Well, I’ve made it to month 3 of my 2020 focus and this month’s Whatever is “Whatever is Right”. It’s taken from Philippians 4:8-9:
Phil 4:8
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Phil 4:9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.
If you look “right” up in the dictionary, you’ll find that it is used as an adjective, adverb, noun, and verb. I counted 34 definitions that ranged from explaining how the right side of something is toward the east when facing north, to the conservative side of government, and all kinds of other rights, including right field in baseball or 90º right angles in geometry. (Last weekend understanding isosceles right triangles became kind of important when Bob was cutting down trees out in the field and I wanted to stay clear of their way when they were falling.) Most of the time it denotes something that is positive (unless you bend towards being liberal in politics) or in accordance with facts and truth. Sometimes there are arguments about who or what is right and in education we tend to denote right brained people as having a more creative kind of bend. The bottom line is that in the U.S. English language “right” has a lot of connotations.
The Greek word that is translated as right is δίκαια (dĭ-kī-ă) and appears in the New Testament 79 times. It is translated as “righteous” in 53 of those occurrences and the next most common translation is as “right”. My concordance and commentary say that this word is describing what is upright or just and aligning with proper standards and actions of God’s covenant.
I figure that was probably what Paul wanted the Philippians to think about here: whatever they see that is upstanding and good, and maybe to look for that in others as well as look for ways to exhibit it themselves.
I used to consider what was right in relation to what is wrong. Maybe that is because I am a fan of mathematics and when I was younger, I took a lot of satisfaction from getting the right answer to a problem. Usually there was only one right answer, which made all the other answers “wrong”.
Later I learned that there are degrees of right or accurate answers, like 3.1415 is more accurate than just 3.14 when denoting pi. It was brought home to me when a friend posted this puzzle on Facebook. I enjoy these so I figured pretty quickly that if I moved the yellow one in the “+” and changed the 6 to an 8, the equation would be correct. I decided to see who else got the “right” answer and looked at the comment section. I was surprised to see several different solutions to this puzzle. It reminded me that sometimes there is more than one “right” answer to a problem. The thing is, I had not noticed the other solutions on my own because I quit looking as soon as I found mine.
I wonder how often that happens in other circumstances? A dangerous thing about considering that there is only one “right” is that it makes everything else “wrong”. Are there multiple “rights” to go along with the multiple “wrongs”? Or worse yet, I am so sure my “right” is the only one that I don’t even consider other methods or solutions to be viable resolutions. How often do I miss other “right” answers or remedies because I was satisfied with what I had and quit looking? I suppose I should take to heart a little more the old adage, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
When I first started studying “Whatever is Right”, the Covid pandemic had not really touched my world. Honestly, at this point other than some inconveniences, it still hasn’t. What it has done is to invade my consciousness. I’m not sure that is a terribly bad thing. What is not good though, is when I spent a couple of hours last night playing around with numbers to see what it would look like in a week if one infected person spread it to 2 people for 7 days and each of those people spread it to 2 other people each day for 7 days. (I then figured models of spreading to 3, 4, and 5 people each day as well as looking at what it would look like in 14 days. That rabbit hole I went down was pretty deep.) All that exercise did was to increase my anxiety when I could have spent the time focusing on the positive ways people are serving each other and look for where and how I can join their efforts or find my own “right” solutions to the problems I see around me. I suspect that thinking about those kinds of “rights” would be more in line with what Paul was encouraging the Philippians to do. Looking for and accepting multiple “rights” would be even better. Being a part of solutions is best.
Here’s to focusing on finding many ways to skin the “whatever is right” cats in my world.
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