Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding excerpts from my upcoming book, Getting Up. Here’s another! Check it out!
Response Ability
“Look at the word responsibility—response-ability—the ability to choose your response.”
– Stephen R. Covey
Personal responsibility is the ability to respond in a mature way to our personal choices. When we take personal responsibility it means we take the weight of the consequence or benefit of our actions. There are million and one things that can happen to us. God is concerned about those things, but I think He is more concerned with what happens through us than what happens to us. He wants see how we respond. He is interested in our character development, which includes how we respond to temptation or how we respond to the situations that can cause offense. This is our ability to respond. This is personal responsibility.
I liken response-ability to any ability in which we can grow. The more we perfect our response, the greater our ability grows. I would say this is a major key to growth and maturity, and absolutely essential to the process of getting up.
How’s your response ability?
I should not be held accountable for what happens to me, but how I respond to the situation.
Great challenge, Ashley. It can be too easy sometimes to blame everyone else or our circumstance for what happens to us and while we might not always be responsible for the circumstances, we are responsible for how we respond.