We Sure Do Suffer for Lack of Knowledge

The other day I sent my boss an email asking to take a late lunch at the end of the day so that I could leave work earlier than usual.

Now, the intent of the ‘late lunch’ was to use that time to get a head start on beating the traffic in going to my meeting. However, my meeting was canceled and notification was sent via email, but, you guessed it, I didn’t read my email before I left. So, I caught up with my boss nearing the end of the day and asked him if he got my email about my late lunch. Of course, him being distraught about other issues at the moment responded quite brashly and walked away without giving me a clear answer.

Of course I was rather confused as to what just happened, but I realized he was probably under a lot of pressure already and I just tightened the pressure valve.

The bottom line was that we ended up going back and forth each of us defending our cause. He never read my email so he thought I was asking for time off when I spoke to him in person toward the end of the day, when in actuality I had sent him notification early in the day, not for time off, but simply to shift my allotted lunch time around.

Anyway, he approved me to leave and when I got home later that night I sent him an apology email because even thought I may have been right in following the procedure for my request, I was wrong in the way I handled the situation. I was in no way supposed to be arguing back and forth with my boss. Hebrews 13:17 says:

Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account. Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.

It is not my job to convict and bring correction to anyone, much less those in authority-that is the work of the Holy Spirit. Of course, this is not to say that I should never be bold, because there is a time for everything and we have to use our boldness under the wisdom of God.

So, (and this is really the point) besides honing my abilities to write an apology note, the real issue here was that I could have avoided the whole situation if I had just read my email, like I usually do. I suffered due to a lack of ‘knowing’ or knowledge that my meeting had been cancelled.

The same truth applies to us and the Bible. How many times do we have to suffer through a problem before we realize that we are simply lacking the right information to make the right choice? Hosea 4:6 says:

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priests for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children..”

A lot of our problems or rather the poor way we deal with our problems stem from our lack of knowledge in the Scripture. Just like me, I didn’t have enough knowledge to avoid the problem altogether. And, with the partial knowledge I had, only managed to engage in a run on conversation that really ended where we began.

All in all, I thank God for showing this to me. I knew the confrontation at work had to be for a reason.