How much confidence should I really have in my own judgment?
That question has become more difficult the longer I have lived and especially the longer I have been in positions that require decisions affecting other people. Experience is supposed to produce wisdom, and I believe it often does. You recognize patterns more quickly. You have seen decisions succeed and fail. You have accumulated enough scars to know that some problems are not nearly as simple as they first appear.
But experience can produce something else as well. It can produce confidence, and confidence can quietly become certainty.
The phrase that started these reflections was absence of malice, after watching the old Paul Newman movie by that name. Initially I was interested in the fairly obvious distinction between intention and consequence. We can cause harm we never intended. But the more I have thought about the phrase, the more difficult even the claim of good intention becomes.
How exactly do I establish an absence of malice?
The law has to make judgments about intent, of course. We distinguish an accident from negligence, negligence from recklessness, and reckless behavior from something deliberately done. Those distinctions matter enormously. But a courtroom never actually sees the human heart. It considers evidence, listens to testimony, examines conduct and circumstances, and from those things reaches a conclusion about intention.
In ordinary life we do much the same thing with one another.
The uncomfortable difference is that when I judge myself, I tend to assume that I have access to better evidence. I know what I intended - Or at least I think I do.
One of the more sobering lessons of age is discovering how capable human beings are of assigning noble names to complicated motives. Pride can coexist with principle. Resentment can find a home inside a legitimate concern for justice. Fear can influence what we call prudence. Self-preservation can mingle with responsibility. Loyalty can distort judgment while still feeling exactly like loyalty.
I don't say that cynically. I don't believe every good deed conceals some darker motive or that every principled person is secretly acting from self-interest. There are people of extraordinary integrity who make genuinely sacrificial decisions at considerable personal cost.
I simply no longer believe that sincerity gives us perfect access to ourselves. And this is going to sound cruel and judgemental :
I have known some people in my life whose very DNA is "Integrity"- to give voice to even a little bit of "compromise"... they would rather you cut off their hand. But in reality, I personally don't believe that world exists... it isn't ever that clean... in my opinion.
There are situations you can be so right, you are actually "Dead right" that you kill people with "truth".
That brings me back to something I wrote about some time ago in Invidious. Long-term leadership creates its own peculiar environment for judgment because history accumulates. Relationships, disappointments, loyalties, previous conflicts, institutional memory and personal investment become intertwined with present decisions. You try to separate them. Good leaders have structures and trusted people around them precisely to help identify what they may not be seeing. But no leader ever becomes a completely disinterested observer standing outside the story.
We are always somewhere inside it- again- that is why the wrestling matters.
I found myself thinking about this again through Captain Vere in Billy Budd. Whatever judgment we ultimately make about Vere's decision, Melville does not give us a man casually dispensing justice. Vere understands the gravity of what is before him. He knows Billy. He knows the law. He knows the circumstances aboard the ship. He understands that his decision will have consequences beyond Billy, and yet none of that knowledge gives him the one thing he would need in order to judge perfectly.
He cannot see everything. Neither can we.
There is something healthy in admitting that before making a consequential decision. It does not mean refusing to decide. Leadership cannot function that way, nor can parenting, teaching, courts, churches, organizations or families. Sometimes the information available is all the information we are going to get, the deadline arrives, and somebody has to act.
Perhaps the goal, then, is not certainty. And even though integrity is absolutely necessary...Perhaps it is 'faithfulness' that is the priority
Gather what can be known. Listen carefully. Question the convenient version of events, particularly when it happens to confirm what I already believe. Examine my own motives without assuming that I understand them perfectly. Seek counsel from people willing to disagree with me. Pray. Wrestle. Make the best decision I can make, and then retain enough humility to admit later that I may have gotten it wrong.
That sounds reasonable enough until we confront the burden underneath it. Because some decisions cannot be retrieved.
A reputation may already have been damaged. A relationship may have changed. An opportunity may have disappeared. A sentence may have been imposed. Words cannot always be called back, and consequences rarely remain confined to the boundaries we imagined when we acted.
If the moral order of the world finally depended upon human beings possessing enough wisdom to anticipate every consequence of every decision, despair would seem like a fairly reasonable response.
This is where, for me, the question eventually leaves philosophy and enters theology.
The Christian claim is not that human beings, with sufficient prayer and integrity, eventually become reliable judges of everything. Scripture is far less optimistic about our powers of perception than that. The claim is that our inability to see the whole does not mean there is no whole, and our inability to govern every consequence does not mean that every consequence is finally governed by chance.
Joseph's words to his brothers near the end of Genesis have always been remarkable to me: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20).
That sentence becomes particularly interesting in the context of these reflections because there actually was malice in Joseph's story. His brothers did not accidentally sell him into slavery. Their motives were hardly innocent, and Joseph does not sanitize what they did. He calls their intention what it was.
They intended evil. Yet somehow their intention was not the final intention operating in the story.
Years later, looking backward over betrayal, slavery, false accusation, imprisonment, political upheaval, famine and eventual reconciliation, Joseph could see a pattern that would have been impossible to see from the bottom of the pit. None of the individual evils had become good. Betrayal was still betrayal. Injustice remained injustice. But those events had somehow been gathered into a purpose larger than the intentions of the people who caused them.
Paul makes an equally audacious claim in Romans 8:28 when he writes that God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. I have sometimes heard that verse used too easily, almost as though every painful event needs only enough time before we can explain why it happened. Life has made me much less confident about that.
There are things I cannot explain. There are outcomes I would never call good. There are losses for which I have no satisfying answer, decisions I would change if given another opportunity, and consequences whose purpose remains completely hidden from me.
Providence does not require me to pretend otherwise.
Maybe that is why I increasingly think of providence as mystery rather than explanation.
It does not provide a neat answer for every tragedy or convert every mistake into something we would have chosen. It certainly does not excuse carelessness by allowing us to say that God will work everything out anyway. If anything, our limitations should make us more careful with the lives entrusted to us, not less.
But providence does allow me to relinquish a burden I was never capable of carrying.
I am responsible for faithfulness, not omniscience.
I should pursue truth even though I will never possess all of it. I should examine my motives while acknowledging that God knows my heart better than I do. I should act with integrity without confusing integrity with infallibility. I should wrestle before consequential decisions, remain humble afterward, confess error when I recognize it and repair what I can when my decisions have caused harm.
And then there comes a point when I have to release what remains beyond my control.
That may be the final lesson for me in this strange trail that began with an old Paul Newman movie. Absence of Malice made me question the adequacy of good intentions. Billy Budd made me question whether integrity and law are sufficient to guarantee justice. Both eventually forced me toward the same uncomfortable recognition: human beings must make judgments while possessing only fragments of the truth.
We wrestle because our decisions matter. We remain humble because we may be wrong.
We act because responsibility sometimes requires it. We pray because we know our vision is limited.
And after all of that, there remains something we cannot calculate, control or completely understand.
Providence.
I don't pretend to understand its workings. Perhaps calling it providence while insisting that I can explain exactly how it works would contradict the very thing I have spent these pages trying to say.
I know only that Joseph could eventually look backward and see that the evil intentions of men had not been sovereign over his story.
Most of us do not get Joseph's vantage point. At least not yet. Job went to heaven never knowing the cosmic spiritual war raging in the background. The lens we walk in still has that dusty glass.
So we do the best we can with the light we have, remain suspicious of our own certainty, ask forgiveness when we fail, extend mercy to others who are judging with limited sight as well, and trust that there is a wisdom beyond ours at work in places we cannot see.
For now, I think I am content to leave it there—in the mystery of providence.
Critics will moan and say that is just a "God in the gaps" flimsy retreat. And they may be right. But it is the only choice we have- He is the only one WHO can judge in perfection. And because of that, His rule stays consistent through all eternity. That is all we have.
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