Faith Venture

I remember Mr. Johnson, my high school geometry teacher, who said that his course was more about learning to think than shapes and angles. He was right. I don’t remember much about dodecahedrons, but the logical thinking survived a lifetime (so far, at least). In geometry we would go through a logic process of proving that one shape was similar to another, and if so, they were said to be congruent. Similarly psychologists might say that same thing about a person if the various parts of their personality were internally consistent.

C. Michael Thompson’s “The Congruent Life: Following the Inward Path to Fulfilling Work and Inspired Leadership” begins with the discussion of ethics that I presented in the last post. If you thought about the various parts of your daily life after reading it, perhaps you’ve seen where you have pressure to have a different set of ethics at home, at work, at your organization meetings, at church. Thompson in both his work life as a high profile attorney and later as a teacher at business school found what he considered a disturbing occurrence of that divorce of ethics and work. If you are congruent, then the ethics that you derive from a relationship with God should be brought into all the other areas of your life. And you should not be ashamed of that.

I talked about three men that I have worked with who made great show about being Christian businessmen, but who then also found a way to walk away from promises or contracts they had with me. That is hardly congruent. What else does that mean? It also means that, even though I’ve long since quit worrying about that lost money, but I will always be suspect of their true relationship with God. It never shook my faith, but what if they had business dealings with someone who is thinking about a deeper relationship with God. This sort of experience could turn them away. Psychologists also talk about people perceiving a congruent person as being sincere. I would love to grow into that.

So, how do your angles measure up?

This entry was posted on March 6, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.