Personal Accountability

Listening to the representatives from the 3 companies associated with the oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico – a spreading disaster that is going to effect more than just a few states surrounding the drilling platform as the oil is going to spread up the east coast of our country - I began to wonder when someone was going to step-up and accept responsibility … it is called being held accountable for the actions taken or not taken – either for themselves and/or for their companies. I’m smart enough to realize that all they were really doing was trying to pass the responsibility on to others in order to sidestep financial responsibility later on via the court system … after making billions of dollars these 3 companies are trying to dance away from expending a few millions to assist in the clean-up, as well as responding to those directly effected by this disaster.

Accepting corporate accountability has direct financial consequences … personal accountability is a serious matter as well … Paul Borthwick in, Leading the Way includes the following illustration concerning personal accountability.
In Rebuilding Your Broken World, Gordon MacDonald suggests twenty-six questions to help develop accountability and invite feedback. If we desire to grow, we should submit our selves to a spiritual mentor and answer these questions honestly.
1. How is your relationship with God right now?
2. What have you read in the Bible in the past week?
3. What has God said to you in this reading?
4. Where do you find yourself resisting Him these days?
5. What specific things are you praying for in regard to yourself?
7. What are the specific tasks facing you right now that you consider incomplete?
8. What habits intimidate you?
9. What have you read in the secular press this week?
10. What general reading are you doing?
11. What have you done to play?
12. How are you doing with your spouse? Kids?
13. If I were to ask your spouse about your state of mind, state of spirit, state of energy level, what would the response be?
14. Are you sensing spiritual attacks from the enemy right now?
15. If Satan were to try to invalidate you as a person or as a servant of the Lord, how might he do it?
16. What is the state of your sexual perspective? Tempted? Dealing with fantasies? Entertainment?
17. Where are you financially right now? (things under control? under anxiety? in great debt?)
18. Are there any unresolved conflicts in your circle of relationships right now?
19. When was the last time you spent time with a good friend of your own gender?
20. What kind of time have you spent with anyone who is a non-Christian this month?
21. What challenges do you think you're going to face in the coming week? Month?
22. What would you say are your fears at this present time?
23. Are you sleeping well?
24. What three things are you most thankful for?
25. Do you like yourself at this point in your pilgrimage?
26. What are your greatest confusions about your relationship with God?
26 questions that can make a world of difference … and I have to honest, I’m wondering if the CEO’s of those three companies associated with the oil platform disaster would ask themselves these questions would their answers before the Senate committee investigating just what happened, how it happened and why be different.

What do you think? And, even further, how would our behavior change if we all started to ask ourselves these 26 questions … it might not be as simple as we would expect it to be.

Quote for today: My greatest thought is my accountability to God. Daniel Webster.