Go Back In · Week 5 Complete · The series continues

I want to end this series with the worst I have ever felt at work, because it is the truest thing I know about going back in.

September 11, 2001. I was at FedEx Express, and that morning I was auditing an operation with a bad track record — consistently late, consistently a source of delays. Their shift should have started at eight sharp. I came in to observe, quietly, and I found the whole team in the break room. Freight staged and ready, going nowhere. Televisions on. Food out.

And I lit into them. In a tone that is not usually mine, I told them I could not believe this was how they wanted to run their operation. That we had a standard here. That this is FedEx — the World On Time — and the world does not run from a break room. I was proud of the standard I was holding. I was completely sure I was right.

Then someone said, quietly: look at the TV.

What I was standing on

I looked, and I saw the towers burning, and everything I had walked in armored with fell away in about two seconds. The standard I had been so sure of was nothing next to what was on that screen. And I was the man who had just marched into a room on the worst morning in a generation and lectured people about being on time.

There was no space to sit with it. Airplanes were in the air that now had to come down — ours and others — and they had to be received and parked, on our ramp, in a situation nobody had a procedure for. It needed every hand. And the hands I needed most were the ones in that break room. The people I had just been wrong in front of, I now had to lead in unprecedented times.

So I went back in.

And immediately the rooster crowed a second time. Then Peter remembered the word that Jesus had spoken to him: “Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.” And he broke down and wept.Mark 14:72 (BSB)

I did not get to walk back in as the auditor with the clipboard and the standard. I walked back in as the man who had been wrong, in front of the exact people who had watched me be wrong, and I told them so, and then I asked for their help. Not from a position. From the bottom.

You don’t go back in clean

That is the thing this whole series has been circling. Peter did not get to return as the man who never denied Jesus. He led the early church for the rest of his life as the man who denied Him three times — and the room he came back into still held it, and he stayed in it anyway. The tomb said and Peter, and the and Peter always meant the one who failed.

For though a righteous man may fall seven times, he still gets up; but the wicked stumble in bad times.Proverbs 24:16 (BSB)

Notice it does not say the righteous man does not fall. It says he gets up. The getting up is the whole definition — and you always get up as the person who fell, in front of the people who saw.

You don’t return as someone who didn’t fall. You return as someone who did — and stays.

I felt the lowest I have ever felt in my career that morning, and I have never been more sure that walking back into that room was the right thing. Not because it fixed how I felt. It did not. Because the work was in there, and the people were in there, and the only way back to either was through the door I had already made a fool of myself walking out of.

Go back in. Stay in the room. Even — especially — when you go in still carrying the thing you did.