granting grace for arrogance:
(a Christian perspective on forgiving someone who isn’t sorry.)
a bit of backstory…
So far we’ve talked about understanding God’s grace, and learning how to give grace to ourselves, but this week I wanna focus on extending grace to others.
In theory, it sounds easy and makes sense. I mean, if we want God’s grace to cover us when we make mistakes then we should extend that same grace to others when they make mistakes (Matthew 6:14-15). We’re all human after all.
But what happens when the person you need to extend grace to is unapologetic? I dealt with such a character this week and MAN was it a trip! What made it so difficult was the arrogance and disrespect I had to deal with. We were collaborating on a project, but they kept disregarding my input. Because they presented themselves as the relative expert on the topic, I trusted their leadership and we proceeded according to their plan…which caused a major issue. An issue that I could’t resolve on my own and that needed to be addressed immediately. And on a Friday night of all nights. The once arrogant and self-righteous “leader” cowardly fled the scene, and left me holding the bag.
OOPSIES!
a candid photo of the once arrogant and self-confident engineer after she realized her faux pas.
Not only did I trust this person against my better judgment, but they didn’t even have the integrity to take responsibility to help me clean up the mess that THEY caused. All I could do was seek help elsewhere.
Can you imagine my anger? My frustration? Oh-ho-ho, I wanted heads to roll! How could she leave me high and dry like that, when I needed her most?!
All I could do was pray, and the Lord, of course, came through for me. But He taught me a valuable lesson along the way and about arrogance and forgiveness.
the foundation.
My day job is in the IT space. I’ve been in my career field for over a decade and have quite the resume. I pride myself on my ability to understand and figure things out at their root. I would say it’s one of the few talents I have. I enjoy the process of investigating a problem and finding the solution. So when I learned of a long-standing issue that no one else on my team had been able to solve, I was excited; salivating at the chance to get after it.
I began my investigation and felt I isolated it to a specific area. All the data pointed to my finding being correct, but I wanted confirmation from an independent third party (checks and balances, you know?), so I reached out to the vendor of the technology and presented the issue, my findings, and asked for their input. I was elated to see that a woman was assigned my case (#WomenInIT!), but that excitement wore off shortly after working with her. She was confident…too confident. In my experience, working with people like that never ends well. (Proverbs 16:18-19)
the plot twist.
Very early on dismissed all the hard work and investigation I did, adamantly telling me I was wrong and what I found had nothing to do with the issue. I was upset, but I put my pride aside and trusted her expertise.
Friday afternoon comes—just 3 hours to the end of my relatively quiet and calm work day—and she provides me with her very scant investigation and her suggested fix. I tell you, something in my gut didn’t trust it. I hesitated but I researched her suggestions and saw that they could be helpful, so I proceed to do as she suggested. I was prepared to go back and tell her that her suggestions did nothing, but instead they did SOMETHING. A major something that effectively took the devices in question down.
I jumped on a call with her to tell her about what’s happened and how the devices didn’t recover after doing what she’d suggested. She tried a few things, none of which worked. She looped in another engineer. Then another. Still, the devices didn’t recover. I asked her to escalate the issue multiple times at this point because we were just spinning our wheels. She put forth the escalation and told me the engineer would be joining soon, but she tried to end the call and have me wait for the next engineer to contact me.
Excuse me?!?!
Most definitely not, ma’am! You’re gonna stay on this call and suffer with me until the next engineer joins!
(what we call in the industry a “warm handoff”).
10 minutes pass. 20. 30. An hour goes by, and STILL no new engineer. Now I’m pissed. It’s almost the end of my work day at this point and I’m stuck with an issue that I didn’t even cause! Her manager joins the call (btw we call it a “bridge”, which is just a call with multiple engineers on actively investigating an issue.) He tells me she actually has another “meeting” to get to and will have to drop. I was LIVID. I told him *someone* was going to have to stay on the call with me until the escalation engineer joined. He agreed that he would. Ok, fine.
A few minutes later, he starts subtly complaining that it’s 3a where he was located. I politely but firmly told him I didn’t care; we wouldn’t have been on that call at all had his engineer not brazenly suggested something that took our equipment down. He said he understood and affirmed multiple times that he would stay on the call until the next engineer joined.
Meanwhile, I escalated my ticket to the highest possible priority in their system, had him escalate the issue on his end, AND I contacted our sales engineer to escalate as well. Yet still we waited, another hour, then two.
At the 3-hour mark, the manager who promised me he'd stay on the call with me until the engineer joined, just…dropped. Without explanation or anything. I thought maybe it was an accident, and he’d be joining again soon. NOPE. Nothing.
If I was livid before, I was about ready to blow my top now. Not only was I stuck on a Friday evening after hours working on an outage, but I was working on an outage that I didn’t cause, and the person who caused it fled the scene!
I felt highly disappointed and angry at the pure incompetence and unprofessionalism I’d just, not only witnessed but, experienced. All I could do was call the vendor’s main support number and wait on hold for an engineer.
the confirmation.
I’d waited for about 40 minutes, but my sales engineering team finally came through for me and got me a Tier 3 engineer on the back end. So it’s now 5 hours post my official work day; 8 hours since the issue started, but we were finally getting down to business. Not only that, but my sales engineer, her boss, her boss’ boss, and her boss’ boss’ boss all joined the bridge as well, out of respect for me sacrificing my Friday night.
At first, things were uneventful. The engineer had me doing much of the same that I’d already done. I was honestly annoyed but I knew things were moving now; it was just a matter of time. Eventually, we were able to fix the issue and restore things to how they were pre-outage.
And do you know what the fix was? Do you really wanna know what fixed this whole thing?
A reboot.
“have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Disclaimer:
To be fair, these particular devices are not devices that should be rebooted on a regular basis. In fact, rebooting is considered a last resort, and is typically not recommended except for in very rare situations, such as this one.
Gratefully, the devices began to recover and were eventually restored to an operational state. The issue I originally opened the ticket about was not yet fixed, but the Tier 3 engineer himself took ownership of the case and will be looking into it going forward.
The icing on the cake? I shared my initial findings with him and he agreed that what I’d found could very well be what’s causing the issue. But he’s going to review all of the logs we’ve taken and will verify and get back to me.
wrapping up.
Sometimes we get so caught up in our egos that we deprioritize finding the right solution in favor of being “right”. And for what? At best, we may be right, but we paint ourselves into a corner of arrogance and closed-mindedness. At worst, we can be wrong and end up causing an issue too big for us to handle.
Think about it: how many times did you sin just today alone? I couldn’t even begin to count myself. How many times have you transgressed against God over the course of your life, and yet He still rains down His mercy and forgiveness on you? He doesn’t write you off or forsake you, He grants you the grace to try again, and He’s there with you every step of the way. We should extend the forgiveness to others that God extends to us, not only because we’re called to (Ephesians 4:32), but because we’ve all fallen short in one way or another at some point (we’re all literally born of sin!) and so we should aim to forgive out of love and sympathy.
Initially, I was very angry with that engineer. But by the end of the night, my anger had morphed to frustration, and eventually to mercy. At the end of the day, we’ve all been there; being overly confident in ourselves only to end up being confidently wrong. I know how I’d felt; a mix of embarrassment, guilt, and shame. So how could I, knowing how it feels, continue to pile on and hate this person I barely knew just for being human? In the end, I prayed for her; that she’d learned her lesson. Namely “Humble yourself! And be willing to listen to others. You don’t know everything.”
And I prayed for myself, that I’d learn from her mistake and not allow myself to get too “big for my britches” or for my head to get too big. I prayed that God kept me humble (James 4:6-10), and that he’d remind me that despite how much I think I know, in the grander scheme of things I really don’t know much of anything.
To God be the glory, because without Him I wouldn’t be where I am today. I’m not the source or reason for my skill, but He is. 🙏🏾
so tell me…
Have you ever found yourself following someone who appeared so confident and sure of themselves, only to find that they ran you into a ditch, and got out themselves while leaving you to fend for yourself? What about a time when you were that confidently wrong person who had to eat a slice of humble pie (or the whole pie!)? How did you handle it, and what did you learn?
Drop a comment and let me know. Trust me, you’re in good company!
in grace and peace,
gina. 💙
