There is a peculiar tragedy that plays out in the corridors of power, in boardrooms, in political offices, in institutions of every kind; and it is this: the person who sits in the chair of authority is often not entirely the person your plain eyes see. Behind the grey hair, aged temples, the measured speech, the decades of experience, there is sometimes a much younger soul still keeping score. When encountering or confronting a person whom the leader had a difference of opinion or was in loggerhead with long ago, the old scores and scoreboards return. It is as psychologists admit, “When an old wound gets triggered, you don't act your age, you act the age you were hurt.” Leadership, by its very nature, arrives late in ones lice. It is the harvest of a long life, of learning, of failure, of persistence, of accumulating wisdom through seasons of struggle. A person becomes a leader at fifty, at sixty, sometimes later, carrying with them what feels like the full weight of everything ...
A quote on existential life goes like this, you are a rose –a beautiful rose, but people love lilies. There is a particular kind of suffering that has no name in most languages; the suffering of being exactly what the world actually in need of, and being rejected for it. You offer a rose. They want a lily. You hold out your open hand. They prefer the closed fist. This is not ordinary rejection. Ordinary rejection wounds the ego. This kind of rejection wounds something deeper, it strikes at the very substance of what you are . You cannot stop being a rose to become a lily. You cannot unmake your own nature. And so you stand, fully yourself, in a world that looks past you, through you, around you, searching for the very opposite of what you embody. Jesus knew this pain with perfect clarity. And in John 3:16–21, He did not flinch from naming it. Verse 19 is one of the most quietly devastating sentences ever written, Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of ...