When you were in high school, did you get the talk from your mom or dad or maybe both about managing your reputation and being smart about who you hang out with?

I think that's a pretty standard issue talk. I mean we're already doing that with our kids and they're certainly not in high school yet

I think the line of thinking if I remember right went something like this

You can't control what other people do but everybody has a reputation and you just have one, and if you associate too much with people

who are doing really destructive things, outsiders might look at that and associate you with those things and it might cost you opportunities.

I think it is really good advice, but then I would get that advice from mom and dad and then we go to church and we would celebrate all of these stories

about Jesus going and hanging out with bad people.

And it was kind of a mixed message and my parents are wonderful parents.

They were wonderful parents, they are wonderful parents. I think this is just one of those places where there's some good practical life advice going on, which is, hey, you don't want to set yourself up to own other people's mistakes so that it does limit your opportunities because of that but also

Well if you're a kingdom citizen you've been given grace you've been given, you've got to give that away.

And if you're going to give grace to people and you're going to be redemptive, I mean that's

going to involve hanging out with other people who've got problems, maybe a different list of problems in yourself.

It's just one of those things that requires a whole lot of nuance to really sort through.

And the conventional wisdom, I suppose, is if you're a public figure and you're trying to manage your reputation well,

Ease has got to be really, really smart about who you talk to and who you don't talk to.

And so you look at, you know, the laundry list of people who are associated with some pretty monstrous

characters who've been in the news lately for doing awful awful things to others

and it's like this celebrity hit list of like here's a picture of so-and-so hanging

out with this monstrous guy who did these awful things and oh yeah well here's

somebody from your team hanging out with that awful guy and now everybody's trying to run as fast as they can

to explain what their association was

and why they were in that one photo

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