Two Different Ways Of Being Defiant

Doing what one wants is often heralded as a good thing, but the wrong way to do it usually characterizes the examples of how that behavior plays itself out.

Violet, who doesn’t like being told what to do, ignores the wishes of her parents and later gets in the car with her friend. 

Ideas about doing what one wants and resisting rules can often be applied to two very different and oppositional types of situations.  Since one of those situations is positive and the other one is harmful, seeing them the same way can obviously lead someone to the wrong conclusions about the value of such ideas.  Imagine two young people resisting rules and doing what they want in the two situations below.

A teenage girl named Violet is asked by her parents not to drive in a car with a friend who drives a little too fast.  Violet, who doesn’t like being told what to do, ignores the wishes of her parents and later gets in the car with her friend.  However, Violet realizes that day that her friend not only drives fast but occasionally ignores the stop signs—it must have only been because the other driver was paying very close attention that both Violet and her friend weren’t killed that day.

Now, in the other situation, the friends of a girl named Stella tell her not to talk to a new girl at school who they don’t like because her father is a pastor at a local church.  Stella isn’t a Christian herself, but she soon finds from observing the new girl in class that she seems very friendly and has no one else to talk to.  She decides to break the rule given to her and do what she wants by trying to talk to the girl and get to know her.  You see, Christians, the idea of doing what one wants and breaking the rules is often heralded today as a very good thing, but the few who do it in a good way are often doing something very different from the other people whose actions are described in the same way.