There’s a memory that surfaces in my mind every now and then of a talk I had with my dad as an adolescent. I can’t remember the catalyst for the conversation, but I remember I was complaining. About someone else. I was frustrated that other people, probably at school or youth group, weren’t taking accountability for their actions. I remember feeling alone and I couldn’t understand why I was the only one who had to take responsibility for our shortcomings. Before I could finish my unending list of grievances I held against my peers, my dad vigorously cut me off. “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter. You’re a leader!”

I didn’t know then that my conversation with my dad would not only change my life but set up the framework for how I viewed leadership as an adult. He went on to explain that because I had leadership gifts, I was held to a different standard than everyone else. It wasn’t about what everyone else did, but what I could control: my attitude and my effort. For years to come I fought off the unfairness of that reality. But I felt what he was saying to my core. I was a leader. And I knew it.

What I came to understand that day was I had a choice about how to use my gifts. I could refuse to take accountability for the part I played with my friends and the trouble we found ourselves in. That heart posture would produce more excuses, more complaining, more comparison and an unteachable spirit. Or I could steward my leadership in a different way, a harder way. But in doing so, I’d build character. As a leader, I held tremendous influence and it mattered what I did with it. It still matters.

Today, I was a kid again, hearing my dad’s voice replay again in my head. “You’re a leader, Natalie!” The last year, especially the last few months have led me into the hardest leadership season of my life. Maybe it’s the industry I’m in or maybe it’s the season of our business. All I know is, I feel the weight of leadership on my shoulders like never before.

I serve on a large leadership team with incredibly gifted people. Like most teams, everyone has different gifts, unique to them and utilized at different levels of leadership. Some of our greatest strengths are also some of our greatest weaknesses. Those weaknesses have caused division, distrust, or disloyalty at different times on our team. I’m not exempt from those experiences. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like we’re in an extended season of fragmentation as a leadership team. I see the fractures in so many working relationships. And I’ve felt the burden of that.

Something happened this week that resurfaced feelings of insecurity and distrust for me. Even feeling that caused me guilt, because I want to be unified with my team above all else. But as I got quiet, I sensed the Lord asking me to look inward at the cause of my insecurity. What’s been revealed to me so far is: I cling too hard to my leadership as if it’s wholly mine. And when something is a gift from God, that can never be true.

A church leader once said, “You are the most difficult person you will ever lead.” How often I forget that. As I sat in my office processing what to say or what to do, again the Holy Spirit whispered into my soul that my fight is not against flesh and blood. It’s not against people. It’s against the divisive enemy and my own self-serving motivations.

I struggle to know how to fight that and so I prayed. I’m still praying. That Jesus would show me how to lead like He led. Help me to lead myself through feelings and insecurities. Help me to be on the solution side for bridging the gap between our leaders. Help me to be an arrow that points back to Him. I’m a leader in desperate need of The Leader.

There’s a dream I have that if everyone on my team could know Jesus, really know Him, this would all be easier. If we all surrendered our fears to Jesus and waited on God to green light our ideas, we’d be better at trusting each other. Maybe that’s my dream to come true in eternity. Maybe it’s a vision God’s casting for our team in my heart.

As I’ve been studying the Gospels this month, I’ve noticed how often Jesus highlights the importance of believing. Believing that He is who He says He is. Believing so that our eyes can be opened to more. Believing in the hope that’s on the other side of His sacrifice. What left me in awe this week is realizing how many people saw all the amazing things He did, and still it didn’t change anything in their lives.

They still didn’t grasp the complexities of Jesus being fully God and fully man. Even when His disciples were present for His miracles and His teachings, still they couldn’t see the bigger story Jesus was revealing to them. The people that spent the most time with Him still had missing perceptions of Him at times. And yet, Jesus walked in unwavering confidence with the Father in the midst of so much unbelief.

I want to lead like He led. I want to believe the best in people and at the same time, not be upended when there’s tension within my team. I want to walk in confidence that Jesus is the only one who can change the hearts of the people I lead alongside and yet, always be ready to point people back to His greater story.

So as I navigate through this next chapter of my leadership, I’m praying that I’ll get out of my own way. That I’ll keep relearning the lesson I learned all those years ago: my need for accountability is not determined by other people and my leadership is not wholly mine. May you and I lead with the confidence that because we believe in Him, our leadership can be wholly His.

Take care & take heart,

This past week I pored over the book Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times by John Eldredge. I journaled pages of notes and have been savoring his words of encouragement in the days following turning the very last page. The truth he writes about what Comfort Culture and the pandemic have done to us, the written prayers, the permission to process every emotion before God, and the prompting to ultimately turn all of who I am and what I long for over to him has put some wind back into my tired sails.

In Eldredge’s honesty and humble confession he shares how during the last few years he has been eager to fix things and that he longs for things to be good again. Me too. He shares that part of the road to resilience requires that we process what we’ve been through in order to build our reserves back up. In order to recover before replenishing our reserves, he encourages us to reflect on what we’ve both experienced and are currently experiencing. We must name those things.

I’ve been all too fixated on what I’m currently experiencing, which can be easily summarized as a desperate need to control. To fix things. To make things whole again. One thing I noticed today was that I’m in a tug-of-war with what I think and what I fear people will think. It’s not fair to generalize, but in a few instances here is what I haven’t been able to wrap my head around: when I withhold my frustrations about situations from people, my internal world suffers. I all but collapse in on myself. When I express my frustrations to people, when I externally process an unfinished thought, or when I say what I mean exactly how I mean: I regret it. Because I can see how I frustrate people, how I confuse them, how much I’m misunderstood. I’m at a loss for how much I can’t control what people think. Or what I assume they think.

Days like these feel like my trust erodes because the longing to not feel so nonsensical or too complex is so high. It’s probably not fair, but maybe I’ve wrongly associated being understood with feeling like I can trust someone. I’m working at understanding that better because I sense on a spiritual level, Jesus wants to help me operate out of a healthier mindset.

And still I fixate on what I can control. I ruminate on what I cannot. Last week, my son lost an outfit at school during the chaos of drying off from the splash pad. An easy thing to misplace, a high likelihood of happening when there’s countless preschoolers. I couldn’t get past it. I woke up multiple times in the night thinking about that red Nike shirt and black shorts. I was just shy of making “Lost! $ Reward if Found!” flyers. My brain fought to have control over a situation that wasn’t within my power to fix, while my body paid the price. It’s embarrassing to admit this and I’ve played it cooler than I’ve felt. But something so small took over my thoughts for the past week. This unbearable feeling that I lost something.

I felt the Lord prompt me to pay attention to why the missing shirt and shorts (M.I.A. 6 days now) has weighed so disproportionately on me. Days have gone by with nothing other than my absurd need to find control in every corner and crevice of my daily life. But as I was driving in silence between errands, I heard Him whisper to my heart,

“You haven’t let me hold what you’ve lost. You haven’t grieved who you’ve lost.”

While I am good at processing what I presently experience, I haven’t been good at surrendering what I’ve previously experienced, as Eldredge urges. I can externalize what’s currently happening in my world, but I have a lot of growing to do in releasing what has been. What I can’t go back and fix. What I can’t rewrite. Somewhere along the way I stop surrendering it to Jesus and started forming a grudge.

It’s been hard to see the kind of grief I’ve subconsciously been carrying because the people I’ve lost are still living. And the loss among them looks different. I’ve lost both someone I never pictured my life without and someone I never even really had a chance to know. I’ve lost dreams and I’ve lost plans. Friends have gotten lost to both distance and lack of reciprocity. I’ve lost hope at times. I’ve had to grieve drawing boundaries in relationships that need them. I’ve lost trust this year and I’ve lost proximity to people I love. And in all of my searching, not even Amazon Prime can sell me a manual on how to cope with this kind of loss.

John Eldredge writes that the way into mental and emotional resilience is to practice benevolent detachment. I understand that to mean the gentle, yet urgent need to release control of both the things I’ve been entrusted to and the things that were never mine in the first place. In the second year of the pandemic, I was out walking with my dad and yearning for his wisdom. I had asked him how he was able to cope with a particular loss. While he was still in process, my dad pointed me to the story of Abraham and Isaac. You see, Isaac, though Abraham’s son, was never truly in the eternal sense, his. Isaac was the Lord’s. Abraham only physically lay his son on the altar once, but I suspect after that day, the spiritual surrender became daily.

It’s becoming evident as I reflect that in order to grow into a person of resilience, I must take on the same daily practice. It’s a rhythmic abidance, to give all of who I am to gain all of what Jesus has to offer. Rest from striving. Recovery from what I’ve walked through. Restoration of what’s been lost. Resilience to be able to face the hard things again. Reconciliation of my heart, my soul, my longing, to Him.

Jesus, you are the Keeper of the Lost Things. You are the Ultimate Reconciler. You have the power to redeem and restore all things. You know when my soul gets lost. And still, I’m never lost to You. Help me to relinquish what I’ve held too tight of a grip on. Help me to lay all of my relationships on the altar before You. Any favor or time I have with people comes from You. You are the Source I draw from for my needs.
Relieve me of my need to control what I’m not in charge of and show me how to trust you in all of the small things, even what my child loses at school. You care about the details, so I can have confidence that you care about the complexities within me. Teach me how to keep believing the best in people because you created them to reflect You. And when I can’t find what I’m looking for, remind me that in You all my joy is found. Amen.

Take care & take heart,

Do you ever get the sense that the more you try to explain yourself, the more confusion you cause? I feel like I’ve created a lot of chaos lately. Funny enough, I thought I was leading myself through my relationships with the best of intentions. But perspective is humbling. Time brings understanding. Failure has something to say; something to teach.

The most perplexing thing for me now that I’m on the other side of these conversations is that so much prayer went into them. How could it all have gone so wrong? I thought I heard from God. I thought I laid it all on the altar. And maybe I did, and He’s allowing me feel exposed as a failure anyway. Maybe He knows how badly I need to sit at Jesus’s feet.

For that, I’m grateful. For quite some time, I’ve sensed I’ve needed recalibrated. But I fight being still. I feel more productive striving for perfection. There are small payoffs I can find in that. Validation, in any capacity from authority or familiar faces. It never lasts, but it is a scorecard for how I’m doing. Until I score poorly with people, like I’m conscious of now.

So if this is the Lord humbling me like I think He is, then I want to sit close to the throne of mercy. I know it will cost me my own immediate comfort. What I’m noticing is that when I get still, I find myself anxious. When I let myself get to resting heart rate, to really feel the freedom to be myself, I find reason to try harder. I think I’ve trained people how to value me by the way I rely so heavily on people’s approval. I feed off of people’s responses and their opinions of me and I navigate my way in the world from there. That results in vacillating between being too much and never enough. This isn’t new research I’m reporting on myself, but I think the urgency to surrender this to the King is greater.

So my takeaway question from feeling raw after conversations and experiencing the fallout from my decisions is: where am I placing my value? Where am I lacking inner peace and the ability to let Jesus overwrite my identity into His will?

The easy places to start identifying my overcompensation are at home and with my work. The people that love me have pointed out that I try way too hard. But when I stop trying, people outside of that circle have feedback for me to try harder. It’s a painful place to surrender my perceived need to be understood and valued for what I internally experience. It’s absolutely crushing on tough days like today.

And yet I’m grateful tonight to be poor in spirit. I feel a richness in the truth that when I am weak, Jesus lights a grace-filled path to fortitude. When I come up short in my marriage, motherhood, or my job, I can find His sufficiency at the end of every desperate prayer. He’s never abandoned me when I have a heart to build character. He shows up when I want to get better and not stay bitter. And that’s a generous starting point for underserving me.

There’s so much of me that wants to make my world smaller; to tighten up on the circle of trust that I keep. So I’m praying that the Lord will provide me with the accountability to use my life how He sees fit. To share the parts of my world with others if it means investing in His Kingdom. I want to live like James in the Bible who shared that we can count it all joy: every trial, all of the pain that’s part of the process.

I want to live a life that’s held steadfast by his love. A life held by His truth, to carry me through to the other side of what I need to learn through this. I’ve been listening to TAYA’s new album that came out this past week. Her voice has brought so many Hillsong soundtracks into churches and mainstream music. This new offering has not disappointed. One of the tracks I keep coming back to today is called “Jesus > Everything” and it’s been manna for me.

She sings,

Everything I have
Everything I’ve made
If it’s not Your will
Then strip it all away
Bind me to your heart
A tether that won’t break
And lead me to the cross
Where all else fades away
And it’s Jesus
Jesus over everything

Performed by TAYA, Written by Benjamin Hastings, Jason Ingram, Taya Gaukrodger, Produced by Jon Guerra, Jason Ingram

I want what she sings. Jesus over everything in my life. Praying that I will surrender myself over to Him again and again. Praying that for you, too.

Take care & take heart,