“They must be committed to the mystery of the faith now revealed and must live with a clear conscience.”

A friend was sharing a challenge he has with an employee who has been “Employment Flirting”.  He described a situation where a key employee has been in discussions with another organization for quite a while and before things went any further, the employee wanted to come clean and share that he’d been unfulfilled in his job for some time now but didn’t want to say anything and that this “flirting” had been ongoing, and that the employee was going to have another meeting and then decide whether or not he would move forward or not with the new employer. The employee thought he was doing my friend a favor by sharing this, versus surprising him with just a resignation.  And maybe the employee was right by trying to be a bit more transparent than most would expect, but my friend had a novel way of turning it around on the employee to explain how there are two sides to this coin and how my friend was now left without a lot of choices.  My friend asked back to the employee how he would feel had he, as his boss, come to him and told him that for the past few months he had been unhappy with the employee’s performance, but didn’t say anything but instead decided to go out and get to know some other people to see if they might be better at the job than the employee.  And in fact, he had found someone who he was going to meet with one more time, and if things went well, he’d be coming back to the employee and letting him know that he was being replaced.  As you can imagine, when put that way, the employee could see where “Employment Flirting” is indeed flawed, if, there is to be respect for each other. The lesson to learn here is that as we manage and develop our people, that our relationships with our employees is just like any life relationship and if we want them to stay intact and strong we have to work at them and be sure that we are being open, honest and communicative in both our satisfactions and discouragements before we start flirting around.

It’s kind of hard to wrap our minds around the emotion of disappointment that God must have felt when Adam and Eve broke the trust pact between themselves and God. Surely, as God, He knew it could (and would) happen, but He let them be flirted with nonetheless and they crossed the line, leaving each of us now marred and susceptible to our own failings. We each will have something in our lives that we are being flirted with that runs counter to the commitments that God has given us.  As in all of our lives, as it is with God, we will be better at keeping those commitments if we are being open, honest and communicative with Him and those around us who strengthen us in Christ. The question to ask ourselves today is what are we flirting with that we shouldn’t be and do we have our commitments in the right place?

Reference: 1 Timothy 3:9 (New Living Translation)