Studio52Seven

It is said that to err is human. We at least accept man’s fallible nature. Indeed, at the very grand opening, our ancestors blew it. “Do not touch,” they were told. But… oops! Too late. They ate the forbidden (Genesis 1, 2).

Human history is a long record of failures and flops. In most of them, God simply left us to sort ourselves out. However, we have at least four cataclysmic situations that called for interventions by God. – Well, one, the first, was not violent.

• The first was in the acknowledgment of man’s near incompetence at the task he was given and the need for a woman (Genesis 2:18).
• The second was the sacking of the couple from the garden (Genesis 2:15–3:24). Man had taken the turn that if nothing was done, he would have eaten the other seed in his fallen state. There is no need to imagine what the end of that would have been.
• The third was the flood (Genesis 7). It is what you get when an artist decides that a work of art has been woefully spoiled and needs to be redone. Erase all. At least the canvas was not altogether destroyed. The earth—the canvas—was restored, but with a lot of washing.
• And there was yet a fourth, the confusion of languages (Genesis 11).

In each of these times, Man was set on a tangent that undermined not just his purpose, but God’s intent for His creation.

Project designers and managers do a lot to deploy fail-proof designs. Risk management is a whole world that keeps some heavily paid guys awake; thinking. The cost of a product not coming out as intended can be devastating. The man-hours and other resources that might have been wasted can be unbearable. According to Bigelow, Deborah citing the CBP’s August 2000 edition of Project Management Best Practices Report,

“nearly half of the projects implemented are over budget by 100 to 400 percent. The research further concludes that 86 percent of projects are late in achieving deliverables.”

Bigelow, D. (2002). Four top priorities of Fortune 500 companies. PM Network, 16(11), 20.

Bigelow reports that these Fortune 500 companies benchmarked risk management as one of their four priorities.

While we see God come in once in a while with a major correction, it appears that for the most He leaves us to sort ourselves out. He has given us this enormous responsibility: decision-making. Indeed, Man’s very first blunder was because of this: the ability to make a choice. But God also modeled for Man what to do. When He said that His work in creating the man “was not good” and went ahead to make Eve, He was modeling course correction. When He made the coverings of animal skin and drove the couple out of the garden, He was on a course correction. So, God is not jittery when we run off course. He, it appears, anticipates it.

The problem, it appears, is that we do not seem to recognize how much we need course corrections in our personal lives. Stubbornness is a word we use to describe our attitude when we are set to continue on the wrong course. While others might have seen us as derailing, we are obstinate. The same obstinate guy who is set on the wrong tangent with his marriage may be working with one of these Fortune 500 companies that are not leaving stones unturned to see that risks are identified on time and mitigated, if not altogether avoided.

Stubbornness is a word we use to describe our attitude when we are set to continue on a wrong course.

Project managers employ the Agile methodology to ensure that course correction happens very frequently. With every iteration, there is a review that throws up what needs to be corrected. The wins may be bite-sized, but so will the problems that need fixing.

Mike Heath in ‘Course Correction’ notes that

“When you quit making small adjustments in your relationship, you head toward serious trouble. But small changes can become powerful tools for moving a couple back toward caring, closeness and healing”

https://www.focusonthefamily.com/marriage/course-correction/

The Apostle Paul puts it thus: “Do not go to bed without sorting out your issues” (Ephesians 4:25–27, my paraphrase).

As is true in a relationship like a marriage, it is also true in other areas of life, especially our walk with God. He is committed to course corrections in our lives. When we blow it and come back to Him, He acknowledges our commitment to the journey and helps us make the necessary course corrections. Until we acknowledge and recommit to this journey, we will float along on a probably uncharted course. The extent to which we drift from the original course to that extent, the effort required to make a course correction might be when we say yes again to His Lordship.

As humans, we are all born with a faulty compass. “There is a way that seems good to a man, but the end is destruction,” the Bible says (Proverbs 14:12). God made us unique with our personalities to add value to life on earth. Sin, however, corrupted that system, and instead of our personalities yielding to us the purposes for which we have been created, they yield decay and death. Our temperaments are supposed to complement and interlock with those of others around us to create the reinforced fabric on which the purposes of God thrive. However, often they run out of sync like misaligned gears and crack up conflicts and confusion. They set us on courses that are completely off.

In Lion King 2, Simba, a retired veteran of the art of wandering off track and well aware of the possible consequences, charged his little daughter, Kiara, to “stay on the path I’ve marked for you!.” A lot like when God says to us, “Your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’” (Isaiah 30:21). But are we not all like the children of Israel to whom God, through Isaiah, was addressing that message? There is always the enticingly attractive, make-sense adventure. At the beginning of that chapter, God talks to the obstinate children,

“to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin; who go down to Egypt without consulting me; who look for help to Pharaoh’s protection, to Egypt’s shade for refuge.”

Isaiah 30:1-2

While our Father has a course laid out for us, we do rather prefer to veer off so very often. How seamlessly a clock works when the gears yield to the settings of the horologist. How beautiful and harmonious an orchestra plays when the individual players look to and surrender to the faintest move of the conductor’s baton.

How beautiful and harmonious an orchestra plays when the individual players look to and surrender to the faintest move of the conductor’s baton.

Our lives are ours just as the violin belongs to the player or at least is in his or her hands. And he or she may decide to play as he or she sees fit. However, once such a one subscribes to an orchestra, such yields his or her right to determine what to play or how to play it, to the conductor.

We live in a world where there is a lot of talk about self-determination and rights – “the way that seems right to a man” (Proverbs 14:12). Individuals in marriages, communities, work, and ministry teams, are finding it difficult to cope with each other. This age has been tagged as the most narcissistic. A Microsoft-led study indicates that our attention span is declining. And this shows in the speed at which we also get tired of relationships. And with a culture that promotes disposable romantic relationships outside of marriage or the prospects of it, our world has gotten used to the ease to dispose of relationships – in all their forms. The idea of bearing with others is a lost act. Comments like “I can’t take it any longer” are now the favored expression.

Whether it is in our marriages or work teams, not committing to course corrections in short iterations gives room for problems to pile up to the heavens; making resolutions harder to arrive at. For our individual lives, not insisting or prompt course correction compromises our situation so much that we are flung very far from the destiny God had set for us. Whatever area of life NOW is the suitable time to begin to recalibrate and get back on course.