Thoughts on Being a Leader Who Invests in Others

Today, my friend, my colleague in ministry, and a mentor in life, faith, and ministry celebrates a birthday. Dr. Larry Guido is someone who knows the importance and value of investing in the next generation of ministry leaders. He has always made time for a phone call or an office visit from me. He never fails to challenge me in my thinking and in my faith.

I'm sure there are many who can identify with having someone like Larry Guido invest in them through the years. I am humbled by the opportunities to serve in ministry that Larry has afforded me. I am grateful that even when I have stumbled and made a mess of those opportunities he has demonstrated the patience of Job, not easy for an Italian. Larry knows that ultimately God is bigger than our valiant attempts, successes, or failures.

I pray daily to be the kind of leader who invests in others. A leader who pours into them the hope of Jesus and his gospel, then steps back and let's them find their own voice to proclaim the Good News! I pray that as a husband and father I give my wife and kids the support and encouragement they need to do as William Carey once did, "Attempt great things for God." What made Carey a success was not his attempts at greatness for God, but his realization that it was a great God he served. May we as leaders (read husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, businessmen, farmers, truck drivers, and yes even ministers) always keep in mind that it is the Great God working in and through us that makes all the difference in the world.

What kind of leader are you? Are you investing in others? Do you keep your passion for God and insight into life bottled up for yourself or do you pour it out into the people around you?

Stub

A great reminder about forgiveness from Walter B. Shurden's most recent volume of his preaching journal.

“STUB” AS SPIRITUAL METAPHOR:

          Like Andy Catlett in Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering, each of us has a “stub” of some kind. In a stupid accident for which he could not forgive himself, Andy lost his right hand in a corn harvesting machine. After that, he lived with a sense of not being whole. Who doesn’t?

“He raged, and he raged at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted.” Because he could not accept his “stub,” Andy thought, erroneously, that others could not accept him. At the edge of his anger at everything and everyone else was his anger at himself. And so, Flora, his wife, said to him one day:

                   “Do you know what you need?”

                   “What?”

                   “Forgiveness. And I want to forgive you. All of us do. And you need more than ours. But you must forgive yourself.”

          Each of us has a “stub” of some kind, some physical deformity, some emotional scar, some public moral failure, or some clandestine sin. It weighs us down like concrete. No day passes that we do not think about our “stubs,” those marks that make us unacceptable to ourselves.  And, of course, if we do not find a way to restore joy to our stubby lives, we will live joylessly because of a deep, deep anger toward ourselves. Beyond the forgiveness of God and the forgiveness of others lies the really hard work of forgiving ourselves.