CHAPTER 3

GOD’S FRAMEWORK FOR THE RIGHT WAY OF LIFE

“WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ASK GOD, when you get to heaven?”

A friend asked me that question one night over a dinner at which spiritual issues had peppered our conversation. I thought for a moment and replied, “I think I’d ask, ‘Are you sure you’ve done the right thing by letting me in here?’ ”

He laughed. Then I asked, “So what’s yours?”

“I’d say, ‘Why did you allow bad things to happen in the world?’ ” he said.

I nodded. “And why is that the one for you?”

“Because it bothers me so much,” he said. “I don’t understand why a loving God would allow kids to get sick and die, and tsunamis to destroy everything, and poverty to be so devastating.”

I thought for a while, then said, “Yes, those are very, very sad and incomprehensible things. Absolutely. I often feel the same way. And they are things we won’t know the why about until the other side of the grave. But there’s another side to the question that is just as important. On one side is the sheer lack of any apparent justice or logic in the universe — all of those things that you’ve just mentioned don’t make sense. On the other side is our own resistance to our creatureliness.”

“Creatureliness?” he said. “As in, we are the creature and he is the creator?”

“Exactly,” I answered. “I believe that even if God sat down at dinner with us tonight and explained everything, something inside us would still think, But— if I were God . . .”

The Heart of the Matter

That dinner conversation with my friend reflects the heart of the issue of how God has designed the world to work and how we should live our lives. There is a right way to live, and it is the Hard Way. It is work, but it works, and it will save you countless detours in life. But why is the Hard Way the right way?

Our conversation that night also got to the heart of why we have such trouble with God in this age of the Culture of Entitlement. He has established great and universal principles that enable us to survive, thrive, fall in love, find him, find our own mission, and do all of the things that a successful life requires. And yet a part of us always says, no matter what happens, But if I were God . . .

That reaction comes from our inborn sense of entitlement. It is not just a questioning of God; such questioning is healthy, and we have great examples of it in Scripture (the book of Job, or the Psalms, for example). It goes way beyond questioning God to disrespecting who he is and how he ordered life. And when we respond in that way, we reject our God-ordained role in the world he created. Entitlement directs us to judge God for how the world works, for the bad things that happen to us that we don’t understand, and for things that didn’t happen that we desired. Entitlement says, “My way of looking at life is beyond his,” because entitlement creates a deep sense of being special and above it all.

The purpose of this chapter, by contrast, is to highlight the great life principles that direct us how to live successfully and to see how the entitlement culture around us wages war against those principles. I will show you how you can be part of the solution to entitlement.

Here’s the truth: The more you experience and follow God’s principles (which lie at the core of reality), the better life becomes for you and those in your life. These principles originate from the God who never shirks from doing things the right way, no matter how hard they are.

God really does want the best for us! And by living according to the principles he’s built into the universe, we can experience his best.

A Rejection of Reality

In its essence, entitlement goes deeper than a person thinking, It’s okay if I want to be lazy because someone else will bear my burdens, or I’m so special that the rules don’t apply to me. In fact, entitlement goes so deep that it rejects the very foundations on which God constructed the universe. At its heart, entitlement is a rejection of reality itself.

Think about it: This means that entitlement actually makes you “crazy,” defined as having a break from reality. It blinds the entitled person to what makes the world work. The entitled person sees a problem at her workplace and thinks, This can’t be my fault, and misses the reality that her attitude did, indeed, cause a great deal of that problem. Another person sees his struggling marriage and thinks, When she apologizes, then I will, instead of seeing that he needs to fix whatever he has broken in the relationship, regardless of what she does.

I have worked with enough cases of severe mental illness to say, with confidence, that you don’t want this kind of crazy, or its consequences. It will tear you apart and shred your life and your dreams. God doesn’t want that for you! Your healthy friends don’t want that for you. And you shouldn’t want that for you.

Entitlement didn’t begin with our contemporary culture. It has been around for a long time. You see it in the very beginning, when Adam and Eve decided that they didn’t like the limitations that God had placed on them. They wanted to expand their options so that they could be “like God” (Genesis 3:5). They felt restless with the role God gave them; they wanted his role.

Entitlement existed even before the creation of the world. When Satan pondered his own limitations, he said, “I will make myself like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:14). He wanted to be “like God,” the same carrot he later dangled before our human parents. Of course, Satan actually wanted more than to be “like God” — he wanted to be God, meaning without limitations.

Ever since Eden, we humans want to be like God, with all his privileges and power, and — the very definition of entitlement — we feel it is our right. Entitlement infects our brains with the notion, I have a right to more and better; in fact, I am owed that.

But when we take a look at human history and even at our own lives, what results do we see arising from an attitude of entitlement? The answer: It has been disastrous. When a country violates a peace pact with another and goes to war, you’ll generally find a sense of entitlement driving it and being used to justify it. When a company breaks faith with its stakeholders, often it’s because someone, perhaps a CEO or CFO (remember Enron and Worldcom? Bernard Madoff ? Any number of recent banking scandals?), has determined that they are above the rules. And when a spouse enters into an unhealthy liaison with another person, the reasoning will often be, “After how I’ve been treated in this marriage, I deserve better.” Entitlement just doesn’t operate in our best interests.

Nevertheless, I am hopeful — and, as with all good things, that hopefulness starts with God. He has not left us alone to struggle with a broken culture, broken lives, broken companies, and broken relationships. He is moving among us with his answers and his power. This is where the principles I list in this chapter come in. These principles underlie everything in the rest of this book. All of the insights and skills we need to escape from the trap of entitlement are here, all of them developed through the Hard Way paradigm.

The Hard Way Principles

Five overarching life principles make possible our successful journey on this planet, in the same way that gravity, electromagnetism, and radiation govern the physical world. The Bible teaches these five principles, and research supports them. The crucial thing to remember is that these principles cannot be violated or ignored forever, and they can’t be ignored without cost. They are larger than we are, for they come from God. Yes, we can disagree with them, shake our fists at them, deny their existence, and insist that they just aren’t fair. But that doesn’t change their impact and power.

It’s like disagreeing with the force of gravity. You might think, Gravity is really limiting. It keeps us from flying on our own, so I disagree with it. And at least temporarily, you can act against it. Jump up from the ground as high as you can, as many times as you can. You will actually catch some air — for a second or two. But you will always come down. You can’t defy gravity forever.

It makes no sense to ignore reality or to act as if you can successfully oppose it. If you hit your head against a brick wall long enough because you don’t like it standing there, the only thing you’ll get for your trouble is a headache. How much better (and less painful!) to figure out how to cooperate with and use these principles and forces in ways that create a great life for yourself! To make them work for you rather than against you.

So learn these principles and use them regularly.

Principle 1: Humility and Dependence — We Are Completely Dependent on God

The Creator designed life in such a way that he creates and runs things, while the creatures depend on him: “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). It’s like when someone says, “I am in the army.” This statement means so much more — it means, “I am a small part of a very large system, within which I live, work, train, raise a family, and have a social life.” This is God’s world, not ours (Exodus 19:5). We don’t own the real estate.

As in my dinner conversation with my friend, our creatureliness is a good thing. It is who we are. We belong to God, not him to us. Creatureliness implies humility and dependence. We acknowledge that this is his universe and that he has invited us into it.

Humility is a much misunderstood attitude and deserves clarification. Humility is not about having a negative view of yourself; it’s not about eating worms. Feelings of self-loathing have more to do with having a harsh judge in your head, and they aren’t good for you. Humility is simply accepting the reality of who God is and who you are. When you see the reality of his power, his love, and his care, you more easily see yourself as who you are: a loved creature, a special creature, an important creature, but a creature nonetheless.

Dependence means you look to him for your sustenance, for every breath you take. You are not independent from his care any more than an astronaut is independent from his air tank, or a child is independent from his parents. You receive good care and guidance from God. That is dependence.

When we forget who we are and who God is, life simply doesn’t work, at least in the long run. It works much better when we base our decisions and our actions on a firm grasp of who he is and who we are. He designed us that way. A cell phone does great work as a cell phone, but it makes a terrible giraffe. It wasn’t designed to serve as a giraffe. Its best destiny is to be the best cell phone it can be. When you fight this principle of God’s world, you fight the concepts of humility and dependence and, inevitably, things don’t go well.

In contrast, entitlement tells you to be your own boss and determine your own destiny. Entitlement teaches you to say, “You’re not the boss of me!” It implies that you can be and do anything you want, demand of the others around you anything you want, and that it’s lame to depend on anyone. After all, it’s your life, so you need to follow whatever path you choose. But entitlement ultimately leaves you proud, alone, empty, and functionless.

I was once in the middle of creating a business success program. I was spending a lot of time on it, figuring out how it could help companies better connect with their employees, thereby achieving higher performance. But I had a lot of other irons in the fire as well.

I tend to overcommit to things, and when I do, I have to sort out my priorities. In that sense, I’m a happy workaholic. I work a lot, not because of pain or angst, but because I love what I do. But often I go too far, and that was the case with that success program. So as I was trying to figure out my priorities, I talked to one of my truly spiritual friends. “Have you prayed about it?” he asked.

Immediately I felt like a third-grader who had forgotten to bring his homework to class. I really hadn’t prayed about it; I had just worked on it. I had totally neglected something so fundamental and so basic. The next week, I prayed about the project, gave it to God, told him I’d go whatever direction he pointed, including dropping the whole thing. I said I would follow him. Within another week, my schedule opened up, people came to me wanting the program, and I had the opportunity to create something that really helped companies.

Don’t listen to entitlement when it tempts you to become your own boss — to take complete control of your own life. You have a boss, and his name is God. Will you enjoy that all the time? Of course not. Sometimes the boss tells you to do hard things. But you’ll be better off and happier and will reach more goals — and more worthwhile goals — when you adopt the stance of humility and dependence.

Principle 2: Connectedness — We Are Designed to Live in Connectedness with Each Other

Connectedness, or living in relationship with God and others, is the fuel of life. To be fully known and fully loved is one of the deepest and most fulfilling experiences we can have. We live in a relational world and a relational culture, summarized by Jesus’ teaching: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). Love comes from him, and we are to love not only him but each other.

Relationship is based on need. Throughout our life, we will experience stress, frustrations, and hurts. We will be required to make difficult decisions, and we will make hurtful mistakes. The fuel to survive and recover from those obstacles of life comes from the empathy, acceptance, and understanding we receive from others. We also need connectedness in the arenas related not to survival but to fulfillment: encouragement to be creative, innovative, and productive. The Bible points out how much we need each other: “But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up” (Ecclesiastes 4:10). Relationships bring the right nutrients to the soil of our lives, so that life goes well.

In every arena of existence, we see this principle at work:

• Children whose parents tune in to their emotional state have better success later in life.

• Marriages in which emotional intimacy thrives can better weather life’s trials.

• People with a support system of friends with whom they feel safe being vulnerable have fewer health problems.

• Churches that feature not only good pulpit teaching but also small groups create healthier disciples.

• Companies that pay attention to relationships, as well as to the bottom line, enjoy improved performance.

Connectedness is both an end and a means. Not only does it sustain life, but relationship, in a sense, is life itself. People don’t just open up to each other so that they will function better, be healthier, and have better lives. Those are side benefits. The primary motivation is: People open up and make themselves vulnerable in relationships simply because they want to love and be loved. We are, by God’s design, drawn to connectedness because relationships fuel us to meet the demands of reality.

This is exactly where the entitlement mentality does its greatest damage. It distorts the power and meaning of connectedness so that relationships fail to operate with all the force for which they were designed. This happens in two ways: objectification and an unhealthy self-sufficiency.

Objectification. When one person treats another as a need-meeting object or as a dispenser of some desired commodity, that is objectification. People objectify each other sexually. A good listener may be sought out for her ability, but who remembers to ask how she’s doing? A doctor at a party often has person after person ask about their ailments, with little consideration of his desire to simply hang out and converse with friends.

The self-absorbed attitude of entitlement makes it difficult to see people as having needs, feelings, and lives of their own. Forget “walk a mile in my shoes” — entitled individuals can only envision the lives of others as an extension of their own. They can’t enter fully into the experience of the other individual.

I once worked with a management team in a company that wanted me to get its factory workers producing at a faster rate. Management thought the work was getting done too slowly and that current productivity levels didn’t reflect the workers’ true capacity. When I asked these executives what they were doing to motivate their employees to work more, I expected them to mention things like bonuses, prizes, team outings, and offers for advanced training. No such luck. “They have a job,” they said. That was it. The workers should appreciate their gainful employment.

Their answer dismayed me, so I talked long and hard with these execs about their attitude. If that’s how they really felt, I said, I could guarantee that the employees would have a similar attitude, but in reverse: “This company is lucky to have me.” It always trickles down.

It took a long time, but finally these leaders started seeing their employees not merely as a means to an end, but as people with lives and dreams — just like the executive team. I had to combat a total lack of empathy, and that battle cost the company a great deal of time and money before the executives finally learned the lesson.

Unhealthy self-sufficiency. Another problem that entitlement creates is the conviction that I don’t need others to sustain and support me. I’m not talking about healthy self-sufficiency, such as learning to pay your bills and taking ownership of your choices. I’m referring to the self-sufficiency that denies that we need the support, encouragement, and feedback of others. Entitlement sees it as weak or inferior to ask for understanding, acceptance, or a place to vent. To admit need conflicts with the entitled person’s self-view that she is above all that and has her act together. Entitlement is anti-need; it will cut you off from the supplies that your life requires to carry on.

If you’ve ever had lunch with a self-sufficient person, you understand how frustrating and empty the conversation can become. We all need to open up and be vulnerable; that is a basic part of God’s life system. But open up to a self-sufficient person and you’ll gradually realize that your lunch mate can’t relate to people who struggle, or even to those who just need human contact. They can seem friendly and interested, but they have little sense of what it means to be incomplete without human nutrients outside of themselves.

Paul expressed a similar frustration with the Corinthians when they would not be vulnerable with him. In an emotional passage, he pleads:

We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange — I speak as to my children — open wide your hearts also. (2 Corinthians 6:11 – 13)

If connectedness is the fuel of life, then entitlement results in an empty tank for the entitled person. And that causes breakdowns in relationships, love, career, self-care, and spirituality.

Principle 3: Ownership — We Have to Take Responsibility for Our Own Choices

God designed you and me to take responsibility for, or to own, our lives and our choices. God created a system in which we have a great deal of freedom in how we choose to live. We freely choose whether we will or will not follow God’s ways: “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15). God had no interest in making slaves or robots who can’t own their choices.

Having this freedom to choose means that we own, or take responsibility for, the consequences of our lives. People who have what business research calls “high ownership capacities” do well in life, love, and work. They make their choices with a mind toward the goal they hope to achieve. They see themselves as succeeding or failing because of their own decisions — what is called in psychology an internal locus of control. They believe that their choices, which come from within, matter in their destinies.

We feel happiest when we have high ownership. The entire Boundaries series of books that Henry Cloud and I have written focuses on high ownership: Own your part of your job, your marriage, your dating life, your spiritual life, and your health. If someone is driving you crazy and trying to control you, own that you are allowing things that aren’t good for you. If you can’t say no to people’s needs for your time and energy, own that they aren’t the bad guy for asking, and that you need to learn to set a limit and say a kind but firm no.

Entitlement, however, erects a huge obstacle to healthy ownership. It does this in a couple of ways: low ownership and externalization.

Low ownership: Individuals who don’t take ownership of their lives sometimes live as if their actions have no consequences. They tend not to see beyond the present; their concern is for what they need and desire right now. They’re surprised when they lose jobs or relationships. Most of us are aware of the basic principle that “If you sow X, then X is what you will reap,” but not the entitled person.

My job as an organizational consultant sometimes involves participating in letting someone go. A company client of mine once called me in to deal with the letting go of a key executive. It became complicated. More than anything else, the company heads wanted to make sure that she not feel surprised at the firing. They wanted to make it crystal clear to her, over a period of time, that they had serious concerns about her performance, that they clearly communicated what it would take to turn things around, and that they would give her resources to help her improve. None of this worked, and after repeated conversations, they told her they would have to let her go.

She reacted with great surprise, telling them that she felt totally blindsided. The company heads were dismayed. After all of their efforts to warn and correct her, she hadn’t been able to see it. She had a low ownership of her behavior and a track record of great difficulty judging when she was not performing well in her tasks and relationships. Unfortunately, her low ownership played a significant part in both why she was let go and why she felt caught completely off guard by the decision.

Externalization: People with an attitude of entitlement often project the responsibility of their choices on the outside, not the inside. The fault lies with other people, circumstances, or events. They blame others for every problem. Their entitlement prohibits them from taking the beam out of their eye and asking the all-important question: How did I contribute to this latest problem? Instead, they default to answers outside their skin. The result? They tend to be powerless and unhappy. They tend to see life through the eyes of a victim. And their suffering is unproductive — it doesn’t get them anywhere.

Blame is a first cousin to entitlement. The more you fight the tendency to blame forces outside yourself and instead own your life choices, the better your life will be.

Principle 4: Accepting the Negative — Your Flaws Can’t Be Forgiven and Healed until You Admit Them

Are you aware of the judge in your head? You have one. We all do. And he doesn’t shrink from making himself heard. My first emotion when I wrote this sentence was to cringe a bit. I thought, He was tough on me today. I don’t know of anyone whose first impulse is, I can’t wait to hear what my judge has to say about how I handled my day. We see him as harsh, negative, and condemning of us.

Your judge is your internal guide, the mental voice that makes value statements on your successes and failures. Most people who read books of this type tend to have a rough judge who hands down condemning verdicts such as:

• There you go again! You always do this.

• You’ll never get it right.

• Why couldn’t you do that better?

• You’re letting everyone down.

• You’re such a disappointment.

• You should be ashamed of yourself.

• What a loser!

These are all hurtful and deflating statements, and we speak them to ourselves. No one has to judge most of us; we do a fine job on our own. A harsh internal judge slows you down, discourages you from taking risks, and makes you not like who you are.

God never intended this for you. He wants you to experience yourself as he does — as someone special who, though flawed, is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). He wants you to see yourself as someone God loves. When we feel about ourselves as God does, we can accept our sins and failings, and those of others, and then deal with them in positive ways: “Accept one another then, just as Christ accepted you” (Romans 15:7).

God made a way through Christ so that we could live with the negative as it truly is, without denying it or minimizing it. In a relationship with Christ, we feel permission to be who we truly are, warts and all. We don’t have to hide, pretend, or put our best face forward. We are known and loved just as we are by the one who matters most. This enables us to love others the same way.

The result of acknowledging and accepting the negative is that the negative then can be transformed. When you are okay knowing your failings, you can face them, bring them to God and to the people with whom you feel safe being vulnerable, and heal whatever is driving those feelings. This is the key to great growth. It’s a paradox, but the ones who run from the negative will suffer from it, while the ones who accept the negative will find the power to change it.

I was working on one of my leadership teams with an executive who was a successful businessman well regarded by the industry. He found it hard, however, to be authentic with others, especially when he felt frustrated or angry. He thought that if he felt irritated about a sales problem or a performance issue, people would see him as an uncaring tyrant. So he compensated by being Mr. Nice Guy all the time, keeping a smile on his face even when he was seething underneath. His judge stayed in control, telling him, Don’t be who you really are, or it will go badly for you. This caused all sorts of problems for him: maintaining this cover-up cost him creative energy, people felt he wasn’t real, and he had an inability to confront effectively.

I had him open up in our group session about what he was like when he felt angry. He found this hard to do because he worried that the group would judge him as harshly as he judged himself. But he cooperated: He mentioned someone in his life with whom he felt angry and expressed his anger about that — and he really let himself feel it.

The group responded wonderfully. “I don’t think any less of you,” said one.

“I’ve felt that way, too,” said another.

“I feel like I know you better now,” declared a third.

The experience transformed this man. He felt blown away by the acceptance and grace of the team — just the opposite of what he’d expected. Never in his life had anyone said it was okay to feel angry.

When we met the next month, he reported several dramatic changes. He had more energy. He was kinder to his wife and kids. He confronted others well and fairly. And when he felt angry, he said his piece and got over it quickly. The judge in his head was being redeemed, being taught to accept him as Christ and the team had accepted him.

Entitlement does not prompt you to accept the negatives in your life. It drives you away from admitting your flaws, away from bringing them up with people you trust, and away from learning how to deal with them. Instead, the entitled attitude has three directions, all of which destroy your health:

• Denial. The person in denial simply turns her back on reality. She refuses to admit her flaws to herself or anyone else, which eliminates any possibility of deep and satisfying relationships. Who would put up with that for very long? Worse, denial keeps her from growing, changing, and transforming. God doesn’t heal what goes unconfessed: “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed” (James 5:16).

• Perfectionism. The person caught in perfectionism beats himself up for failures, minor or major. His standard for performance is perfection, and he offers himself little grace when he stumbles. He constantly scrutinizes and condemns himself, and never makes it to a point of self-acceptance.

• Narcissism. The narcissistic person adopts a grandiose view of himself that hides his flaws, which usually lie buried under deep shame and envy. He is so afraid to see himself as he really is that he reacts in the opposite direction, toward the “I’m special” stance, in which he becomes arrogant and selfish and has difficulty feeling empathy for others.

Think about the pressure, stress, and emptiness that accompany the entitlement solutions of denial, perfectionism, and narcissism! God’s way is hard because you have to actually face yourself. But his yoke becomes easier (see Matthew 11:30) because you can then experience his grace, and the grace of others, to bear and relate to your real, authentic self — negative aspects and all. This self can then be loved, forgiven, graced, and helped to become a transformed individual, full of grace, forgiveness, and mercy for others.

Principle 5: Finding Our Role — To Live Long and Contentedly, Find Your Purpose in Life and Fulfill It

Life is complete only when you give back who you are to the world. God made you to pass along the good you have experienced. We don’t feel fulfilled or in our right space in life until we find our passions, develop our talents, experience our mission, and engage ourselves in meaningful expression of those things to make the world a better place. We receive love. We become loving. Then we give love to others through our relationships and our talents.

God made it this way from the beginning. Listen to humanity’s first mission statement: “Fill the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). He designed us to bring order and fruitfulness to the world. Therefore, we are at our best when we work hard, do what we are good at, and bring that good to others — whether it be manufacturing airplane coatings, writing music, or selling real estate. This is the “task” part of life, the “doing” aspect, which expresses itself in a career, a service, or a hobby.

Finding your role means that you are giving back to the world over time in a sustained and steady way, and this attitude actually contributes to your living longer. Research indicates that the number one factor in longevity is not social relationships or happiness, but conscientiousness, described as persistence, dependability, and organization.¹

There are two ways entitlement stands in the way of finding your role and finding fulfillment in it:

• Entitlement limits the person’s goals. One of the most limiting ideas of entitlement thinking is that the end goal of life is happiness: “I just want to be happy, that’s all.” Entitlement says that the highest good is to be a happy person — but in fact, that is one of the worst endgame goals we can have. People who have happiness as their goal get locked into the pain/pleasure motivation cycle. They never do what causes them pain, but always do what brings them pleasure. This puts us on the same thinking level as a child, who has difficulty seeing past his or her fear of pain and love of pleasure. There is nothing wrong with happiness. But in a healthy life, happiness comes as a by-product of doing what you love, having purpose, and giving back. You don’t give your talents so that you’ll be happy; you give them because you care and you want to make a difference. Then you feel happy. Happiness is a by-product to enjoy, not a dream to seize.

• Entitlement limits the individual’s growth. The other negative fruit of entitlement is that it freezes development. While God designed us to discover and develop all sorts of great abilities and passions, entitlement influences us to stay right where we are. It keeps us from growing, learning, challenging ourselves, or trying new things. It whispers to us, “That sounds really hard and it doesn’t look like it’s worth it.” When we listen to this voice, something inside us goes to sleep. We might become couch potatoes, video addicts, chronic partiers, or simply get in a rut and routine that becomes boring and deadening.

When you find your God-ordained role, then all the unique abilities and strengths God programmed into you from the beginning begin to function together to fulfill your place in the ultimate great story. And even though happiness isn’t your goal, you’ll never be happier.

Skills

Ponder a few questions that will help you make good use of God’s framework for your life:

1. Which of the five principles in this chapter has proven to be the greatest challenge for you to live out? In what area of life does the negative influence of entitlement most express itself against that principle: family, work, marriage, dating, or something else?

2. Think about a person in your life, family, or work who is entitled. How did he or she get that way? Family of origin? School experiences? Church relationships? Marriage? A season of great loss or stress? Answering this question will help you not only to help that person, but also to focus on using the rest of the book to help yourself grow into the Hard Way of success.

3. Consider God’s own lack of entitlement. Although he is the only being in the universe who deserves to be entitled, his character overflows with humility and love. Ask him to help you live in reality in the way that he himself does.