A Good Boss

I don't supervise a lot of people--a couple of full-time employees, a handful of part-time workers, several students. But I've been a boss for a couple of decades now, and I've had a boss for a lot longer than that, and the most truthful thing I've learned about bosses through all those years has been this:

A good boss can deal with anything, as long as he/she knows about it.

Over the years I've had to let my boss know I've screwed up many (many) times. The time I wrote a personality profile that inadvertently slandered the ex-president of our organization. The time I mis-read a statistic and the subsequent brochure had to be discarded because I passed the mis-reading along in print. The time I didn't catch an error and the wrong telephone number was published in an important document. I could go on and on until the internet ran out of room for cataloging my mistakes.

People who work for me have made mistakes, too. They've designed artwork that was the wrong size, and spec-ed the wrong color, and on one memorable occasion, faked photography with a non-functioning camera.

But I've learned from my good bosses how a good boss deals with mistakes: We shake our heads a couple of times, maybe roll our eyes, then we say "So what's the solution for this?" and we move on, expecting that the person has learned a lesson and will doublecheck the statistic for the next publication.

I try to find out where the mistake originated--was I distracted or stressed? Was my employee undertrained or cutting corners? Then, as long as the underlying cause wasn't intentional or a lack of integrity, I move on.

It occurs to me that humans often make the mistake of thinking God is not a good boss.

"If I do something wrong," they say to themselves, "God won't love me any more. He might even tell me I'm not good enough for His kingdom. So I won't tell Him the mistakes I've made, and He won't know."

Eventually they accumulate so many unconfessed sins that they convince themselves God couldn't cope with such a terrible person, and they wander away from Him.

Or they tell God about the mistake, but aren't really interested in not making the mistake again. "God, I'm sorry I gossiped," they pray in the morning, gleefully looking forward to lunch break when they'll repeat the same sin.

God wants us to tell Him about our mistakes and ask for forgiveness, and if we are sincerely trying to find out where our mistakes originated and fix the problem, He joyfully forgives. He promised in Psalm 103:12 that He'll take those mistakes and send them "as far as the east is from the west."

God can deal with anything we tell Him about. God is a good boss.