Your Body Matters to God
Twenty-one days to the body you always wanted. Ten tips to banish body fat. Get your pre-pregnancy body back fast. Your perfect body plan. De-jelly your belly. These promises (and many more) are touted on every newsstand in North America every single day. Even though I’ve never been a person who struggled with being overweight, I’ve always struggled with the idea I might just be on the precipice of it, just one bagel away from being obese. Ridiculous, I know, but it’s there in my mind just the same. So every time I checkout at the grocery store or peruse the magazine section of my local Barnes and Noble, these headlines grab my attention and tempt me to grab the mag.
In her book, Eve’s Revenge, Lillian Calles Barger seeks to help women like me who want to resist the unrealistic portrayals of women that bombard us everyday—but she does it in a completely, revolutionary, unique way. She doesn’t follow the footsteps of the self-help books that provide women with strategies to become more accepting of their body or those that unpack the reality of media myths—from models who starve themselves to the standard practices of air-brushing. For Barger, books like this only serve as a band-aid to a deeper problem. What women need most of all is to recover an understanding of our bodies as integral part of our spiritual lives. We live, for the most part, disconnected from our bodies and unaware of the importance the role the body plays in our spiritual lives. Barger wants to remedy that. She writes, “What I am attempting to do is recover the body from its continually diminishing position in the nature of the self, spirituality, and the building of communities.
Eve’s Revenge is comprised of nine chapters. In chapter one, she challenges the idea that the body is merely a “blank canvas” upon which we can do whatever we wish to our bodies to meet cultural expectations—from botox to extreme dieting. Continually preoccupied with the superficial, we fail to understand the deeper meaning of what our bodies are for. In chapter two, Barger asks and explores the penetrating question: “whether we occupy our body or whether our body occupies us. Rather than celebrate the incredible things the female body can do—dance, nurture and grow a human life, run, or give and receive hugs and affection, we focus on how our bodies fail to meet the standards set forth by the media. In chapter three, Barger begins to unpack what it really means to have a woman’s body. Is the body just a machine? What does the body have to do with my relationship to God? In order to be really spiritual, in order to really connect with God, must I deny my body? Barger points out that no matter how much we strive to disconnect ourselves from our body, that we can never really escape them.
In chapter four, Barger discusses the social difficulties of having in a female body. In Chapter five, she drives home the point that our body is “the location in which spirituality is lived out” and that our “actions and work in the world are done through (our) body, and are the truest test of what (we) profess to be.” In chapter five, Barger encourages us to consider and deal honestly with the vulnerability the body presents to us, namely, pain, the need for touch, and ultimately, death. In the final chapters, she explores the ramifications of the actions of Eve (chapter 6), the result of the idolization of the Virgin Mary (chapter 7), how Jesus, through the incarnation, redeems the body (chapter 8), and finally, provides helpful strategies for acknowledging the importance of the body through communality (chapter 9).
Barger’s book is an attempt to spark a dialogue between feminist ideologies that raise the awareness of the importance of women and their bodies and evangelical orthodox thought. In Eve’s Revenge, Barger demonstrates an impressive mastery of philosophical and theological concepts in both fields. Barger’s knowledge and wisdom in this book is difficult to honor in a single book review. What can be said is this: that despite the messages we receive on a daily basis, our bodies are important to God, and it is only through these bodies that we are able to serve Him.
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Our Own Worst Enemy
When I think of female rivalry, that is, rivalry between women, I think of Cinderella and her step-sisters. I think of the rivalry between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. I think of the escapades of the women on Wisteria Lane in Desperate Housewives. What I’ve rarely considered in recent years is how female rivalry impacts my growth and development as a woman leader.
In 1990, Carolyn Heilbrun, a Jewish American, wrote a provocative book entitled Reinventing Womanhood. In this book, she claimed that the number one reason women failed to achieve in leadership positions was not because men kept barring their way to progress in achievement, but rather because of the failure of women to bond. For Heilbrun, a few women inevitably rose to positions of power and leadership, but because of the failure of women to bond, these women became not woman leaders, but rather honorary men.
Susan Shapiro Barash, in her book, Tripping the Prom Queen, takes the issue a little deeper. According to Barash, the world is still a patriarchal culture, and this fact sets the stage for female rivalry—because women feel that they have to constantly compete with one another for limited and scarce resources such as leadership positions.
Competition between females is nothing new, and it is strung throughout the biblical text, from Sarah and Hagar to Rachel and Leah. If Heilbrun and Barash are right, then the question becomes: are we our own worst enemy when it comes to striving to become better leaders? Until now, most of our attention has been focused on how men hold us back from leadership positions because men, in most cases are the gatekeepers. That is, they have the say on whether or not a woman is welcomed into a leadership position in the church. But have we looked long enough at what women do to each other? Have we been honest about how women in our churches and in our workplaces treat one another—either outright or subversively?
While I don’t completely agree with Heilbrun and Barash, and I think that their assessment of female rivalry is a little overblown, their research makes me pause to wonder what we can do to improve the relationships among woman so that women leaders feel more supported and encouraged by her female friends and counterparts.
And so I am curious, lady leaders, to hear your experiences. Have you felt supported and encouraged by other women as you seek leadership positions, or have you felt the sting of female rivalry when you achieved a great accomplishment?
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Great Expectations: The Perplexing Paradox of Women’s Unhappiness
Oh ‘t ain’t what you do it’s the place that you do it
‘T ain’t what you do it’s the time that you do it
‘T ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it
That’s what gets results
~ Ella Fitzgerald
I began with the best intentions. This weekend, while the hubby was working in Sacramento, I planned to work at least 10 hours on dissertation, compose a 1500-word article plus two blog posts, prep for some upcoming interviews, dissect a single chapter of John Paul’s Theology of the Body with a friend, and finally to read (and write a book review of) three other books. Sound crazy? Just a little over a year ago, this break-necked speed felt normal. Anything less and I was downright bored.
Enter Little Miss Marathon, who, on her very best days, slept 3-4 hours straight and ate only the minimum required for her age. For the last 6 months, we’ve been trying to figure out ways to get her to sleep and eat—but it seemed that all she wanted to do was go, go, go. Her energy levels made me feel like a century-old centipede. And all this came to a roaring head this weekend. After 24 hours of screaming and no sleep and fighting food at every turn, I finally wondered, “Does she have an allergy?” The next three days were filled switching from milk-based products to soy and finding ways to get her to sleep regularly. By Sunday, she was a new baby—sleeping 12 hours straight at night and eating a more normal amount. On one hand, I was ecstatic that my baby was now comfortable and content; on the other, I was exhausted, and rather than focusing on what I had “done right”, I honed in on all that was left undone, namely, every single thing on my to-do list.
Every year since 1972, The United States General Social Survey poll 1500 men and women regarding various aspects of their lives. The participants cut across all education levels, income levels, and marital status. In one question, participants are asked “How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being very happy, and 1 being not too happy?” Across the globe, women’s level of happiness has progressively declined. And this study is only a representative; at least six other studies conducted in this same time frame point to the same problem: in the face of unparalleled growth in educational opportunities, greater financial stability, and progress in the work sphere, women are more unhappy than they were pre-1970. Markus Buckingham at The Huffington Post aptly summarized: “Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men.”
These findings have understandably stirred up a great deal of discussion and debate with many voices trying to make sense of the data. Wharton Professors Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers scandalously speculate that women’s level of unhappiness is due to women’s rising expectations for themselves. It’s no longer sufficient to be a devoted “stay-at-home-mom” or a “successful business women”—women feel intense pressure to be everything at once, all the time. Inevitably, they fail to achieve all that they set out to accomplish—be it in the home or the workplace.
As a new mom and an academic, Stevenson and Wolfers’ assessment rings a chord with me. Take this last weekend as a case in point: despite my daughter’s giggles and sighs of relief, despite deep moments of satisfaction and well-being, I could not shake the nagging burden of my own self-created to-do list. I wondered where all my time had gone. I wondered how on earth I was going to finish a dissertation while raising a young family, even with shared household duties. Rather than savoring the moment, I let my expectations get a hold of me. It’s not that I think I can’t be a mother and a professional; it’s just that it’s probably realistic for me to remember that I can’t be all things excellently all at once. Even the Proverbs 31 woman probably did not accomplish all her feats in a single day.
I would take Stevenson and Wolfers’ claim even further and say that for good or bad, our expectations are closely related to comparison. Working women sometimes envy the apparent easiness of life that stay-at-home moms have. Stay-at-home moms sometimes envy the apparent freedom that working women have. Many envy the women who appear to have both. Our own judgment of what other people have and do, however misinformed, directly impacts our expectations for ourselves and thus, our level of happiness. I can’t help but think that given our basic necessities (food, water, shelter) and barring medical and/or mental problems, our level of happiness would improve if we really believed that less is more.
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Mama’s Got a Fake I.D.: A Map for Motherhood
It was a quiet morning in mid-March of 2008. A fellow professor and I were softly chatting in Stamps Theological Library at Azusa Pacific University, savoring the lull in activity that always comes in mid-semester. The semester had been launched, lesson plans were written, and final exams were in the distant future. We talked about theology, about our students, about our stage fright when giving lectures. But most of all, we talked about our futures. Both of us had achieved significant accomplishments at a fairly early age: she had been the recipient of the only full scholarship that Fuller Theological Seminary provides for all four years of her MDiv program and I was a published writer wrapping up the final semester of coursework for my PhD program.
Both of us had been encouraged by mentors from early on throughout our academic careers, about our potential for contributing to the academic community, about charting new territories for women scholars. And we loved academia. We loved the life of the mind. And we never thought, in all our years of learning and studying and teaching and writing, that our gender would ever stand in our way. Both the feminists and our fathers had taught us that we could be anything we wanted to be, that the world was ours for the taking, that we were only limited by the things we never chose to do. But on that March morning, we secretly admitted that we didn’t feel that the academic world was all we wanted out of life—we didn’t just want to be scholars and writers and professors—we wanted to be mothers. And we wondered how on earth such two demanding, seemingly opposing spheres of life could ever be reconciled and how we could participate fully, incarnationally in both worlds. I remember the tension building as we talked, as our minds scrambled for answers to what we thought were new questions. “The problem,” I said, “is that there are no maps.”
Exactly one year later, I gave birth to my daughter. Motherhood is all and more that I ever dreamed it could be, but tension I felt that March morning remains. Motherhood and academics and writing don’t always meld. It’s hard to transition from diaper changes to dissertating on the dynamics of spiritual formation. It’s a strange, foreign, and sometimes stark borderland where I often check and recheck the path I have chosen. (Did I really invest 13 years for a PhD to spend copious amounts of time every single day force-feeding my daughter-with-no-appetite?) But fortunately, Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira, in her recent book, Mama’s Got a Fake ID, has provided me with a map. In a chatty, friendly way, Caryn addresses the identity crisis that many (if not all) women face when they become mothers.
Caryn’s book contains three main parts. In Part One, she unpacks all the various reasons that women lose their identities when becoming mothers including stereotypes that society place on mothers and losing sight of who God designed us to be, as human beings with individual giftedness that reaches beyond our roles as mothers. In Part Two, Caryn looks at seven ways to uncover—or rediscover—our core identity: overcoming false guilt about our gifts, finding and rooting your identity in Christ, discovering who you are in God’s eyes (your God-given likes, dislikes, passions, interests), learning to describe and introduce yourself to others in ways that acknowledge both your giftedness and how God knows you, acknowledging, accepting, and even treasuring your limitations, and admitting that you’re not perfect. In the final portion of the book, Caryn advises her readers to look beyond themselves to see how they can be a blessing to other moms.
Mama’s Got a Fake I.D. is a candid, thoughtful, and fun meditation on the tensions mothers face when their passions and giftedness extend beyond the home. She provides questions to help those women whose identities were buried long ago under piles of grocery lists and laundry baskets and family schedules. One of the most profound and moving chapters for me personally was the chapter on treasuring limitations. As a person with high achievement standards, accepting the limitations imposed by motherhood is a tremendous effort, but Caryn’s book gave me freedom to not only accept these limitations but embrace them. But probably the best thing about the book is its balance: Caryn denigrates neither motherhood nor giftedness outside the home, but rather brings the honor due to them both. A highly recommended read for new and more seasoned moms.
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The One Necessary Thing
This last March, my husband and I welcomed our first child into the world. The months of pregnancy brough surprises around every corner, but but none so surprising as the day I discovered the stereotypes that prevail in my own mind about women, mothers, and daughters.
Early one morning, my husband found me sobbing in our living room. He anxiously asked me what was wrong and I sobbed, “I’m going to be a terrible mother.” The night before, during an inevitable bout of insomnia, I had happened upon the blog of a young mother living somewhere in middle America. This mother’s blog was filled with accounts of life with her two daughters. Days spent contentedly making crafts together. Handmade Easter dresses and matching baskets. Little Princess mermaid parties complete with handmade mermaid outfits and pink party favors. Shopping and personalized embroidered clothing.
I’ve spent 23 of my 30 years pursuing some kind of education. I’m much more comfortable in lecture halls and libraries than I am in craft stores and at parties. So when I read this mother’s blog, I was overwhelmed by the possibility I was not fit for motherhood. I don’t like shopping. I don’t like pink. I don’t know the first thing about party favors. How in the world would I be competent to raise a daughter?
But when the emotion of the moment was over, I was shocked at the limited scope of my thinking. For a few hours, the motherhood I read about in that blog seemed to be the only way to raise a daughter. As someone who has chosen to devote her life to the study of leadership and women’s experiences in leadership, I should have known better, but on first reaction, I didn’t.
I think the same one-dimensional thinking can sometimes plague the way we approach ministry to women as well. Last year, Amy Simpson wrote a post titled, “Why I Don’t Do Women’s Ministry.” She described the nature of women’s ministries in our local churches, how they trend towards superficial activities rather than activities that foster deep spiritual growth. The response was overwhelming. While some women were angry with the description, it struck a chord of familiarity with many others. While some women viewed such activities as opportunities for community, others thought such activities were a waste of time. They desperately wanted more learning, more spiritual meat. Collectively they seemed to wonder, “Is this the only way to do women’s ministry?”
When we hear the familiar story of Mary and Martha, our attention usually turns to either Martha or Mary. Martha carrying on with the busyness of her day. Mary at the feet of Jesus, listening. We don’t usually hone in on the radical thing Jesus is doing. He’s rocking the boat. He’s upsetting the apple cart. He’s teaching a woman the Word of God. Before Jesus, women were denied access to inner courtyards of the temple. Now, they’re sitting at the very foot of the Teacher, the traditional position of a disciple. Jesus called this learning “the one necessary thing.” All other things are ancillary.
I don’t think the traditional approaches to women’s ministry represent the only way to do ministry any more than that young mother’s blog represented the only way to raise children. While there is room in the Christian life for fun and celebration, if such ministries are not supplemented by deep teaching and learning, they may very well be wrong. As women leaders, we have a responsibility to ensure that our all ministries are committed to “the one necessary thing.” We have to ask ourselves, “Are we helping other women grow and mature into the likeness of Christ? Are we preparing them for a life of service to God through both times of joy and times of suffering?”
After that morning I spent crying in the living room, I went shopping at the local grocery store. The little store was crammed with people doing their weekend shopping. As I reached down to grab a block of cheddar cheese from the refrigerated bin, I overheard a conversation between a mother and daughter close behind me. “So, Mom, you mean that I am free, free to make my own choices, but God is ultimately in control? How is that possible?” I whirled around, surprised. The young girl’s face was screwed up in consternation and confusion. The mother lovingly looked at her daughter and passionately described the paradox of God’s love and sovereignty. Relief flooded through me at their interaction. I smiled. “Yeah,” I thought, “I could do that.”
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The Audacity of Courage
Growing up, my all-time favorite action hero was Indiana Jones, an audacious archaeologist who traveled the world looking for treasures and lost artifacts, including the Ark of the Covenant and sacred stones. On his last crusade, Jones is searching for the Holy Grail, the cup Christ reputably used at the Last Supper. To aid him in his journey, Jones uses an ancient book to help him navigate through a maze of tunnels and various obstacles that impede the way to the Holy Grail.
At the very end of the maze, Jones reaches a chasm that is deeper than the visible eye can see. He stands precariously on the edge of the rocky cliff, his face contorted with bewilderment. Had he gone the wrong way? Had he made a mistake? There was no visible way to cross the chasm; the other side was utterly beyond his reach. Gripped with fear, he anxiously thumbs through the pages of the ancient book until he understands the obstacle: it’s a leap of faith, an invisible bridge. Jones scatters sand over the invisible bridge, closes his eyes, and steps out over the chasm with both feet. Once he realizes his footing is secure, he rushes across the invisible bridge to retrieve the Holy Grail.
Inevitably, every Christian leader, even those among us who appear to be the most fearless, must face their own chasm, the chasm between our calling as Christian leaders and our own personal resources.
Whether we are preachers, professors, speakers, writers, or teachers, our aim, our calling, as Christian leaders is to reach the lost and build up the body of Christ. This is the task to which God has called us, and it is a task that is utterly beyond our reach. In 2 Corinthians 2:16, the apostle Paul addresses this chasm, exclaiming, “And who is adequate for these things?” The chasm is deeper than the visible eye can see.
The chasm cuts straight across our calling, and we may face it at various times throughout our lives as Christian leaders. When we step up to a podium. When we stare at a blank page. When we look into a face that is eager to grow and learn. Such moments may cause us to think we went the wrong way, that we’re not a leader after all. Rather than stepping out on the invisible bridge, we may be tempted to retreat and look for a safer route. It takes courage to cross invisible bridges.
Courage doesn’t get much press in contemporary culture, and even when it is discussed, it is often poorly defined. “Courage” is often reduced to “bravery,” something that is useful on the battleground, but not necessarily useful in leadership. Yet, prior to 1980, Webster’s dictionary defined “courage” as “the heart, the seat of one’s emotions and thoughts.” In the Scriptures, to “take heart” or to “be courageous” was to set one’s will in accordance to the will of God, no matter outside circumstances, no matter how deep the chasm.
In Roman Catholicism, courage was understood to be so pivotal to the Christian life that it was considered one of the four cardinal virtues and the virtue upon which all the other virtues were dependent. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at its testing point, which means the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.” Courage is not simply the absence of fear, but the force of moving forward despite fear. In leadership, courage is the audacious act of stepping out onto invisible bridges, recognizing and trusting that God is working even in our weaknesses.
Like Indiana Jones, I want to be courageous and step out on invisible bridges. I don’t want to get distracted or deterred from God’s will and calling by how things appear on the surface. And so I wonder, fellow woman leaders, what chasms have you been confronted with? What invisible bridges have you crossed? And how can we encourage one another to lead more courageously?
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Is The Church Ready for Iron Ladies?
I have a confession to make, one that I often sheepishly keep to myself: I have very rarely felt discriminated against for being a woman, but often because I am not a certain type of woman.
I stand on the shoulders of giants who labored to make inroads for women’s rights, for equal opportunity in our culture, our workforce, our political system, and our churches. As a child and a teenager, my father taught me that I could be anything I wanted when I grew up. I believed him. My generation – the people I grew up with and the people I interact with even today – take it for granted that women deserve the same opportunities as men. My church assumes that leadership in the church should be based on God-given ability and vocational calling rather than gender. At both seminaries I have attended, I have been encouraged by God-honoring, conservative male professors who regularly tell me, “The church needs women leaders. One reason the church today has so many problems is because we have so few women leaders.
No one can deny that discrimination against women is a present reality and that women still face significant challenges in their path to leadership. However, in an age when more women are occupying leadership positions in churches across the country, when more women are running successful, high-profile Christian ministries, when enrollment trends at many Protestant, evangelical seminaries reflect a growth rate among women students that exceeds that of men, I can’t help but wonder if we’re asking all the right questions regarding the future of women in leadership. Perhaps the question is not, as it has long been, exclusively whether or not women should be leaders in our churches, but also, “How should we perceive women leaders once they are in those positions?”
In a recent book titled, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, researchers Eagly and Carli argue that “the glass ceiling” is no longer a useful metaphor when describing the obstacles women face in leadership today. Instead, they suggest the image of the “labyrinth” through which women must navigate successfully to be an effective leader. Women can be leaders, but our perceptions about women and leadership often divert the route to leadership. Research studies indicate that it is difficult for a woman to be perceived as both a lady and an effective leader. Both men and women expect women to be “warm, caring, selfless, and nice” while they expect leaders to be “assertive, direct, and competent.” When women display the desirable leadership traits – confident in their competency, assertive, and bold – they cease to be viewed as “warm and caring” and are instead perceived as “tough, domineering, relentless, or brutal.” In political circles, these women are called “Iron Ladies.”
The first woman who taught me what it meant to be an iron lady was my grandmother, the leader, the helmsman, the anchor of our family. She lived through the Great Depression and World War II. She stood beside her husband through both the Korean War and through three decades of hard labor on a cotton farm. She bore and raised three children who, in turn, gave her five grandchildren. She buried her husband, her father, and her mother. Even today, at age 75, when she is not taking care of sick and aging family members, she’s volunteering at the local nursing home and hospital. Yet, I can probably count on a single hand the times I’ve seen her cry or heard her complain. Once, when I complimented her on her strength, she casually shrugged and said, “Sometimes you just have to be tough.” And being “tough” never made her any less a lady.
And so my question for you, lady leaders, is this: If women leaders face this type of discrimination in the broader culture at large, how can we begin to counteract it in our churches? Is the church ready for iron ladies? For women leaders with tremendous visionary and leadership capacities, but who may not display the qualities we expect of women? Are we ready to hold loosely our own expectations of other women leaders and of ourselves??
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Jesus and Fried Chicken
There was a time when I believed the Great American Idea that your autobiography is your own personal story. Now, after years of exposure to a rich variety of people, customs, and traditions, I realize that our own personal stories are inextricably linked to the stories of our fathers, our mothers, and the people of our culture.
For over a hundred years, most of the members of my family were cotton farmers, people of the earth who had left the luxuries of Western Europe to try their hand in a new land. They had enough courage to traverse the Atlantic and half of the continental United States territory in search of a better life. They had enough grit and determination to prevail through both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. They were a pragmatic, hard-working lot of people who gave little thought to their relationship with God. Jesus was reserved for Sundays – right along with fried chicken, sweet corn on the cob, and creamy mashed potatoes smothered with thick gravy. There was no real relationship with God, only a religion that had little to do with daily life on the cotton farm.
My family’s story is not unique among the families that have populated the southern regions of the United States for the last two centuries. Even today, many portions of the South still suffer from the Jesus-and-fried-chicken faith. For many Southerners, being a Christian means that you go to church on Sundays and sometimes pray before meals. Christianity did not involve a life-transformation or a close, growing, intimate relationship with God. This is the family and the culture in which I was born and raised, and my spiritual journey is the sun-dappled story of how a very real, omnipresent God broke through these false ideas and brought healing to the damage they had caused.
I don’t believe that Jesus-and-fried-chicken faith, that cultural Christianity, is unique to the South. I believe that anytime we get comfortable in our journey with God, when “Jesus AND money, ministry, work” becomes part of our conversation in our families and in our churches, when we focus on numerical growth rather than spiritual growth, when we become desensitized to the central message and calling of Jesus, when we experience a fragmentation in the church over issues of gender, worship, service, and textual interpretation, our faith is at risk of being reduced to a Jesus-and-fried-chicken faith. With Jesus, there is no “and.” There is only Jesus, the dusty-footed itinerant preacher who ushered in a revolution in the way we understand and relate to God.
I still struggle with all of the “ands” in my life and in my leadership roles. They often spring up in the most unexpected places, like weeds pushing up through the cracks in a concrete sidewalk. I forget about faith when I’m trying to piece together a life that is composed of a whole host of complex, competing roles, such as wife, future mother, writer, professor, and student. I forget about providence when I worry about budgets and finances. I forget about holiness when I focus too long on the various ministry tasks that I deal with on a daily basis.
I don’t want a Jesus-and-fried-chicken faith. I want Jesus. And I don’t think I’m alone. As Christian women leaders, we have to be willing to look long and hard at all of the “ands” that have made their way into our lives and our ministries. What are the other “ands” that impede our progress as women leaders? How can we, as leaders, begin to eliminate them first in our own lives and then in the lives of those we lead?
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Whose Holding Up Your Arms?
In Exodus 17, we see a similar thing happened in the life of Moses, albeit on a far grander scale. The Israelites were encountering their first opposition while wandering in the desert. The Amalekites, a group of nomadic raiders, attacked the people of Israel. While Joshua led the troops into battle, Moses, along with Aaron and Hur, watched the battle from a nearby hill. Exodus 17:11 reads, “So it came about when Moses held his hand up, that Israel prevailed, and when he let his hand down, Amalek prevailed.” Eventually, Moses became weary, and so Aaron and Hur responded by holding up his arms until the Israelites were able to finally defeat the Amalekites.
Often, when we think of the leadership of Moses, our minds are flooded with images of his heroic deeds. Moses the statesman, confronting the Egyptian pharaoh and negotiating the release of God’s people. Moses the shepherd, leading the Israelites through the Sinai Desert. Moses the conduit of God’s miracles, stretching out his hand to part the Red Sea. Moses the legislator, descending Mount Sinai with two stone tablets containing God’s laws. But Exodus 17 reveals to us another aspect of Moses’ leadership: the willingness to accept the assistance of others.
One of the common temptations in leadership is succumbing to the pressure of having to “have it all together.” We may be tempted to hide our fears and weaknesses, feeling that we need to be strong for others. We may find it difficult to trust others with our insecurities and doubts, believing that this would somehow compromise our integrity as leaders. Such tendencies are rooted in our cultural ethic of self-reliance, and they can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation that will ultimately handicap our effectiveness in ministry. To truly grow as leaders, we must, like Moses, be willing to embrace the support of trusted friends and advisors.
But how can we forge such relationships? Here are three suggestions for how to begin:
Taking it to God. Relationships should be grounded in prayer. Pray that God will surround you with godly people and reveal to you those people he has placed in your life to support you. Pray that God will strengthen and bless these relationships.
Taking risks. Authentic, meaningful relationships require a certain level of vulnerability. When building relationships, be willing to take the risk of being misunderstood or rejected at times.
Taking time. Relationships don’t happen overnight. Like the carefully cultivated plant, they need space and time to grow. Build space in your schedule for activities and time with friends.
Ardath and Nancy, like Aaron and Hur with Moses, held up my “arms” in a time of need. Who’s holding up yours?
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Leadership Lessons from Harry Potter
A few years ago, well-meaning Christians revolted against the Harry Potter phenomenon. They dismissed the whole series as a perpetuation of the cult, of magic and sorcery that were contrary to the will of God as displayed in the Scriptures. A few years ago, U.S. and World Newswire published an article describing how some evangelicals banded together to burn the Harry Potter books in protest. I seriously doubt that any of these people actually read any of the books themselves. As an evangelical, a literary critic, and a researcher in the field of leadership, I could not believe the talent and the depth illustrated in this series, and how much I learned about what true leadership looks like.
For those who are unfamiliar with the story, Harry Potter, at the beginning of the series, is a twelve-year-old orphan boy who was adopted as a little baby by his aunt and uncle, who treat him less than human and more like a burden. In fact, he has no room of his own, but rather lives in the closet under the stairs. For all his life, his aunt and uncle have ignored him at best and treated him unkindly at worst, all the while spoiling their own son. He lives in absolute obscurity—that is, until his thirteenth birthday, when a strange visitor arrives, explaining to Harry that he, and his dead parents, are wizards, and that the time has come for him to go to Hogwarts, the school for witches and wizards.
Harry is immediately thrust into a whole new world, a wizarding world in which he in not so obscure. There he finds out that his parents did not die in a car crash, as he had long believed, but rather were killed by the spell of an evil wizard, Voldemort while Harry was still an infant. Voldemort had tried to kill Harry, but for the first time ever, his spell did not work. After that, Voldemort disappeared from the wizarding world and terrorized the people no longer, and Harry then became known throughout the wizarding world as “the boy who lived.” Harry finds that he is a hero in this wizarding world, and is, to say the least, puzzled over it all. Harry treats his new-found fame very lightly, and sets about making friends in his school and learning more about the new world he has been introduced to. He discovers that Voldemort is trying to return to the wizarding world, and seeking power to control it, and Harry is somehow destined to stop him. In this book, Voldemort is after the sorcerer’s stone, an enchanted stone that grants eternal life to the person who owns it, but Harry, Herminone, and Ron, two of his closest friends at Hogwarts, stop Voldemort from taking the stone.
There are several leadership lessons to be learned from Harry Potter. The first lesson is about humility. Harry Potter, famous throughout the wizarding world, lived first in obscurity and then under scrutiny. Every move he made in the wizarding world was watched. He was famous, having survived an encounter with Voldemort—something that no wizard—great or small—had ever done before, and in doing so, robbed Voldemort of his power. And he did this while still an infant. People deemed him a hero before he could speak or walk. Yet, Harry did not become prideful or arrogant when learning of his encounter with Voldemort or how highly regarded he was in the wizarding world. As far as he was concerned, he was still Harry—the orphan boy who had lived for 13 years under the stairs. Eventually, later we discover that it wasn’t Harry at all who bested Voldemort—it was his mother. His mother protected him from the spell of Voldemort with her unconditional love—a magic stronger and deeper than any other magic. I think sometimes in leadership we are tempted to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to, as if our own merits and achievements alone had thrust us into leadership. We forget that ultimately, it is God that has granted us specific gifts and talents and God that opens the door to leadership opportunities.
The second leadership lesson we learn from Harry Potter is the importance of self-sacrifice. Throughout this book and throughout the series, Harry Potter wants nothing more than to be an ordinary boy, yet he suppresses this desire and continues to shoulder the burden of responsibility in handling the comeback of Voldemort. In one scene, Harry, in his wanderings through the rambling castle of Hogwarts, discovers The Mirror of Erised, a mirror that shows the person looking at it whatever would make them the most contented person in the world—it reads the heart and reflects the core desire of the person’s heart. When Harry looks into the mirror, he sees his parents standing behind him, gazing at him with tender love and affection. Every night, he sneaks back into this room for hours, just to look at his parents. He would trade anything in the world to have them back. He doesn’t want the fame, doesn’t want the responsibility of dealing with Voldemort. He just wants his parents. One night, the school headmaster, finds Harry in front of the mirror, and explains that the mirror only reflects the deepest desire of a person’s heart, and provides neither truth nor knowledge. With this bit of wisdom, Dumbledore encourages Harry to not waste away in front of the mirror, and instead embrace the challenges set before him, which Harry does.
We often connect leadership with ideas about greatness, about influence and power. We don’t often connect it with self-sacrifice, and the spiritual poverty in which true leadership is often born. Harry Potter shows us that leadership is often connected with sacrifice—sacrifices that cut deep and may sometimes even rob us of our core-most desires. Leadership is less about power and influence, but more about responsibility. It is true that inevitably power and influence is part of leadership, but it is more about responsibility for the greater good of those you lead more than anything else. And that kind of leadership requires self-sacrifice.
The third leadership lesson we learn from Harry Potter is the importance of community in leadership. In the last scene, Harry Potter and his friends, Ron and Hermione, are on a mission to stop Voldemort from getting the Sorcerer’s Stone. To get to the place where the stone is kept, they must first go through the security system, which includes a series of magical challenges set up by the faculty. Each person uses their individual gifts and talents to navigate through these challenges: Hermione uses her logic and knowledge, Ron uses his skill as a master chessman, and Harry uses his broom-riding skill. Even though it was Harry that ultimately had to face Voldemort alone, it is clear that he could not have done so without the help from his friends.
Too often in leadership, people forget that leadership is often a team endeavor. Even though there may be a person who serves as the ultimate leader, the head, this person is supported through community. I think this is often neglected or forgotten in leadership. The impact of community should not be forgotten, and the individual contributions and support of those around the leader should be recognized and treasured.
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