My 7 year old daughter Maggie and I were cruising around Target not too long ago. We had indulged in a “Starbucks” so both of us were caffeine buzzed and acting goofy. Maggie in particular was getting more and more wound up running up and down isles, grabbing at things, making weird noises and it was starting to stress me out because I did have a list to fulfill. I never go into a store without some mental or actual list of things needed. Finally, I started calling her out, “Maggie, calm down you are getting on my nerves.” I made such a comment several times before she responded in a loud voice that stopped me and several other shoppers in or tracks. The results were mixed. A twenty-something guy looked back over his shoulder and gave Maggie a dirty look. A woman with two kids in her cart laughed out loud.

“I’ve been such a bad girl, I could grow up to be a man,” Maggie said. I don’t know if it was the getting on my nerves part or the running wild or being called down or some combination of all that led her to connect a failure to correct the behavior to an eventual gender change. What would make a little boy say, “I’ve been such a bad boy, I could grow up to be a woman.” Maybe he would say “I’ve been such a good boy……”

What lingered with me beyond the humor, is how our notions of and responses to good and bad labels develop. People can easily get stuck with wrong notions about the consequences of behavior and a sense that they are “bad” and being punished. If we are able to grow and mature, we transcend the child-like notion that consequences are arbitrary, unfair, and even disconnected from our behavior. We come to recognize that it is about choices, responsibility. Through the repetition of life and experience we see principles at work like the law of sowing and reaping, gravity, etc. Once we “grow-up”, it is understood that consequences are generally predictable and directly correlated to our actions. As Stephen Covey says, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.”

There are without a doubt cases of bad things happening to good people, but in general if you are taking notes as your life unfolds it becomes at least noticeable that our choices lead to a good life or a bad life. For example, most would correlate a good life with good health. Bad health almost always equates to bad life. It’s not 100%, but a good chance that if I exercise and eat right, manage stress, get enough sleep etc.; I’ll be in fairly good health. The point is that bad girls don’t grow up to be men or vice versa but that girls and boys who figure out that life is guided by universal principles that are not secret and it is their own choices not an arbitrary, external force that determines their outcome are the winners. They are the leaders and the entrepreneurs and the ones that will shine light into the unknown future.

Deuteronomy 30:15 “See, I set before you today life and prosperity or death and destruction.