Days seldom follow the schedules we’ve made for them. There is always an interruption. Something breaks. The person you depended on doesn’t perform. And there are those maddening moments of crisis that throw us off balance.
There’s an old story of a cowboy who walked out of the saloon only to discover that someone had painted his horse’s tail red. As onlookers roared with laughter, he was burning with rage. “Does anybody know who did this?” he demanded to know.
“I saw who done it!” shouted somebody in the crowd. “He was wearin’ a vest but no hat. And he went straight from here to the hardware store over there.”
“I’ll tear him limb from limb!” threatened the cowboy. And he stormed off in the direction of the store. He flung open the door and shouted, “Did somebody in here paint my horse’s tail red? If so, let him be a man about it and step forward.”
A huge blacksmith stepped out from behind a stack of barbed wire. His arms were as big as posts, and he appeared to be chiseled from solid rock. Everyone in the store fell silent as he snarled, “I did it. And just what do you have to say about it?”
Faced with a genuine crisis-management situation, the cowboy looked the massive blacksmith over and sized up his options in a flash. “It sure looks to me like the first coat is dry,” he said. “Do you want to apply the second one, or should I?”
There are times that call for righteous indignation. No less than Jesus went through the Temple precincts turning over the vendors’ tables and setting animals on sale for sacrifice free. But some call for discretion. To reply in haste to every irksome provocation you encounter in life will not make you heroic or set all those situations right. It will simply give you the well-deserved reputation of being a hot-head.
The late F.B. Meyer gave some sound advice on what to do in a crisis. He wrote: “Never act in panic, nor allow a man to dictate to you; calm yourself and be still; force yourself into the quiet of your closet until the pulse beats normally and the scare has ceased to disturb. When you are most eager to act is the time when you will make the most pitiable mistakes.”
Proverbs 29:20 offers this wisdom about crisis management: “Do you see a man who speaks in haste? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”
It is sometimes necessary to confront. Principle must not be forsaken, and holy things are not to be sullied. More often than not, however, the lack of self-restraint in a crisis brings on a disaster of major — and occasionally fatal — proportions.