Leaders Take Time to Reflect

Prov. 16:2 (NLT) People may be pure in their own eyes, but the Lord examines their motives.

Pride, seeing my intentions and behavior to be “pure,” gets in the way of most everything we do: the reason? The subtle expressions of pride often happen in the little things that we don’t face and resolve. The accumulation of those unresolved expressions build up behaviors that often have national consequence.

The current economic conditions of 2008-2009 reflect the power of pride, not expressed as haughtiness, but expressed as “the pride of life” that drives people to take mortgages out they could not possibly afford and large financial companies paying out “bonuses” for purposes of “retention” rather than as reward for performance. When pinned down, these people, great and small, easily point the finger outward: never inward.

That’s why this writer continually writes on the heart (motives). Recently, having forgotten a previous agreement, I insisted on grabbing a check for dinner. My behavior, born of my “pure” motive to thank a friend for his recent help, was so overriding that I pushed back in my mind my previous commitment that each couple would pay their own portion of the bill. Between that conversation and dinner, I purposed to pay, driven by a complex of internal motives that were not revealed until after “I won the check-grab.” What words came out as my friend was challenging me were not pure, but prideful: my behavior was full of self - a twinkle in my eye, a “gotcha” in my heart.

It was in the quiet of evening prayer that I realized how easily I had succumbed to “it’s all about me.” What I wanted to do. What I saw was “right.” How pride had driven motive and memory. My motives, even though one could consider them honorable, were all about me – not about “us.”

Do you take the time to listen to what God is saying in your heart, in a quiet time of reflection?

Copyright (c) 2009 by P. Griffith Lindell