Ostium Catholic

Paul's résumé, recited tonight, is genuinely impressive by the standards of his own field: circumcised on the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless under the law. He isn't inventing false modesty about credentials he doesn't have. He built the thing, and then, with full knowledge of what it cost him to build, called it loss compared to actually knowing Christ.

That's a harder move to make the further along a career actually goes, not easier. A junior employee can walk away from a title without much cost. Someone who has spent fifteen years accumulating exactly the credentials Paul describes has a much larger asset to reconsider, and reconsidering it doesn't require abandoning the work. It requires being honest about whether the résumé has quietly become the thing you actually worship, rather than evidence of work faithfully done.

The shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one, and the woman who sweeps her whole house for one coin, are both operating on a logic no efficient organization would defend. Neither is calculating the acceptable loss rate. Both are treating one overlooked thing as worth a disproportionate search. Notice that the next time you're tempted to write off one underperforming relationship, client, or colleague as not worth the recovery effort. The math these parables run on isn't actually irrational. It's just optimizing for something other than aggregate efficiency, which is a category most professional frameworks don't have room for.

Name one relationship or account you've quietly written off as not worth recovering. Make one deliberate, disproportionate effort toward it this week.

Lord, let me hold my own credentials the way Paul held his - built honestly, and released without regret when they're not the point. Amen.