A mistake?

Just as I thought the edge was dulling on the tension I felt at work, here comes more. PeBo is suggesting now that I should impose time tracking on my staff to see what they're doing all day. And my peers on PeBo's staff are suggesting that my people don't have the skills or desire needed to do their jobs, which would explain why they might be working on the wrong things. And after 6 months of working with them and observing, I think they're right. So our next staff meeting will be spent talking about how we can work around my folks to get things done faster!

And here I thought I had come here to be a consultant to my part of the company, build a staff of consultants to help them understand the financial impacts of their actions, and communicate it with the rest of the place. Instead, for the last several months we've been neck deep in reengineering the business process of handling data and reports, and it looks like for the *next* several months I'll be doing little else but trying to either retrain or get rid of my staff, most of which were handed to me by other managers, including my two bosses!

Somehow this is a different job than the one I was hired to do a year ago. Feels like a big mistake. But then, maybe all it's only what Solomon was talking about in Ecclesiastes 9:11, when he said: "... The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favor to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all."

At least time seems to be flying by. All the studying for grad school (or seminary - however you want to refer to it) is forcing me to concentrate on something else for a significant chunk of my spare time, so I don't dwell on the office overmuch. It's the 3rd week of class tonight. Already!

This week the topic was the run up of Saul's kingship, and all his boneheaded mistakes. What poor judgment! Or maybe they were mistakes, not of judgment, but of a rebellious heart. Or maybe they were motivated by personal greed or false pride or poor self-image. Or maybe they were results of a general carelessness caused by simply not taking God seriously. And as a consequence - he loses all he gained, and winds up worse off than before God called him.

Gee... I'm intimately familiar with all those types of mistakes. Does that mean I'm wired like Saul? I always thought I was wired more like David, or like Solomon. Hm. I wonder if they were INTJs/ENTJs. :)

Of course, David made all those same kinds of mistakes, too - and *he* was a man after God's own heart. While those mistakes cost him, the setbacks were temporary, and he continued to have God's favor. What was the difference? One obvious difference was that Saul was never broken in spirit before God like David was, crying out with all his heart for God's mercy. The one time Saul asked for God's forgiveness, it was so that he could continue to look good in the eyes of the people. That was never David's motivation - David's heart broke over his own wretchedness.

As does mine.

And like David, I know that God's mercy is my only hope and my greatest need, in this life - and the next.