10/18/2026
The Principal’s Office
On Owning the Part That Is Mine
I was only sent to the principal’s office once.
I was in eighth grade and taking band, and I did not particularly care for the band director.
Some of this was undoubtedly his fault.
Some of it was undoubtedly because I was thirteen.
He was one of those teachers who seemed to me to try a little too hard to be cool with his students, which irritated me. More importantly, he occasionally told jokes during class that mocked faith and Jesus. I didn’t find them funny.
I also had opinions.
This will surprise absolutely no one who has known me for any length of time.
I have always been fairly willing to say what I think, and adolescence had not yet taught me some of the finer distinctions between having an opinion, expressing an opinion, and perhaps keeping that particular opinion inside my head for another thirty seconds.
So one day I walked into the band room, saw one of my friends, and offered what I apparently considered a concise assessment of the educational experience.
“This class sucks.”
The band director overheard me.
Apparently he did not appreciate constructive feedback.
I was sent to the principal’s office.
Now, in my defense, this was not a familiar destination for me. I was a good kid. The principal knew that, and he routinely told me I reminded him of his daughter. There wasn’t much mystery about whether I was suddenly embarking upon a life of delinquency.
Nevertheless, I had said what I had said.
He told me he was going to have to call my mother.
I said okay.
There really wasn’t anything I could do to stop him.
I don’t remember being particularly frightened about Mom’s reaction. I probably wasn’t thrilled about the prospect, but there wasn’t much of an argument available to me. I had walked into class and said it. The teacher had heard me. The principal knew it. I knew it.
Eventually Mom got the call.
Her response has stayed with me far longer than whatever punishment or conversation followed.
Her position was essentially that there were two problems.
I should not have said what I said.
The teacher should not have been using his classroom to make jokes that mocked her children’s faith.
She would fix hers if they would fix theirs.
There was no attempt to use one problem to erase the other.
That is what I remember.
Mom could have defended me by making the conversation entirely about the teacher. There was certainly enough thirteen-year-old logic available to justify my behavior if she had wanted to.
She didn’t.
But she also didn’t allow my behavior to make the teacher’s behavior irrelevant.
Both things could be true.
I was wrong.
And I had a legitimate complaint.
It took me considerably longer than eighth grade to understand how useful that distinction is.
When conflict happens, I think there is a natural tendency to start weighing wrongs against each other. If the other person’s offense is larger than mine, mine begins to feel less important. If I can sufficiently explain what provoked my response, I can sometimes convince myself that the response was justified.
And occasionally the opposite happens. I recognize something I did wrong and become so focused on owning it that I excuse behavior from someone else that should still be addressed.
Mom’s approach was considerably cleaner.
Figure out which part belongs to you.
Deal with that.
Let the other person deal with theirs.
There is something uncomfortable about accepting responsibility without attaching an immediate but to it.
I shouldn’t have said that, but you should have heard what he said.
I shouldn’t have reacted that way, but she started it.
I shouldn’t have lost my temper, but I’ve been putting up with this for months.
Sometimes everything after the but is completely true.
It still doesn’t change what came before it.
David understood something about that when Nathan confronted him after his sin with Bathsheba and Uriah. There were plenty of other people involved in the story and plenty of circumstances surrounding it. But when Nathan finally put David face-to-face with what he had done, David’s response was remarkably simple:
“I have sinned against the Lord.”
No defense.
No comparison.
No explanation of anyone else’s part.
He owned his.
I don’t think that means we should become indifferent to what other people do. Mom certainly wasn’t. She wasn’t willing to hear that a teacher had been mocking Jesus in front of her child and simply shrug because her child had also behaved badly.
She expected accountability in both directions.
But she understood that one person’s responsibility does not cancel another’s.
I find that helpful because responsibility becomes considerably more manageable when I stop trying to settle the entire moral accounting of a situation before I deal with my own part.
I don’t have to determine who was more wrong before I apologize for something I shouldn’t have said. And acknowledging my own failure does not require me to pretend the thing that hurt, angered, or provoked me was acceptable.
I can own what is mine without picking up what isn’t.
Of course, that gets harder when the other person refuses to acknowledge their part.
We like reciprocal accountability. I’ll fix mine if you fix yours sounds fair, and in eighth grade there actually were adults available to make something close to that happen.
Adult life is less cooperative.
Sometimes I apologize and the other person doesn’t. Sometimes I correct my behavior while theirs remains unchanged. Sometimes I have to make right what belongs to me knowing perfectly well that nobody is going to call the other person’s mother.
Faithfulness cannot always wait for everybody else to go first.
I don’t remember exactly what happened with the band director after Mom talked to the school. I don’t remember whether he stopped making the jokes entirely or whether the whole thing simply faded into the collection of minor dramas that make up eighth grade.
I do know I didn’t make a habit of visiting the principal.
And somewhere in that experience, Mom handed me a way of thinking about responsibility that has followed me into much more complicated situations.
There may be two problems.
There may be ten.
I don’t have to solve all of them before I can identify the one that belongs to me.
Sometimes what is mine to do is simply to look honestly at my own part, deal with it, and resist the temptation to use someone else’s behavior as permission to leave mine alone.
Mom could handle her kid.
The school could handle theirs.
And eighth-grade me could perhaps learn to keep certain educational assessments to herself until she was at least safely out of earshot.
