Trivia question: Name the following company based on its litany of honors... Received six awards in 2000 for being environmentally friendly
Fortune - America's most innovative company for six consecutive years (1996 to 2001)
Fortune - America's #2 company for Quality of Management, 2001
Fortune - America's 22nd best company to work for in 2000
Fortune - 2nd ranked American company for employee talent in 2000
Financial Times - Energy Company of the Year, 2000
Global Finance - World's best company in the Energy Sector, 2001
And the Answer is... are you ready for this... Enron.*
While everything looked so good externally for this energy giant, the core of the company was rotting due to extremely poor decisions. Today the word "Enron" doen't bring to mind "innovative" or "best", rather the word brings to most people's minds words like "failure", "corruption", "deceit", "fraud", and the like.
Sometimes I fear a lot of Christians live life like Enron. They try to appear like they have everything together, when spiritually and emotionally they are dry and possibly even rotting. They wear the smile on Sunday while their pillow is wet from tears. They carry the words of God under their arm, but God seems so far away. And they hate themselves for their hypocrisy.
So what's the cure? Confession.
It is amazing what a dose of truth can do. It may seem painful to let the blazing light of truth crash into the darkness of our souls - but our spiritual eyes will adjust and we will eventually be thankful that the truth is known.
Are you being a spiritual "Enron"? If so, who can you safely go to and confess the emptiness to?
(source: Leadership Wired)
2 comments:
Just last Thursday we watched a movie on Enron in my Organizational Behavior class. Do you remember that just prior to the fall of the Enron empire former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling resigned? And, after being named in the lawsuit against the company former Enron Corp. vice chairman Clifford Baxter committed suicide. As Christians who may be living like Skilling and Baxter, we too have the same responses; flee from responsibility and from the truth, or even worse, continue in our sin until we reach a point where our spiritual growth becomes dead. It's often too late that we realize that appearance indeed is not everything. It surely would have been difficult; going against all his peers, but had he confessed the truth Baxter might still be alive today. "It may seem painful to let the blazing light of truth crash into the darkness of our souls" but it's got to be better than trying to bear the burden of living in our sin.
Post a Comment