Whining just might be the most widespread epidemic of this generation.
“Yeah, I drink too much sometimes, hit my wife, and slap my kids around, but my father used to get drunk and beat me with the buckle end of his belt.”
“I’m pregnant. He’s gone. I don’t know what to do. This is so unfair!”
“They’re sending me to jail because I got caught with cocaine in my car. Why don’t they go after the people who sold it to me?”
“My husband moved out and said he never wants to see me again. I told him the affair was over and that the other guy didn’t mean anything to me. Why can’t he just forgive me and let’s put this behind us to move on?”
Trash-talk television, celebrity adulteries, drug-busted-and-still playing athletes, the abolition of public moral codes – all have combined to make us think we don’t have to be accountable for our behaviors. Until we reject this lie and quit whining, our culture will continue to get worse.
We choose our actions and reactions. Sometimes we don’t choose our circumstances, but we do choose how to react to them. We never choose our parents, have no control over the genetic hand dealt us, and are frequently confronted with temptations we didn’t solicit. But it is irresponsible to appeal to any of these as excuses for behaving like cockroaches rather than human beings made in the image of God.
When we make bad choices, we should be held accountable and allowed to suffer the consequences. It is our incentive to change, to handle things better next time, to get help in understanding and handling our negative impulses.
When someone you love messes up, don’t abandon him. If he seeks forgiveness, give it freely. But don’t clean up his mess, excuse his rotten behavior, or let him off the hook for the consequences that follow. Above all, don’t listen to him whine, blame, or manipulate you into “fixing it” for him.
There is a difference in being loving and supportive of one’s principled attempt to take responsibility on the one hand and enabling his continued bad behavior on the other. It is the difference between being genuinely helpful and making a bad situation worse, between fostering character and enabling ruin.
God calls us to resist and triumph over our weaknesses by his grace, not to excuse ourselves for giving in to them by whining.
