Leadership Character

Spirit Leaders don’t need to have a heavy-duty ego stake (“See, I told you I was right!”) in the outcome of personality clashes. They don’t even need to hear an apology because they choose to live on the Easter side of the cross, where the selfish self is dead, buried, and out of the way, so the deeper self that is aligned with Christ may rise to faithfully serve.
--Gary Straub & Judy Turner, Your Calling as a Leader

Walk with Integrity

Those who walk with integrity heed the call to repentance. Their longing for wholeness will not let them do anything else. They know their own weaknesses. They understand that even if they have committed themselves to an upright life, the old capacities for lust, greed, sloth, and pride remain. Their honest humility is in no small part born of knowing that they, like all others, have fallen short of the glory of God and, no doubt, will continue to do so.

Those who walk in integrity act with humility. In the midst of crisis, the completeness that speaks through their lives sounds a very different tone in our world than the arrogant boast, the power-asserting threat, and the proud claim to absolute righteousness.

To act with humility is in no way to cower or to hold back. Indeed, when it comes to acting on difficult issues, the humble often become the boldest. Knowing their limitations, they stand free of any need to pretend to be more than they are. Knowing their finite place in relation to the One who reaches toward all, they open to God and others in a way that pride will never allow.

--Steve Doughty, To Walk in Integrity

Healing and Forgiveness

How many times have you heard someone say, "Even if God could forgive me, I could never forgive myself"?

I thought of the apostle Peter and how he denied Jesus. (See Luke 22:61-62.) What if Peter had been so full of self-condemnation that he had languished for the rest of his life, refusing God's forgiveness because he could not forgive himself? A life of valuable witness and all that Peter did in the early church would never have come about. But Peter, despite his failures, accepted God's grace and moved forward.

Lack of forgiveness can keep us from serving God. For that reason we are called upon not only to forgive others but to forgive ourselves.
--Taken from the Upper Room Daily Devotional

To be an effective leader it helps to have as little unfinished business as possible. Forgiveness is one of those things we tend to push to the back. As a result, this unfinished business saps our energy, drags us down and even unconsciously distracts us from the current work before us. To not forgive ourselves when God has forgiven us is to set ourselves up as a higher court than God. Finally,there is strong evidence that when we have not forgiven ourselves of something, we become more judgmental of others. From the Kingdom point of view, a judgmental leaders is an ineffective leader.

Holy Spirit Healing

Part of the inner journey of growing in Christ is allowing the Holy Spirit to peel back the layers, heal the underlying hurts, expose our pride, and show us how to make creative and redemptive responses to things that happen in the external world. As we cooperate with the Holy Spirit in this work of inner transformation, the ego’s false-self weakens; and the true self in Christ emerges.
--Gary Straub & Judy Turner, Your Calling as a Leader

Listen to Your Life

We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned into pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But “be not afraid, for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and past for the sound of him.
Frederick Buechner in Sacred Journey