Moving on and leading onward

Well, the announcements have all been made. I have resigned my position as Head of School at Veritas and am taking a position with Westminster Christian Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. My successor has been selected, with the official announcement having gone out to the Veritas community today. Transition work is now taking place, with both places preparing for their next respective administrators and both administrators beginning the process of ending well in our current fields of service.

I don't like transitions, and this one will be particularly difficult. We've been in Oklahoma nine years, and we have many good friends here we hate to leave. I know we will stay in touch through various social media and an occasional visit or meeting up at General Assembly, but it won't be the same not being able to spend time with the guys in some smoke-filled garage, or around a fire pit in someone's back yard, or making a last minute run to Louie's. I love these guys. Leaving them breaks my heart.

I don't like transitions from a vocational standpoint, either. Once I know I'm leaving one place for another, I get into these deep and, at times, paralyzing reflective moods. As an administrator, I ponder what I did well, what I didn't do well, what I wish I could still do before I leave, what I'm glad to leave behind, and, frankly, who I'm glad to leave behind.

I've been giving more and more thought to the idea of leadership these last few years. What does it mean to be a leader? What does it look like? How is it done? And in our situation, what does it look like in the context of great pain and betrayal. And now that we are in transition mode, I'm thinking about this all over again. There's no shortage of writing on the subject, nor is there a shortage of schools of thought on what it means to be a leader. I pick up things here and there; I read this and that. I just started reading Dan Allender's Leading with a Limp, and his premise is that, in spite of the great pain and loneliness that accompanies leading, if one's desire is to have one's love for God deepened, then few things cultivate that love more than leadership.

I want to be a good leader. But I want to be a good leader for the right reasons and to the right end. I don't want to be a good leader because I want to be the center of things. (Anyone who knows me knows I tend to be reclusive.) I don't want to be a good leader because I think I know everything about the areas in which I lead. (Anyone who knows me knows I'm only as smart as the people around me.) I don't want to be a good leader because I want people to like and respect me. (I did try that for a few years and couldn't make it work.) I want to be a good leader because I want first to love God. And if the pain and loneliness of leadership is God's way for me to do that, then that's where I need to be.

So if you see me in the next few months with coffee in hand (when don't you see me with coffee in hand?) with one of those distant, reflective "Cogito ergo sum" looks on my face, you'll know what I'm thinking about.