Go Back In · Week 3 Complete · The series continues

There was a man on one of my teams I should have let go, and I did not. I want to be honest about what that cost, instead of telling you the version where it works out.

He was not keeping up. Not for lack of trying — the job had moved and he had not, and the gap was not closing. The clean call, the one any operator would have made and been right to make, was to let him go. I could have. I had someone who could step in, the disruption would have been short, and in a month it would have been a closed chapter. I was fully equipped to do the comfortable thing.

What comfortable means here

I want to be careful, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about a man who could afford to be generous. That is not it. This was not about having money to burn. It was about having an easy way out and choosing not to take it. The comfort on the table was the clean exit — the short disruption, the fresh start, the fully defensible decision. Comfort is not always about what you own. Sometimes it is just the door marked and you’d be fine.

I did not take it. We kept him. We put real time into growing him — mine, and other people’s — and we carried the gap while we did. Not because I am a good man. Because I could not get around the fact that business is not always business if you are a Christian, and this was one of the times it was not.

The part I do not usually say out loud

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?Mark 8:36 (BSB)

I read that verse for years as being about the big things — a soul, eternity, the whole world. It is. But it runs down into small rooms too. What did it profit me to keep this man? On the ledger any accountant would keep, nothing. It cost.

The care was real. So was the price, and almost nobody saw the price.

Here is what it cost, and I am not going to round it up into a lesson. The rest of the team absorbed the gap — quietly, without much complaint, and it wore on them in ways I did not fully clock until later. Things we could have done, we did not, because part of our capacity was spent carrying one man. The hard conversations I had with him were long and did not always land, and I had a lot of them. There was money in it too, the kind that never shows up as a line, because it shows up as everything you did not get to.

I would do it again. I want to be clear about that. And I would do it again knowing it cost what it cost, and knowing that “I’d do it again” is not the same sentence as “and it all worked out.” Sometimes you make the right call and you simply pay for it, and the paying does not turn into a story with a bow on it. It just sits there, the way this one still does.

The man in Mark had a door too

But the man was saddened by these words and went away in sorrow, because he had great wealth.Mark 10:22 (BSB)

He walked out of a room he was invited into, because staying would cost him the thing he was comfortable holding. I have been him more times than I would like to count. This was one of the times I was not — one of the times I stayed in the room and let it cost me — and I am telling you plainly that staying is more expensive than leaving. That is why the comfortable exit is so comfortable. It is also why it is so often the wrong door.