day no. 15,007: a ticket for admission

"A subordinate’s willingness to admit mistakes depends on the commander’s willingness to tolerate them."

We must learn from our mistakes. Part of this involves admitting them. If we don't think we have made a mistake, we won't confess them. If we don't admit them, we can't learn from them and avoid them in the future. But the atmosphere of mistake management contributes to this. It creates a culture in which learning and improvement are goals, so admitting mistakes and teachable moments are encouraged. That environment fosters a willingness to admit mistakes and a willingness to be corrected for a common goal of maturity and wisdom. 

If a commander, parent, or pastor, cannot tolerate nonsense of any kind, he will create a great deal more of it... not less. Nonsense of every kind will increase off grid. It will still be happening, only he won't know about it. It will be done in the darkness and it will encourage more of it because it cannot be corrected in the light. It will spread in the petri dish of darkness and grow worse, producing even more of the very thing expressly not tolerated. 

You can erase mistakes through ignorance or forgiveness. Ignorance removes them by increasing them somewhere else. Forgiveness removes them by erasing them in your presence. In other words, ignorance doesn't actually do what it's attempting. It reduces the number of sins you see and increase those you don't. Forgiveness insists on seeing the sin and reduces those that are hidden.

So if foolishness and mistakes are to be decreased, they must first be given the opportunity to be confessed. And as if admitting you were wrong was not difficult enough in itself, the added weight of an mistake-intolerant atmosphere makes it all the more less likely. In that home, at that church, in that organization, in that battalion, errors increase, wars are lost, marriages broken, children wounded and community destroyed.