Contributed by Darren Lim • Apr 29, 2025
It was one of the recent rainy mornings when I got into an accident on my way to work. The traffic heading into MEX came to a standstill when all of sudden, I caught a glimpse through my right view mirror of a motorcycle losing balance, sliding horizontally and hitting into the right rear of my stationary car. The motor and its rider got repelled upon impact some 80m away. My immediate reaction was one of annoyance. I thought to myself that this was typical of a motorcyclist. Speeding on a rainy morning, recklessly weaving between cars and now causing others great inconvenience. This week’s sermon was a good reminder that because I have not seen what actually transpired, there could be a myriad of reasons why he lost balance. It could be that another car suddenly decided to switch lanes and he hit the brakes in response. It could be that he hit a stagnant puddle and his wheels lost grip. I will never know but the point is this – it may not be his fault. I will never know the real reason why but I am called not to judge and condemn.
God’s desire is for me not to unfairly judge and stereotype others. However, there remains the dilemma between unfairly judging others and resolving to do nothing. In the area of work, I have in the past refrained from giving my staff timely feedback on bad work performance. I constantly deferred the conversation and consoled myself that I was finding a suitable time to do so. I would instead hint at alternative ways to address challenges and issues they faced during our 1-to-1 engagements. This backfired on me when I had to give a bad end-of-year review. My staff was surprised and visibly upset that I did not provide honest and timely feedback. This would have allowed him sufficient opportunity to correct and improve. Since then, I started doing some self study on how to effectively give and receive feedback. That’s when I came across management frameworks. Firstly, it speaks about setting the scene. It was important to find a conducive environment for a private conversation and to check if this was a good time to give feedback to the person. If it wasn’t, best to schedule a better timing. Secondly, the line manager was advised to objectively state an observation of the recent situation by articulating what the manager thought had transpired and how that came across to the manager. Lastly, to seek to understand the other person’s point of view – what were they going through, how they felt and why they might have acted the way they did.
If the management principles of this world also stresses the importance of being wise in appropriately addressing what, when and how to point out a behaviour worth correcting, how much more so for us as Christians when mistakes have implications of eternal proportions. What matters is that we maintain a posture of humility and a genuine desire to see others walk right with God. I pray that as I gradually walk more and more in step with the Spirit, I will be able to discern when to appropriately speak the truth in love and humility to a brother/sister as we journey together towards Christlikeness.