Love @ Work Does Not Delight in Evil

Do you get a secret thrill when your business gets one over on a competitor? Or, closer to home, when a rival for a promotion makes a big mistake? Come on, be honest!

Our natural self-centered first reaction is to rejoice when something goes wrong for someone we view in some way as a competitor or, as 1 Corinthians 13:6 puts it, “delight in evil”. In this context, we’re talking about something going wrong for someone else. Of course things do go wrong for other people. Of course we are entitled to do what we can (ethically and morally) to accomplish business and personal goals. But our attitude toward our opponent is to be one of love, not hate. When Jesus says (John 6:35) “love your enemies, do good to them”, I don’t think this just means people who are actively attacking us. Even more it means the people who are in our way, or who don’t like us (or we don’t like).

We can get quite conflicted can’t we? When someone else wins the promotion, we wish something had happened to slow them down. Conversely when something does happen to someone else, we rationalize our celebration by thinking that they obviously didn’t deserve it, we are clearly better than them, or they’re better off as they are. Where is our compassion? Where is our love?

This can be a factor for managers too – one of the toughest parts of management is dealing with difficult or poorly performing employees. How often have we wished something would happen that would cause such people to resign, or have to leave, or else would give us clear grounds for dismissal? I inherited an employee many years ago, an experienced programmer who had all sorts of bad reports against him from various people. My job was to go through a process to terminate him. So I started with him, of course, and let him talk about what was going on. Then I started to listen to what other people had to say, and it began to dawn on me that there was more to this than met the eye. Fortunately, before I went through the disciplinary process I realized that this was a very talented man with some communication challenges, who had received no support whatever from a manager who was in fact “delighting in evil” – grabbing onto the bad reports he’d received as ammunition to get rid of what he saw as a difficult employee. This programmer became my star performer, my number one ranked team member. He also went from being morose and dissatisfied with work and life in general to a cheerful and actively contributing member of the team. I’ve experienced this scenario several times during my career and can attest to the joy of reversing the situation and discovering and unleashing the potential in discarded employees. It doesn’t always work out that way of course, but we are bound to try.

As so often, this comes back to how we view our colleagues as unique, valuable, gifted individuals, loved to the extreme by God. When we see people that way, even if we can’t resist some jealousy if they succeed ahead of us, we will not rejoice in evil. We will instead be concerned and compassionate, and will seek justice on their behalf if necessary. In fact, if they deserve a promotion ahead of us (and we often know it) we will speak out on their behalf. When was the last time you did that?