Last month I had to fix my kitchen faucet because it was no longer doing its job.
I am the first to say I’m not a handyman, and more so when it comes to anything that has to do with water or the plumbing and my house, I don’t even bother trying.
I went online to find a handyman who could help me. The first person I messaged seemed willing to help. After a few messages back and forth, he said it would be $80 to put in a new faucet which sounded good to me.
When he came over the next day, I welcomed him into my house and was quite trusting in regards to what this man had to say. What he did say was that I needed a different faucet because I had ‘bought the wrong one’. Being the nice guy that he appeared to be, he offered to go to Home Depot to get it since he didn’t want to leave me without a faucet.
He messaged me and said it would cost $145 for the faucet. When I asked for the receipt, he made up some excuse saying he won’t have the receipt or invoice until the end of the month. Long story short, everything ended up costing $260, and I learned afterward the faucet was only $39.99.
When I tried to get my money back this guy walked all over me and that was it. I got ripped off because I was nice.
I was quite rattled for the rest of the day and the only thought that kept coming to my mind was ‘do nice guys finish last?’.
I took the guy’s word for it, I was nice, trusting, and paid him although it was much more than what we originally agreed on and I feel he ended up taking advantage of that.
Have you ever been in this situation where you got the short end of the stick because you were simply nice? Have you ever felt that nice guys finish last?
Years ago, I was speaking at a men’s conference with an author who wrote about a book and the premise was that Jesus wasn’t ‘nice’. He was loving and kind, but Jesus also flipped over tables and had some very blunt conversations with Pharisees and religious leaders. Some of these conversations would probably get us kicked out of church today if we talked to our pastor like that.
What do you think? When you look in the Bible, you can see examples of how being nice was the proper way to respond and live, but you can also see other situations in the Bible where people were righteous and had a backbone at the same time.
At the end of the day, I don’t know what the proper answer is or if I should have responded to this handyman differently. I see more cases where nice guys finish last more often than first in our society as many of them can get walked over at times.
Saying that I am a big believer that we are known by our fruit and how we love others and sometimes that is reflected by being nice rather than angry, short-tempered, or bossy.
Moving forward, I will steer towards the nice side despite these recent results, but this situation with the handyman does make me think about it a bit more as a Christian man. Can you still reflect the fruit of the Spirit, yet still have a backbone and be firm when needed to be? And if so, what does that actually look like?
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