Can I get a guitar, please – with no strings attached??

Friends,

The phrase “No strings attached” is a widely-used and well-accepted catch-phrase that is commonly used in advertisement slogans or by salesmen as they try to convince their customers to buy their deals or products. As cautious consumers we do tend to circumspectly look for any hidden string that might be attached to any deal and stay away from any such string.

Whereas it is wise to stay away from “strings” in the marketing sphere, there are several things in life in which the strings come attached and are not meant to be separated. A guitar is a silly example, but there are several real-life situations that qualify for this. Just as the woodwork and the strings make a guitar, Rights and Responsibilities are two inseparable components of real-life situations. It is a tragedy that we humans often tend to look at some important real-life situations with a consumer’s mentality and try to do away with the string of Responsibilities but hold on to and even intensely fight for the woodwork of Rights. We find it very simple to recognize that a guitar with no strings is no good but we often don’t seem to recognize the dire consequences of neglecting the responsibilities of our actions.

Some pregnant women want to claim complete rights over their own bodies but conveniently choose to neglect the responsibility for the life they carry within. Some adults claim their right to do whatever they want together, but when the morning comes, they choose to kill their responsibility with the “morning after” pill. Some homosexual partners claim their right for parenthood but neglect the responsibility of providing the child with real parents – a mom and a dad. Some young people claim their right to wear whatever they want, conveniently neglecting to think about their responsibility to not be a moral stumbling block or a source of temptation to a passer-by. And there are many such examples. Has not this “Rights-only” mentality led to the rampant decadence of our society wherein the degree of moral corruption has reached a point that it requires the Senate to look for answers to fundamental questions of life such as the definition of marriage – and the Senate too offers no hope??

The above are just a few examples of the “Rights-only” approach on a bigger scale. Whereas it seems convenient to cite these weighty examples to beat the point, the simple fact is that every human being, including myself, tends to fall into this “Rights-only” approach in little as well as big things in our everyday life. The issue at hand could be the matter of how we spend our leisure time, or how we feed our stomach, or what words we let out of our mouth, or how we entertain ourselves, or how we respond to someone standing on the street and holding a “Help” sign, or something else. It is essential to bear in mind that the God who lets us exercise our rights also charges us with a responsibility for our actions.

Adam and Eve exercised their right to eat of the forbidden tree. And Oh! Boy, were they (or the whole humanity for that matter) ever able to bear the responsibility for that?? Christ bore the responsibility for that. May we be wise enough to think of our responsibilities before we rush to exercise our rights!

– Wes