Issue 246
Based on Isaiah 59:8
Have you ever wished for a bit more peace and quiet? Sometimes during a busy period you long for a break in the form of a holiday or a day off.
When a disagreement arises between workers, others may intervene to bring about a state of peace. In another context, as you look inside of yourself you may not feel wholly at peace.
Looking at gangs, armies and sects, you may find yourself appalled at the lack of peace in today’s world. Most of us cannot remember a time when the world was fully at peace. There always seems to be a war raging somewhere.
Yet in the vast majority of us, there is a longing for peace at all levels of life and work.
Over 600 years before the birth of Christ, Isaiah gave us a description of the reasons for a lack of peace. This is the way of the crooked road. He describes the process by which we turn our paths into these crooked roads and concludes that there will never be peace on such a road.
In more detail, he catalogues at least fourteen steps to turning a path into a crooked road. These are not ancient and dated quaint echoes of a bygone era; each step has a totally modern look and could easily be found in a newspaper today. To break with tradition for these pieces, here is a list for you:
1. Blood-stained hands
2. Guilty fingers
3. Spoken lies
4. Wicked mutterings
5. Ignoring justice
6. Lack of integrity
7. Empty arguments
8. Trouble making
9. Evil deeds
10. Acts of violence
11. Shedding innocent blood
12. Evil thoughts
13. Ruinous ways
14. Destructive ways
You may need to alter a word or two, but this list of behaviours could be found unchanged in most papers, most days.
And all of them apply to work. In the global economy, people die due to corporate malpractice. There is blood on our hands. Contracts are broken, agreements are ignored and words become meaningless, empty, unjust and downright evil. You don’t need to look at war zones to find these fourteen behaviours; they are present in trades, professions and businesses. These behaviours turn our paths into crooked roads.
So what do you do with this information? It depends on how peaceful you feel or how much peace you think you know in your life. This list can provide you with a diagnostic tool and help you figure out how you may be contributing to your own state of peace. This list can help you examine team behaviour or corporate policy and measure its promotion or destruction of peace. This list is a challenge to us all to examine our lives and see if we are agents of peace or war.
These behaviours also dull our senses and stop us from hearing or seeing God. They place us at risk of missing out on walking with him altogether.
To turn a path into a crooked road is a very dangerous project. Hallmarked by lack of peace, it will take you on the long route to destruction.
The list is also a warning – stay straight
Isaiah 59:8
8 The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths. They have turned them into crooked roads; no-one who walks in them will know peace.
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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