He Did It The Right Way And Lost The Job

He did not make a speech about it. He wants that understood, because he has heard the story told back to him twice now in a shape he does not recognize.

What happened is that a thing came across his desk that was not right, and he knew it was not right, and he said so once, in a small meeting, and then he did not sign it.

That was it. He did not go over anybody's head. He did not send anything to anybody. He simply did not put his name on a thing he believed to be untrue, and he said why, once, in about forty seconds.

Three weeks later he was moved off the work.

Nobody used the word. It was framed as a reallocation, and there was a genuine reason given that was almost plausible, and two people said nice things about him in the process, and if you had described the whole sequence to a stranger they would not necessarily have seen anything wrong with it.

He saw it. Everybody who was in that meeting saw it.

And the man who signed it is doing very well.

That is the part he did not expect to be so hard. He assumed the hard part would be the losing. The hard part is the watching. It has been about a year, and the other man's name keeps arriving in ordinary conversation, attached to good things, and every time it does something goes tight in his chest and he has to do a small piece of work inside himself before he can carry on with the conversation.

He has not become bitter. He would say that, and the people who know him would back him up.

But he has become quiet about God in a specific way. He does not say much about faithfulness any more. He does not use certain sentences he used to use easily, because he heard himself say one of them about eight months ago and it sounded thin in his own mouth.

And you have a version of this. You did it the right way and it cost you, and somebody who did not is doing fine, and you have gone quiet about something you used to say without thinking.

All this has come upon us, and we have not forgotten You

There is a psalm that does something almost no modern song will do, and every person who has been costed for doing right should know it is in there.

The writers are describing defeat. Real, public, humiliating defeat. And then they say this.

All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant.Psalm 44:17

Read what they are not doing. They are not confessing. They are not searching themselves for the hidden sin that would explain it, and they are not accepting the standard interpretation, which in their world and ours is that if it went badly for you then you must have done something.

They say: this happened, and we were faithful, and both of those are true.

You are allowed to hold those two facts together without resolving them, and Scripture holds a whole psalm open in exactly that position. It is written, all this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you (Psalm 44:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that in the songbook so that a man who was moved off his work for telling the truth would not have to go looking for a fault in himself to make the world make sense.

Now the watching, because that is the wound that is still open.

Asaph has a whole psalm about this and he says it cost him nearly everything: his feet had almost slipped, he says, because he saw the prosperity of the wicked. He is not describing a small irritation. He is describing a man who nearly lost his footing entirely from watching the wrong people do well.

So the thing that goes tight in your chest is not pettiness and it is not a spiritual failure. It is one of the oldest recorded experiences of faithful people, and a psalmist nearly went down under it.

You are having a normal and ancient experience, and there is nothing small in you because a name in a conversation still catches. Scripture says my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped, for I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked (Psalm 73:2-3), and it is His Spirit who has kept your feet under you for a year while that name kept coming up.

And the going quiet about faithfulness, which is the thing you have not told anybody.

That is not you losing your faith. That is you refusing to say a sentence you are not currently able to stand behind, which is a form of integrity and it is the same integrity that made you refuse to sign. You did not stop believing God is faithful. You stopped making claims about how it looks from the outside, because you have seen how it can look.

You are being honest rather than cold, and the silence you have kept is the same integrity that cost you the work. It is written that the Lord desires truth in the inward being (Psalm 51:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who would rather have a man quiet and honest than fluent and hollow.

And now what this page will not do.

It will not tell you it will be put right. It might be. Things surface, and reputations are longer than a year, and sometimes a signature turns up again in a room where it matters. But nobody here knows that about your situation, and telling you the correction is coming would be a story invented to make you feel better, which is exactly what has already been done to you once.

You have a God who saw the whole meeting, and you do not have a schedule for the record, and the first of those is the one that holds a man up. Scripture says the Lord is a God of justice, and blessed are all those who wait for him (Isaiah 30:18), and it is His Spirit who makes waiting something other than idleness.