“The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out.”
I’ve gotten to process and share these revelations with a couple of people close to me in the last couple of days, a powerful movement deeper into the heart of what God is doing in my life right now, the beginning of an awakening of sorts. These words from a book that gave voice to some of my experiences in support raising has done the same with some of my experiences now in ministry, a critical book about seeking God in the crucible of ministry and the danger of losing your soul. I got to hear the author speak at a spiritual retreat for women in May and she rocked my world. I've shared several key excerpts that have spoken to me the last few days and how they have intersected my life/my thoughts are in bold italics.
Excerpts from Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Ruth Haley Barton:
“What would it look like for me to lead more consistently from my soul—the place of my own encounter with God—rather than leading primarily from my head, my unbridled activism, or my performance-oriented drivenness? What would it be like to find God in the context of my leadership rather than miss God in the context of my leadership?
THE CHALLENGE OF SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
The soul leader pays attention to such inner realities and the questions that they raise rather than ignoring them and continuing the charade or judging himself or herself hardly and thus cutting off the possibility of deeper awareness. Spiritual leadership emerges from our willingness to stay involved with our own soul—that place where God’s Spirit is at work stirring up our deepest questions and longings to draw us into deeper relationship with him. Staying involved with our soul is not narcissistic navel gazing; rather, this kind of attentiveness helps us stay on the path of becoming our true self in God—a self that is capable of an ever-deepening yes to God’s call on our life.
But right away this presents us with a challenge. For one thing, the soul is a tender thing, and leadership can be very dangerous.
As Parker Palmer says,
“The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out.”
The settings in which many of us are trying to provide leadership are places where everyone is crashing through the woods together, harried and breathless, staying on the surface of intellect and the ego while all things soulful flee deeper into the woods. Besides that, we know the leader is often the one who gets shot at or voted off the island. The savvy soul knows better than to run out into a clearing, thereby giving everyone a better shot.”
:::
my soul has taken so many bullets it fled back into the woods. And I’ve been on a search trying to find it again and coaxing it to come out of hiding.
:::
Barton continues, “Beyond the challenge of coaxing the soul to show up in such a dangerous environment, there are the many challenges that present themselves once the soul does make an appearance and starts sniffing around. As we become more attentive to our environments through the eyes of the soul, we might notice tension between what the spiritual life requires and what it takes to be (or at least appear) successful in the current cultural milieu.”
:::
tension from extended times of the soul resurfacing in the support raising period and feeling the most alive and the most “me” than ever before and coming into ministry with a fierce determination to lead from that place, the place that God dwells, to a harsh realization that it is nearly impossible for the soul to survive in such harsh environments. I tried leading from my soul and more and more it learned it wasn’t welcome and needed to be hidden. And slowly, until it was too late, I realized last Thursday, what I feared and fought against for two years before entering full-time ministry, I had lost my soul.
it never is something that you even feel coming. It’s an ever deepening shift within, so subtle it takes a crash to wake you up to the fact that something is missing.
Ruth Haley Barton says it’s like losing a credit card. You don’t realize it’s missing until you go to use it. then you begin a frenzied back track of all the places you had been, trying to find where it was lost. We drop everything for that search.
If only we did the same with our souls. If only that search was as urgent.
Suddenly, Thursday, it was.
Everything came to a standstill, for something incredibly vital had been lost and desperately needed to be found.
The search and realization of what was lost set a lot of forces in motion. A deep sadness had settled in deeper, a deep sense of loss and a depression, a frustration and anger over this current state of affairs. Or a heart discontented and disillusioned.
…. Realizing I had lost my passion, realizing I wasn’t living out of my heart, realizing, my deepest fear had come true, the reason why I fought so hard for three years wrestling through what it was I was going to do next with my life, knowing that if I wasn’t living out of my heart or living out the passion God had given me, I would die. I realized sadly last Thursday, I wasn’t fully alive.
It was a moment of astonishing clarity. It was after a conversation with one of the younger women in our church where I left feeling reconnected with my passion. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t living out my passion, but that it in reality for this first season of ministry, it was only a small percentage of the work I was doing. So this moment stood out. It was as if in that moment, I could hear God telling me, this is why I’m alive, to bring Him glory. It was in that moment I felt a multitude of things. It stood out to me with astonishing clarity because I felt in the core of my being, this is what you were created for.
This is what I made you for, this is what I made you to do, women’s ministry is where I’ve called you.
I heard those words from a nearly audible voice.
It was one of those moments where I felt intricately connected with my passion, and my calling, not in what I’m called to do, but who I’m called to be…
The sadness set it in as I realized how rare this moment was. While I was living out my passion and living in the awareness that I am fully called to this place and this church for this season of my life, I realized the number of times I’ve only felt like this so far this year could be counted on one hand alone.
And I was supposed to be living my passion, but somehow a small fraction of my time was being spent doing work like this, work that was life-giving and energizing to me, work that deeply reflected my heart and my passion, work that specifically was a deep “yes” to the call I’ve felt God’s placed over my life in this season. So somehow I was living my passion, but had lost it. My soul had gotten lost in the other myriad of activities within my job.
I realized something vital had been lost and desperately, desperately needed to be found.
it never is something that you even feel coming. It’s an ever deepening shift within, so subtle it takes a crash to wake you up to the fact that something is missing.
Ruth Haley Barton says it’s like losing a credit card. You don’t realize it’s missing until you go to use it. then you begin a frenzied back track of all the places you had been, trying to find where it was lost. We drop everything for that search.
If only we did the same with our souls. If only that search was as urgent.
Suddenly, Thursday, it was.
Everything came to a standstill, for something incredibly vital had been lost and desperately needed to be found.
The search and realization of what was lost set a lot of forces in motion. A deep sadness had settled in deeper, a deep sense of loss and a depression, a frustration and anger over this current state of affairs. Or a heart discontented and disillusioned.
…. Realizing I had lost my passion, realizing I wasn’t living out of my heart, realizing, my deepest fear had come true, the reason why I fought so hard for three years wrestling through what it was I was going to do next with my life, knowing that if I wasn’t living out of my heart or living out the passion God had given me, I would die. I realized sadly last Thursday, I wasn’t fully alive.
It was a moment of astonishing clarity. It was after a conversation with one of the younger women in our church where I left feeling reconnected with my passion. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t living out my passion, but that it in reality for this first season of ministry, it was only a small percentage of the work I was doing. So this moment stood out. It was as if in that moment, I could hear God telling me, this is why I’m alive, to bring Him glory. It was in that moment I felt a multitude of things. It stood out to me with astonishing clarity because I felt in the core of my being, this is what you were created for.
This is what I made you for, this is what I made you to do, women’s ministry is where I’ve called you.
I heard those words from a nearly audible voice.
It was one of those moments where I felt intricately connected with my passion, and my calling, not in what I’m called to do, but who I’m called to be…
The sadness set it in as I realized how rare this moment was. While I was living out my passion and living in the awareness that I am fully called to this place and this church for this season of my life, I realized the number of times I’ve only felt like this so far this year could be counted on one hand alone.
And I was supposed to be living my passion, but somehow a small fraction of my time was being spent doing work like this, work that was life-giving and energizing to me, work that deeply reflected my heart and my passion, work that specifically was a deep “yes” to the call I’ve felt God’s placed over my life in this season. So somehow I was living my passion, but had lost it. My soul had gotten lost in the other myriad of activities within my job.
I realized something vital had been lost and desperately, desperately needed to be found.
:::
“On our good days, we might experience these tensions as a place of paradox where creative solutions might be found, but on the other days they feel like polarities that are impossible to manage.
(AMEN, I say. This couldn’t be more true.)
“These days (and maybe everyday) there is real tension between what the human soul needs in order to be truly well and what life in leadership encourages and even requires. There is a tension between being and doing, community and cause, truth-telling and putting the right spin on things. There is the tension between the time it takes to love people and the need for expediency. There is the tension between the need for measurable goals and the difficulty of measuring that which is ultimately immeasurable by anyone but God himself.
There is the tension between the need for organization hierarchy with all the power dynamics this creates and the mutuality and interdependence of life in community to which we as Christians are called. There is the tension between knowing how to “work the system” and entering into trustworthy relationships characterized by trust and a commitment to one another’s well-being. There is the tension between the need for an easy discipleship process through which we can efficiently herd lots of people and the patient, plodding and ultimately mysterious nature of the spiritual transformation process. And then there is the challenge of knowing how to speak of these things in fruitful ways in the very inside places of power without becoming polarized in our relationships with one another.”
- Ruth Haley Barton
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