Bad Business

By Fred Vilbig

In accounting, your numbers don’t always add up. You total everything up, and the numbers are a little off. That can happen in something as simple as your checkbook or as complicated as a spreadsheet for $1 billion conglomerate corporation. It happens all the time on inventory when things just disappear.

If the discrepancy is less than 1%, or maybe even as much is 5%, rather than wasting untold hours trying to find the math error or the transposed number, accountants employ a time honored practice of inserting a “plug” number. Taking time to find that missing number or item would just be bad business.

If you think about it, God is a bad businessman. Jesus asks the question, “Which one of you, having 100 sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the 99 in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?” Luke 15:4

The answer is no one in their right mind. Why for the sake of one sheep would you jeopardize 99 others by leaving them to predators and thieves in the wilderness? Bad business!

But God is ridiculous. Yes, I said ridiculous. He loves each one of us so much that He goes searching for us, even when it is foolish; even when the odds are against Him; even when we don’t want Him to find us. He is always searching us out. Ridiculous as it may seem, God loves us more than any of us could ever imagine. He wants us in heaven with Him more than we can possibly conceive.

The one thing He won’t do is force us. God is all about love. And forced love is not love, it is a fraud, a fake. God is all about the truth, so he wants us to love Him in truth. That is why God is so gentle, so subtle in calling us to Him. He’s always calling us, just in a soft, peaceful whisper.

So God is a bad businessman, but thank God for that. Where would we all be without bad business?