on the edge of control. We get that same sense of pleasure when we push the boundaries of behavior, like that bicycle, right on the edge of control.

Conversely, nice guys/girls seem to finish last because they add something beyond instant gratification to the mix.  They ask the question, "Is what I am doing and measuring success by right in God’s eyes?"  Even non-religious, humanist nice guys/girls live by a different set of standards than the world does. They ask a similar question, "Is what I'm doing right, honest, and ethical?  If the answer yes, they do it; if no, they don't do it.  They ask, "Is what I'm doing going to hurt anyone or anything?"  If the answer is no, they do it; if yes, they don't do it.

If we want to become true winners in the game of life, then we must live by God's standards of right conduct and not the world's.

ABBA and the price of fame

Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA by Carl Magnus Palm (2009)

I'm an ABBA fan!  (Yes, I'll admit it.)  I started listening to them back in the 70s when I was a teenager.  My brother Wayne and I had several of their long-playing 33 rpm albums and 45 rpm singles in our record collection.  (No, they didn't have CDs back then.)  So I was really excited when I recently came across a serious biography of the the pop-music group.

ABBA was a popular music group formed in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972 which comprised Agnetha Faltskog (A, high soprano vocals, married/divorced to Bjorn), Bjorn Ulvaeus (B, guitar, vocals, composer, producer, married/divorced to Agnetha), Benny Andersson (B, keyboard, vocals, composer, producer, married/divorced to Anni-Frid), and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (A, low soprano vocals, married/divorced to Benny).  Managed by Stig Anderson under the Polar Music label, they became one of the most commercially successful music groups in the history of popular music selling well over 381 million albums and singles worldwide and have been inducted into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame.  Their record sales and popularity are right up there with Elvis Presley and the Beatles.  Their success made each of the ABBA members quite wealthy and their manger, Stig Anderson, the wealthiest man in Sweden.  At one time, worldwide earnings from ABBA made up a significant portion of the Swedish GNP (exceeded only by Volvo). 

Here's few interesting things I learned:

• Agnetha (A) is actually extremely introverted and private, was never comfortable performing in public, touring, or being in the public eye, and has more-or-less shunned the limelight since the group broke up in the early 80s.  She was also a very doting mother to her two children, hating leaving them to do appearances, and has never emotionally recovered from her divorce with Bjorn.
• Bjorn (B) is actually a brilliant composer and lyricist and wrote most of the lyrics to ABBA's songs.  He and Benny have been song writing partners since the 60s. He is also an avowed atheist.
• Benny (B) is also a brilliant composer but not very good with lyrics.  He and Bjorn are right up there with Lennon and McCartney in their music composing abilities and successes.  His first instrument was the accordion.  He also became a father when he was a teenager, and left his wife and two children to pursue a music career.
• Anni-Frid (A) was actually from Norway and was the illegitimate daughter of a German soldier and a Norwegian teenage girl.  Her grandmother brought her to Sweden to raise her because of extreme prejudice in Norway.  Anni-Frid also became a mother when she was a teenager, and like Benny left her husband and two children in her early twenties to pursue a music career.  Later on in life, her daughter was tragically killed in a car accident in New York in 1998, and her third husband, Prince Heinrich Reuss, died of cancer in 1999.
• Stig Anderson like Anni-Frid came from a very poor, single parent background and through hard work and determination built a successful music business.  Like Bjorn, he was also a talented lyricist and helped write the lyrics to several of ABBA's biggest hits including Waterloo.  Unfortunately, he also was quite abrasive, a cheapskate, a workaholic, and an alcoholic.  After the breakup of ABBA, there was a falling out between Stig and the ABBA members due to financial improprieties.          

The book details how popularity and profit has their price and how their lives epitomize the old saying, "be careful of what you wish for...it might just come true." 

Here are a few links to some of my favorite ABBA hits:

Waterloo (this won the Eurovision song contest and catapulted ABBA to super-stardom), Bang-A-Boomerang, Dancing Queen, Fernando, Knowing Me Knowing You (written by Bjorn after Agnetha and the kids moved out of the mansion),  Take a Chance on Me,  The Winner Takes It All (Agnetha's favorite, written by Bjorn after the divorce), Cassandra (see my essay The Cassandra Complex),  The Day Before You Came (ABBA's last recording)

"What defines a genus?" by Adam Ketola

Today's guest blog comes from my nephew Adam Ketola.  Adam is a Chemist and lives and works in Minneapolis.

I've been reading this book about Nikola Tesla written by Sean Patrick.  The author posts a question in the beginning, "What defines a genius?"  One would think that having a high IQ would make one more successful to the point of labeling them a genius, but IQ is only a number and in reality we only need just high enough of an IQ to present opportunity.  So the answer is no, we don't need a high IQ to be successful.

The next theory is the 10,000-hour rule.  The rule states that by practicing or studying something for a total of 10,000 hours that is when one will be truly great at something.  This seems to be only true for professional athletes such as Tiger Woods, but not the case for everyone. 

Finally, Dr. Barrios did a study on truly great minds such as Nikola Tesla.  What he found was that people who were successful and considered a genius lived by a certain code.  They lived life on the basis of not what life offered them, but on the basis of how they could empower themselves to add meaning to life. 

Unfortunately, most people these days live life the way society tells them to.  Society says we need an education and to work hard in order to find a job and that will make us successful.  This is true to a certain extent, but by living by this code, one will never step out to become a genius. 

The way to becoming a genius is not living the way society tells us, but rather stepping out, empowering ourselves and making a difference!  Everyone has the capability of becoming a genius, but one must first accept the opportunity.

10 Things you must give up to move forward

The Cassandra Complex

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the Trojan King Priam and his wife Hecuba.  Apollo, the god of prophecy, was infatuated with Cassandra’s beauty and gave her the gift of prophecy in order to win her love.  But Cassandra spurned Apollo’s romantic advances.  So Apollo cursed her so that no one would ever believe her prophetic warnings.  Cassandra, unable to convince people of her dire predictions, then had to spend the rest of her life watching helplessly as her prophetic warnings came true.  She knew what the future held but was unable to change it.

A “Cassandra complex” occurs when valid warnings about the future are ignored or dismissed and has become a metaphor used in psychology, environmentalism, science, medicine, politics, religion, and business. 

There are many “Cassandra’s” in our world today.  They write blogs, editorials, and books; they’re the talking heads on television news shows; they’re the voices on talk radio; they preach from the pulpits every Sunday; they debate and make political speeches; they warn people of unhealthy practices; they predict market trends; they advise people on how to invest their money; they warn people about the perils of climate change; and they put their jobs on the line for something they believe in, etcetera, etcetera.  Sometimes they’re right and other times they’re wrong which are why most of us remain skeptical because we can’t tell the difference between the warnings of true and false prophets.

Six months before the fatal Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly, a top ranking engineer with Morton Thiokol, tried to warn his superiors about the looming danger posed by the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters designed and manufactured by Morton Thiokol.  He warned Thiokol management of the adverse effects of cold weather on the O-ring seals of the boosters writing, “the result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life.” 

The night before the launch, when the weather at the Florida launchpad dipped below freezing temperatures, Mr. Boisjoly and four other Thiokol engineers joined in a teleconference with NASA and Thiokol vice presidents, urging the Thiokol representatives to exercise their rights as the manufacturer of a critical component to postpone the launch.  However, the vice presidents felt that the case for postponing the launch had been based more on gut feelings and hunches, and lacked the conclusive data required to delay the launch, which had already been postponed twice.  After advising the other Thiokol VPs to “take off their engineering hats and put on their management hats,” Thiokol general manager Jerry Mason gave the launch approval.

In the investigation that followed the disaster, Boisjoly became widely known as a whistle-blower when he provided internal Thiokol corporate documents to a presidential commission.  Included in the documents was the memo he had written warning of the danger to the O-rings in cold weather.  Following his testimony at the commission, he was cut off from space work at Thiokol and was shunned by colleagues and friends.  Morton Thiokol management even tried to make him a scapegoat for the disaster.  Boisjoly resigned from Thiokol in protest and never worked as an engineer again.

Boisjoly would later be vindicated for his actions, and awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.  He went on to speak at more than 300 universities and civics groups about corporate ethics, and became sought after as an expert in forensic engineering.  He died of cancer on January 6, 2012 at the age of 73.  [This was taken from an article by Joel Spark in Space Safety Magazine; also see this wikipedia article on Roger Boisjoly and this on his scapegoating at Morton Thiokol]

Roger Boisjoly was a true prophet or "Cassandra" and put his job on the line to avert the Challenger disaster.  But no one would listen to his warnings.  All management at Morton Thiokol and NASA had to do was use their natural reason and look at the empirical (observational) evidence Boisjoly provided.  

Much of our natural reason involves “pattern recognition”: we see A, B, and C occurring and we conclude D will result.  Meteorologists use this concept extensively to predict the weather; intelligence analysts use this concept to predict the actions of our enemies; and physicians use this concept to diagnose illnesses; psychologists use this concept to understand human behavior.  Often times in life it's nearly impossible to collect enough data to support our conclusions using deductive reasoning (top-down logic), so we must use our natural reason to make inferences and draw conclusions.  This is called inductive reasoning (bottom-up logic). 

There are some people who may have the gift of true prophecy like Cassandra and can predict the future.  But all the false prophets in the world drown out their message.  So use your God given ability of natural reason to filter truth from falsehood and strive to look for the truth.

(Note: Here's a link to one of my favorite ABBA songs Cassandra.)

Making Happy Memories by Todd Neva

December 25th 2013

Seven centuries before the birth of the Christ, Isaiah, the Prince of Prophets, wrote, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Immanuel, God With Us, was our Lord Jesus Christ, with humanity for thirty-three years, and then gone.

The humanity of Christ, from his lowly birth to the passion of his crucifixion to his departure from Earth, shows the nature and character of our God: a personal God, from whose image we've been created, whom we call Abba Father. Our God relates with us through our humanity, through life and death. Jesus Christ was with his disciples, and on the eve of his crucifixion he told his friends, “You will weep and lament.”

He knew the sorrow of his disciples that would follow his death. He knows your sorrow when you lost your friend, your spouse, your mother, your father, your brother, or your sister...

Christmas is a time when we gather with family. It is a time of joy and celebration. But for many, it is a time of sadness when there is one extra chair at the table.

I am keenly aware that the memories I make now with my family will one day turn into sadness. But the sadness will turn to joy as we meet again in Heaven.

Jesus Christ reassured his distressed disciples, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (Jn 16:22) Jesus prayed to his Father that he shall send a Comforter that he may abide with us forever. I pray for those whose Christmas is flooded by memories of a lost, loved one that they would know the Christ and be comforted by the One who knows their sorrow.

Read more about Todd and his struggle with ALS by following this link:

http://nevastory.com/

R U Ready for Christmas? (Final Part 6)

In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart!  I have overcome the world. - Jesus (John 16:33)

On Christmas day 1863 (during the American Civil War) the famous American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."  The poem tells about the author's sadness upon hearing the church bells ringing on Christmas day.   

The year 1863 had been an especially hard one for Longfellow, for he had suffered two major setbacks in life.  First, his wife Frances had died accidentally in a house fire; and second, his son had joined the Union army against his wishes and had been severely wounded in a battle in Virginia.  

That Christmas day in 1863 found Longfellow in deep despair as he contemplated the meaning of Christmas.  These events inspired him to write this poem:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,

and wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn

The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."
 

R U Ready for Christmas? (Part 5)

You've probably thought it's strange that I would post a series of articles on the need for repentance and salvation before Christmas.  But the Advent Season celebrated during the four weeks before Christmas is kind of  a miniature Lent (the 40 days preceding Easter).  It's a time to prepare for the coming of Christ when God became human in order to save the human race.

We're living in a difficult time in history when violence, terrorism, war, famine, natural disasters, social unrest, and moral decline are changing our world's landscape.  It seems that peace on earth and good will towards men has become a thing of the past.  One only need to watch the evening news, drive out on the highways, or navigate through the shopping mall parking lots to see this.  Our world is going to Hell in a hand-basket!

As much as we may complain about it, we can't force the rest of the world to behave well and treat others with love and kindness.  The only thing we can do is to work at changing ourselves for the better.  When we start becoming better people, the world starts to become better (one person at a time).

In a spiritual sense, think about one aspect of your life you'd like to change?  Are you enslaved to bad habits?  Are you addicted to something?  Is there something in your life that's dragging you down?  Ask God for a present this year for Christmas; ask God to free you from the slavery of sin!  Because this is why Christ came into the world in order to save us.   

R U Ready for Christmas? (Part 4)

The Centrality of Salvation 
by Blessed Pope John Paul II (excerpts from the book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 1994)

[T]he Enlightenment [movement] strikes at the heart of Christian soteriology, that is, [the] theological reflection on salvation and of redemption.  "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life" (Jn 3:16).  In this conversation with Nicodemus every word of Christ's response constitutes a point of contention for a mind-set born of the Enlightenment [movement].

Addressing the question, "Why is the history of salvation so complicated?"  Actually, it is very simple!  We can easily demonstrate its profound simplicity and wonderful internal logic by starting with the words Jesus addressed to Nicodemus.  The first affirmation is: "God so loved the world."  According to the Enlightenment mentality, the world does not need God's love.  The world is self-sufficient.  And God, in turn, is not, above all, Love.  If anything, He is Intellect, an intellect that eternally knows.  No one needs His intervention in the world that exists, that is self-sufficient, that is transparent to human knowledge, that is ever more free of mysteries thanks to scientific research, that is ever more an inexhaustible mine of raw materials for man-the demigod of modern technology.  This is the world that must make man happy.

Christ instead says to Nicodemus: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish" (cf. Jn 3:16).  In this way Jesus makes us understand that the world is not the source of man's ultimate happiness.  Rather, it can become the source of his ruin.  This world which appears to be a great workshop in which knowledge is developed by man, which appears as progress and civilization, as a modern system of communications, as a structure of democratic freedoms without any limitations, this world is not capable of making man happy.

When Christ speaks of the love that the Father has for the world, He merely echoes the first affirmation in the Book of Genesis which accompanies the description of creation: "God saw how good it was....  He found it very good" (Gn 1:12-31).  But this affirmation in no way constitutes the absolute assurance of salvation.  The world is not capable of making man happy.  It is not capable of saving him from evil, in all of its types and forms-illness, epidemics, cataclysms, catastrophes, and the like.  This world, with its riches and its wants, needs to be saved, to be redeemed.  The world is not able to free man from suffering; specifically it is not able to free him from death.

The entire world is subject to "precariousness," as Saint Paul says in the Letter to the Romans; it is subject to corruption and mortality.  Insofar as his body is concerned, so is man.  Immortality is not a part of this world.  It can come to man exclusively from God.  This is why Christ speaks of God's love that expresses itself in the offering of His only Son, so that man "might not perish but might have eternal life" (Jn 3:16).  Eternal life can be given to man only by God; it can be only His gift.  It cannot be given to man by the created world.  Creation-and man together with it-is subject to "futility" (cf. Rom 8:20).

"God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him" (cf. Jn 3:17).  The world that the Son of man found when He became man deserved condemnation, because of the sin that had dominated all of history, beginning with the fall of our first parents.  This is another point that is absolutely unacceptable to post-Enlightenment thought.  It refuses to accept the reality of sin and, in particular, it refuses to accept original sin.

Saint John expresses in the words of Christ, who announced the coming of the Holy Spirit who "will convince the world in regard to sin" (cf. Jn16:8). What else can the Church do? Nevertheless, convincing the world of the existence of sin is not the same as condemning it for sinning.  "God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."  Convincing the world of sin means creating the conditions for its salvation.  Awareness of our own sinfulness, including that which is inherited, is the first condition for salvation; the next is the confession of this sin before God, who desires only to receive this confession so that He can save man.  

To save means to embrace and lift up with redemptive love, with love that is always greater than any sin. In this regard the parable of the prodigal son is an unsurpassable paradigm.  The history of salvation is very simple.  And it is a history that unfolds within the earthly history of humanity, beginning with the first Adam, through the revelation of the second Adam, Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Cor 15:45), and ending with the ultimate fulfillment of the history of the world in God, when He will be "all in all" (1 Cor 15:28).

At the same time, this history embraces the life of every man. In a certain sense it is entirely contained in the parable of the prodigal son, or in the words of Christ when He addresses the adulteress: "Neither do I condemn you. Go, [and] from now on do not sin anymore" (Jn 8:11).  

The history of salvation is synthesized in the fundamental observation of God's great intervention in the history of humankind. This intervention reaches its culmination in the Paschal Mystery-the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ to heaven-and is completed at Pentecost, with the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles.  This history, while it reveals the redemptive will of God, also reveals the mission of the Church. It is the history of every individual and the entire human family, created in the beginning and then re-created in Christ and in the Church. 

Saint Augustine had a profound insight into this history when he wrote The City of God.  But he was not the only one.  The history of salvation continues to offer new inspiration for interpreting the history of humanity, but also confronts the problem of the meaning of man's existence.  

R U Ready for Christmas? (Part 3)

Consider what Jesus taught about the final judgment (Matthew 25:31-46): he never said we’d be judged on how religious we were, but on how we treated others especially the poor, the dispossessed, the powerless, and the disenfranchised.  Did we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, cloth the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, or visit the imprisoned?  In other words, did we help bring the Kingdom of God into the world through love, peace, justice, and good behavior?  Or, did we act like everyone else and oppress the poor and downcast, lie to others, cheat others, treat others badly, and hate our neighbors? 

Christians believe that we cannot separate our faith from our everyday lives.  We cannot compartmentalize our lives by behaving righteously in some circumstances and behaving unrighteously in others.  What good does it do to go the church on Sundays but behave poorly during the rest of the week?  We can oftentimes fool other people; sometimes we can even fool ourselves; but we can never fool God!

Persevering in our Christian faith is an integral and necessary part of becoming better people.  But ultimately, Christians don’t believe we become better people by getting smarter or through our own hard work, but through our trust and faith in God to work in us and through us.  We must try to do our best and then let God do the rest. 

Some call this cooperating with God because all we can really offer to God is our free will.  St. Paul wrote (Ephesians 2:8-10): For by grace you have been saved through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.  For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Because of this, practicing Christians don’t claim to always be perfect, upstanding citizens.  We’re human beings—just like everyone else—full of flaws, weaknesses, and insecurities.  But the process of persevering to overcome our sinful ways and live honestly, decently, ethically, and morally is what God is looking for from us, and then his grace will do the rest in us.  St. Paul discussed the necessity of persevering in our Christian faith this way (Philippians 2:12-13): Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

These are all encouraging things to meditate on, but what about the big problem that the philosopher Qoheleth brought up in his book Ecclesiastes: the problem of death?  Recall that Qoheleth believed that it is death and our fear of death that make life so pointless, frustrating and meaningless for all of us.  Well salvation is not only being liberated from evil or the undesirable but it’s also being liberated from death!

For practicing Christians, our hope is in the resurrection from the dead so that we no longer have to live in fear of death.  As Christ conquered death by rising from the dead, we believe that someday he’ll raise us from the dead as well.  Our belief in the resurrection from the dead is what gives Christians hope beyond our futile existence that somehow God will one day raise us from the dead to an everlasting life with Him in heaven.  And since we no longer have to live in fear of death (our necessary end), we can live a meaningful life knowing that our persistence in living honestly, decently, ethically, and morally won’t go unrewarded.

In short, based on the premise of original sin, redemption, and salvation, we can become Christians through faith and baptism.  And then we become better people by persevering in a life of love for God and others through honest, decent, ethical, and moral living.  These are what save us.  For Christians, faith is the beginning but the end result is love for God and others.