It's Easier to Ask Forgiveness?

 Welcome back to “things that get stuck in my craw” volume 2. The phrase, It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission  has bothered me from day one. It’s arrogant, selfish, and down-right lazy. It smacks of “I don’t care about you enough to plan ahead or even consider how you or others feel. It’s typically used to justify getting or doing something without having to do the work of checking it out first. I have seen many a good fishing hole shut down because no one was considerate enough to ask first. It’s an easy way to get a temporary desire, but a terrible way to build trust.

So where did this less-than-desirable phrase come from anyway? Turns out, it really is a bad interpretation of the phrase, Ask forgiveness, not permission. This has been attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy 

rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise 

the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop

the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper  

 Quite an amazing woman, really. But what did she really mean by it? She explains it as, Do the right thing within the organization, whether or not they know it. That way you can help the people that you work for. You see the military has many levels of bureaucracy, some of which are frustratingly slow. She was trying to get people to look past all the red tape and do the right thing. https://changelog.com/posts/what-admiral-grace-hopper-really-meant

So how did it get so convoluted? Human nature I suspect. We seem to always be looking for the easy way out. We take something good or reasonable and use it for our own devices. So what does the Bible have to say about it?

2 Timothy 2:15 says, Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

The apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians For we are taking pains to do what is right, not only in the eyes of the Lord but also in the eyes of man.

Seems to me, if we are going to do the right thing in the eyes of man, we need to take the high road a lot more often. It’s going to take more than just an apology. It’s going to mean asking permission occasionally.