One day, after my husband picked up my son, Noah, from his after school program, he asked him how his field trip had been that day.

“It was okay,” he said, but he looked a little sad so my husband asked him what was wrong. “Well, he answered, “it was a magician and he asked for volunteers, and I was sitting on the back row and I raised my hand every time he asked, but he always picked kids from the front row. That isn’t right, Dad. It’s just not right.”

My husband started to explain that he understood, but that maybe next time he might get to sit on the front row, but our son adamantly let him know that it just wasn’t right and then he said, “The Bible says that the first shall be last and the last shall be first!”

At ten years old, my son has a knack for interpreting the Bible to apply to everyone else’s behavior, but he hasn’t yet gained the insight to turn the light of it upon himself. Even so, as we were on a road trip this weekend our family was reflecting on this piece of Jesus’ wisdom, and we were discussing what exactly Jesus really meant by that statement.

To me, it exemplifies the backwards philosophy that Jesus brought into the world– the idea that to give up the power, you gain it, and to die, you live. The thought that those who give mercy, receive it, and those who are meek inherit the earth. It’s a way of life that is so opposite from what we think it should be.

Stephen Covey in his well-known novel, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” lists the following attributes of successful people: Be Proactive, Begin with the End in Mind, Put First Things First, Think Win/Win, Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood, Synergize, Sharpen the Saw. These habits seem right to us and it isn’t that they are wrong, but none of them advocate giving up the power the way Jesus advocated it. They are all intended to put a person in the position of controlling the power. When we take the power for ourselves, whose hand are we prying it from?

As our family focused on this backwards philosophy in our conversation, I acknowledged to my husband that most of the arguments in our marriage stem from our inability to allow the other person to be first and to put ourselves last. I told him that our problem that we have revisited over and over in our marriage is largely because both of us are unable to give up the power, and yet, the principle of Christ is that we should give up the power in order to gain the ultimate treasures of the heart. Most conflict in our lives stems from our inability to perceive ourselves being in last place.

Power and control are illusions that obscure our vision and cause us to keep seeing things in worldly terms. When we stop clinging to the illusion of power and control, we lift the veil and it enables us to see what pain there is out there in the world. If we lift the veil long enough, we can do something about it, but we have to be willing to live the backwards way. This backwards way tells us that if someone strikes us on the cheek, we offer them another. If someone asks us to walk a mile with them, we walk two miles with them. Because in the backwards way, success is measured by what we have given and not by what we have taken.