“Then make me truly happy be agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another and working together with one mind and purpose”

If you ever want to do a study on business productivity, it would be fascinating to start with the amount of time and energy that is put into trying to get people to do something in all the same way. Think about that for a moment and in your own experience, how often you have had to have that conversation with someone or a group?  We all have done it.  We have to to win over the wills of individuality and streaks of independence to get people to conform to a a way of doing something so that we can have measurable and predictable outcomes.  Software engineering and startup companies spend an enormous amount of time doing just this.  There have been books after books written on the subject and consultants have made millions of dollars on the simple premise of getting people to do the same things.  Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg himself is after this with his Open Compute Project.  He thinks he can be the one to create a new way of computing, sharing code and getting people to write code in the same way that can be transferred across countries, companies and time zones. This will require lots of people changing to conform to do something new, all the same way. Making change happen in people is complex, hard, and many times frustrating and futile.  But, we have to do so.  We know that the boat moves in the water more efficiently and faster if every oar goes into and out of the water in a synchronized fashion.  If the oars could do it by themselves, then it would be easy. It’s those hands that are connected to a body that are connected to a brain that make it hard.

God calls for all believers to believe in and follow Him all in one way.  Our deviation from that way is our sinful, human way of thinking that we can do it better or do it without the conformity that we are called to submit.  Each and every day, especially at work, we are called into areas where we can choose to submit and conform to His commands and teaching, or we can go it solo into the ways of the world.  While usually not areas that are devastating to us, even the little ways of disagreement, back-channeling, and office politics, can damage our witness and take over our submission to His will and way for us. We will face more than one of those today.  If we are in the spirit of doing it His way, then we will better ward off the temptations and the straying away from what He wants for us.

Reference: Philippians 2:2 (New Living Translation)