Deal with: (v) to take action regarding a person or situation

If you will permit me, I shall refer to this as the “Brock principle.”

When I was in high school, we had a fellow in our class named Brock.

Brock was annoying.

No one wanted him around.

Yet at the same time, there wasn’t one of us that wished to come off as “the bully”—to chase him from our presence. So often, we kept Brock around so long that we ended up being crude, if not rude in our comments, requiring his exit.

You couldn’t win with Brock:

• If you ignored him, you felt like a big, fat, stupid bigot.
• If you accepted him, you felt like a big, fat, stupid idiot.
• If you tried to tolerate him, you just felt big, fat and stupid.

I feel much the same way about arrogance.

Unlike Brock, arrogance will try to change its name to get into your life, your party or your fellowship.

Sometimes it arrives under the name “confidence.”

Other times, “knowledgeable.”

And on occasion, even “considerate to a fault.”

But it cannot hide.

Arrogance is the human emotion coming from other people that we have absolutely no capacity to deal with, because our own arrogance becomes jealous, throws a tantrum and runs out of the room.