Tao te Ching: 13

Be apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace.
Regard great trouble as seriously as you regard your body.
What is meant by being apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace?
Favor is considered inferior.
Be apprehensive when you receive them and also be apprehensive when you lose them.
This is what is meant by being apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace.
What does it mean to regard great trouble as seriously as you regard the body?
The reason why I have great trouble is that I have a body (and am attached to it).
If I have no body,
What trouble could I have?
Therefore he who values the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.
He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.

 This is another chapter that speaks to me. This is a hard one for me to voice my thoughts on because it clicks with me on a level that is difficult to articulate. I'll start by saying that I've seen some translations that say "Disgrace is considered inferior," and I don't think it makes a difference which is actually there. Favor with one is usually disgrace with another and vice versa.

Watch the favor though! If you are in good graces with your boss or your leader, you can surely lose those good graces just as easily. Not only that, if you are spoken well of and talked up, it increases the demands others will want to make on you. This encourages their own ambition and cunning. Not only that, it may inflate your own sense of esteem and inspire you to dismiss hsü and begin to scheme for yourself.

Most importantly, the leader who gives favor or disgrace is not a sage and does not rule with wu-wei. Lao Tzu already explains why this is important in chapter 3.

The second half is as humorous as it is true. I laugh when I read it, or at least I quirk my lips in a wry sort of grin. Can't you see a comic saying, "If I have no body, what trouble could I have?" Still, this has aspects of stewardship and even environmentalism (in a very early 21^st century context) in it. We value our body and our health, even if we put it at risk by not exercising, eating terrible food, and practicing vices. One only has to become ill or be involved in an accident to realize how important our body is to us. We do value it, at least for the moment. Perhaps later we will forget again.

So the one who truly values his world as we value our body can be trusted with it.

I want to say more, but much talk destroys truth.