Zero tolerance prevails, once again

| 6 Comments
Never ones to let a rule go unenforced, a public school finds grounds to punish a student who behaved like a good samaritan:

A 15-year-old girl who stopped her out-of-control school bus was hit with a Saturday detention because she was supposed to be in class when the accident happened.

While a normal person would have excused her breaking the rules by being late and not on the right bus because she saved a bus of elementary school students and driver from injury and possible death, it's practically in the very nature of many of those who work for the public schools to enforce the rules mainly just because they can. That she also prevented the school from facing any possibility of being sued by the parents of injured children is beside the point.

She was late to school is really all that matters here.

6 Comments

Rules are rules.
Funny how we dislike them sometimes.
I guess if we get too rigid, we aren't using the rules correctly.
Instead of something to help and protect us they become a burden.
Rules should be there as guidelines. If we allowed common sense to be the first rule, we would have far less problems like this.
Agree?

Agreed, of course! I think where you and I have differed on the rules vis a vis grace is that I see the rules as still being intact, but grace being the freedom that God gives us to avoid responsibility when we can't obey the rules either through our sinful natures or because one rule conflicts with what we ought to do (like breaking the Sabbath to save a man's life).

Rules for their own sake, like this, is a form of wickedness, not righteousness.

"Never let a good deed go unpunished", eh?

Besides letting power go to their heads, zero tolerance is also another form of laziness because these people don't want to take the time and energy to judge each case on it's merits.

I understand, Mike.
Just remember, that even those rules can be used incorrectly.
Grace doesn't do away with the law.
It just supercedes it.
There is something in the scriptures about being under grace and being under the law.
You are either under one or the other if I haven't misinterpreted what Paul was saying.

btw, I like your pic at the top. Very cool!

This is true, but being under grace means that you have forgiveness for when you break the rules. It doesn't mean that you can behave as you want to behave because it comes with the obligation to love God and seek His ways, which if you do, will end up looking an awful lot like obeying the law by nature.

As my father-in-law has said about grace, grace does not exempt you from having to try to build up serious mental discipline to guard against doing the things that are both prohibited by the law, and required of you to seek out in the New Testament.

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