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My wife and I were recently involved in some training that is taking us one step closer to what God is obviously calling us to do. More on that some other time; I want to talk to you about a little hands-on assignment we had to do in the class.

The demonstration was simple enough in the beginning. The instructor talked about the 10 building blocks needed for every person to survive. Things like significant others, values, information, groups, personal identification, jobs, places of significance, your history, and so on. We then would place names to those categories. We would share as a group the importance of each thing we wrote down.

Then the curve ball came from the instructor. We had to eliminate one. What did we think we could live without? The resulting discussion went on, over and over again, and it got more difficult each time until we were left with just one. Something I found amazing happened, and I realized that maybe this simple demonstration was a peek into what is wrong with the country as we know it. First let me tell you what my wife and I were both left with, without cheating.

Our most important thing left on our paper was “Values.” We even picked that as more important than each other. With other students in the room, all at varying stages of life and age, Values was one of the first things to go. Information seemed to be more valuable to them than actual values. That’s when it hit me.

This was a sneak peek at society as it plays out daily. For a large part of the country, placing the information age, (news, internet, gossip and television) as a needed-to-survive element echoes as a serious problem with society, especially when you place that as a higher priority than a job, your support system or your spouse. And when you easily throw away values (Christianity, integrity, patriotism, honesty, family), you begin to see why we are where we are as a society.

How easily we believe that knowing what is going on outside our doors is more important than what is going on in our hearts. We can become overcome with politics, news, social issues and forget about the real important things. The others in the room at class truly thought that above everything else they needed their smartphone to survive more than a best friend to come and support them. It was mind blowing.

My values, which I would not part with – Faith, Family, Nation – were followed with Integrity, Love, Honor and being a servant. My wife’s were very similar. I even chose my values over my significant other, and so did she. (Don’t worry, we still love each other, maybe more.)

You see, that might just be what is wrong with the nation as a whole. Our value system is messed up, or maybe it has been dismissed altogether.

So we need to value, well, our values. All those other things are important, but when we start drawing lines in the dirt and eliminating things and we are left standing with only one thing, I, for one, would love to see us all standing on our moral principles, standing on a solid foundation. That may be the very thing that gets us to the next generation. Otherwise, I believe we will continue this free fall of mass chaos into a depth of darkness we have never seen and from which we just might not ever recover. There is hope.

Find your values. Cling to them. Live by them. I’m just saying.