{"id":3551,"date":"2006-02-08T10:51:32","date_gmt":"2006-02-08T16:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2006\/02\/08\/you-dont-order-grits-honey-they-just-come\/"},"modified":"2022-01-28T15:54:37","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T21:54:37","slug":"you-dont-order-grits-honey-they-just-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/02\/08\/you-dont-order-grits-honey-they-just-come\/","title":{"rendered":"“You don’t order grits, honey, they just come.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been musing lately about the parable Jesus told involving the workers in the vineyard. You’re probably familiar with it; it’s the one where the vineyard owner hired guys throughout the day, and when it came time to get paid at the end of the shift, the ones hired last — who worked only a couple of hours — got paid the same wages as the ones hired first, even though they had put in a full day’s work. The latter were a bit torqued, even though they received exactly what was promised them. You can read the parable in the first part of Matthew, chapter 20<\/a>.<\/p>\n

About 2,000 later, a guy named J. Stacy Adams figured out a label for the phenomenon Jesus described. Adams called it the Equity Theory of Satisfaction, and in a nutshell it holds that employees decide how satisfied they are with their work based at least partly on how fairly they think they’re being treated, and a great deal of that fairness is assessed based on whether they perceive their fellow employees are being treated better or worse than them.<\/p>\n

If you take the Equity Theory seriously, you can even come up with a scenario in which an employee is being treated horribly — overworked and underpaid, for example — but who will still decide that things aren’t really all that bad because he perceives that his co-worker is being treated even worse.<\/p>\n

Jesus was the second management consultant in history (you have to go back into the Old Testament, book of Exodus, to find the first…that’s your assignment for the day), and he really knew his stuff. Well, I suppose it’s pretty easy to be an effective consultant when you know your clients’ every thought and feeling, so he did have that going for him.<\/p>\n

But this parable is not really about how to run a business. It’s about how God deals with his children. It’s about grace…unmerited favor. It’s about getting what’s not<\/em> coming to us, at least not as our human minds and spirits would work things if we were in charge. Grace is why the thief on the cross got the same kind of cool digs in heaven that John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul dwell in.<\/p>\n

Anyway, while refreshing my memory on Adams’s Equity Theory (it’s been a long time since grad school) I ran across the text of a sermon by Dr. George R. Sinclair<\/a>, Pastor of the Government Street Presbyterian Church in Mobile, Alabama. He titled the sermon “Grace Unequaled,” and I recommend taking the ten minutes or so it will take to read it. It’s funny, insightful, challenging, encouraging and it nails the truth up for all to read. And, it will explain the title of this post.<\/p>\n

When it come to God’s grace, we shouldn’t worry about whether someone else is getting more than their share, because none of us has done anything to deserve any of it…and yet we all can have all of it we want, just for the asking. That’s a management theory I can get behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesus Christ, Human Resources\/Management Consultant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6329,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3551\/revisions\/6329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}