About The Cross Counts

I don’t know about you but I have been confronted at various times in my life and had to stop to think about what is the right thing to do in various circumstances.

It might be a decision I have to make about what I spend my money or time on. It might be a request or instruction from someone else may be in the workplace.

One example of that was when I was CEO of an charitable organisation which had been set up to maximise the amount of income we could generate and hence to provide better care and support for clients with various disabilities. All worked well for a couple of years but eventually I realised that some standards were slipping and the separation that should have been clear in the original guidance documents I had drawn up were no longer being followed as well as it should have been.

As a consequence we were taking money from public sources that we were not legally entitled to receive or at least there was some doubt about whether it could be obtained or not. That put me into a situation as the chief executive of being responsible for actions I could not condone from a spiritual and ethical point of view.

I spent time diving in deeper into the situation to think it through poring over legal advice and books I had obtained from various sources before coming to a firm decision that I could not support the actions we were performing. I developed a major detailed report for the full board of directors and presented it. At the thought of the organistion losing nearly £250,000 per year (about 500,000 US dollars) the board of directors instructed me to file the report away and never mention it again.

Two days later after giving it some more major thought I was forced to resign from the organisation and find other alternative employment to “blow the whistle”. That proved more difficult as I was blacklisted by many similar companies who would have jumped at the chance of employing me only a few months earlier.

Since then I have found myself being more aware of taking actions which I would not be comfortable with and have found myself asking =questions about whole range of things that are occurring in this world we share with non-believers.