Honoring A Life Source
Honoring A Life Source
In Exodus 20:12 we read: "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you."
Not all of our parents were model parents, and many of us have spent years recovering from their brokenness. Still, there is a debt of honor that remains. Not because everything they did was good. But because we are alive through them. They were, however imperfectly, a source of life.
A similar logic applies to the other life sources we encounter along the way. People who opened doors for us when we did not yet have keys. People who made introductions that changed the course of our lives. People who saw something in us before we could see it ourselves, took risks on us, carried our names into rooms we weren't in. Paul once told the Corinthians they had countless guides, but not many fathers. Guides point you somewhere. Parents are the reason you had somewhere to be pointed from. Like our biological parents, these people are not perfect. They may have disappointed us. They may have blessed and wounded us in the same season. But if they brought life to us, that should not be erased.
Honor is more than private gratitude. If someone has helped form an artist, a song, a community, or a movement, that history deserves to be seen. Artists are not raw material for someone else's pipeline, and communities do not give birth to beauty by accident. There are fathers and mothers behind the work, even when they are not visible on stage. You do not simply pluck what is beautiful from that soil and call it discovery.
Every fruit has roots somebody else watered.
Here's what happens when we honor those who have been sources of life to us. And yes, this can include financial honor. In the culture of Jesus, treasure was never treated as neutral.
Our consciences stay tender. Ambition can teach people to forget who helped them, and to believe they got here alone. Honor interrupts that. A numb conscience is often the first step toward shipwreck.
We breathe life into the communities we're part of. Some are shaped by scarcity and quiet scorekeeping. Others are marked by generosity and memory. Blessing others doesn't make us smaller. It makes the room larger.
We recover our dignity. There is dignity in refusing to be the sole author of our own story — in saying, "This person helped me. This person opened a door." That honesty lets us name what was broken without denying what was given.
Yuri Kochiyama wrote something close to this at eighteen years old, long before internment camps, long before Malcolm X died in her arms, long before any of the life that would make her name worth remembering. She wrote that any opportunity, achievement, or happiness she'd have, she'd owe to someone else. And if she couldn't repay the person directly, she'd pass the kindness on to somebody who could use it. She figured that part out before she had anything to be grateful for yet. Most of us figure it out after, if we're lucky, and some of us never do.
And as the Fifth Commandment suggests, honor is connected to life itself. When we honor rightly, something in us stays alive. We stay less brittle, less orphaned, less frantic to prove ourselves.
Honor does not mean denial. It does not mean pretending people were perfect. It simply means refusing to become a thief of your own story. We remember who brought life to us. And where possible, we bless them back. Where we can't, we pass it forward instead.
Malcolm du Plessis
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