Blue on Blue

James 1:13–18

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God
• each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire
• desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin
• every good gift and every perfect gift is from above

Applying the Word to My Life:
I read Extreme Ownership a few years back. It opens with a scene from Ramadi — one of the most violent battles of the Iraq War. Task Unit Bruiser was running a complex multi-element operation through the city, with SEAL platoons and Iraqi Army soldiers working different positions simultaneously. During the fight, a group of Iraqi Army soldiers moved to a new position without coordinating their movement with the SEAL elements nearby. A SEAL security team on overwatch saw armed figures moving through their sector. In the urban chaos, with the enemy present throughout, they could not get a positive identification. They engaged. Then they found out the armed figures were their own partners.

Every contributing factor was real. The Iraqi soldiers had moved without communicating. Radio traffic in the urban environment was degraded. Positive identification in that kind of fight is nearly impossible. Any of it could have been cited accurately in the debrief before the senior leadership. Jocko's team knew that — they were watching as he stood up, expecting him to lay it out and distribute the blame across all of those factors and across the team as well. It would have been defensible. That is just how it goes — when something blows up, everyone in the room is looking for somewhere to put the blame.

Instead, Jocko stood up and said there was only one person responsible: himself. As the task unit commander, what happened under his command was his.

The story landed immediately. Not because I had been anywhere near his battlefield. I had arrived at the same place by a different road.

Early in my career, I had a case where opposing counsel missed a deadline. When I raised it with him, he blamed his paralegal — openly, without hesitation, and continued to pile on. Something about that felt entirely wrong. I decided then and there that I never wanted to be that person.

From that point on I have tried to operate on one principle: anything that happens under my watch is my responsibility, regardless of who made the mistake or how it happened. I tell the people who work with me that I will not call them out publicly for their mistakes — I will own it. We will come back later and work through what happened and how to keep it from happening again, but that is between us. For the world, what matters is that it was my area of responsibility (AOR) and I missed it.

The ownership is public. The accountability is private. Jocko drew the same line in Ramadi — he owned it before the senior leadership, then went back and worked through what happened with his team. Different road, same place.

James opens this passage with the same correction. When we are tempted and fall, the first move is almost always to look outward — at circumstance, at how we were set up, at what we were handed. Sometimes we look all the way up and put the cause on God Himself.

James is direct: don't do that. God cannot be tempted with evil, and He tempts no one. The chain does not begin with Him.

The chain begins with us. Each person is lured and enticed by their own desire. When desire takes hold, it gives birth to sin. When sin has grown, it brings death. This is how it forms — not a force imposed from outside, but a process that begins inside and builds.

The chain that forms sin is ours — desire, enticement, the choice to let it take hold. Every good gift is His. James draws the line between those two and says: do not confuse them.

Every good gift, every perfect thing, comes from above. He does not change or withhold. He gives.

The AOR principle works because it forces clarity about what belongs to whom. The deflection stops, and something can actually be fixed. James is asking for the same clarity at the deepest level: own what is yours, and recognize that what comes from above is not the problem. It is the answer.

My Response for Today:
Today I will name one place where I have been pushing blame outward and simply own it.