Leadership Pain With Sam ChandSample

What Makes You Tick? 

Idealism is a wonderful thing—until it becomes a crushing burden. Leaders in every field have great dreams of having an impact on countless lives, but if they aren’t careful, unrealistic expectations—coupled with genuine disappointments and conflicts—can make them feel less than. All of us, and I mean all of us, from the most successful to those who are just starting out, need to realize the blessings and limitations of the gifts God has given us to lead our churches. Only Jesus had all the gifts. Here’s a news flash: you and I aren’t Jesus!

Your happiness is inversely proportionate to the shoulds in your life. Exaggerated expectations inevitably lead to disillusionment: a common form of leadership pain. We can significantly raise our pain threshold, then by having a more realistic view of ourselves, our God-given talents, and our need for others to fill in the gaps. We may want to see a super Christian in a cape when we look in the mirror each day, but this illusion will eventually ruin everything beautiful in our lives. 

Throughout the Bible and church history, we see a clear pattern in how God works with people. No matter how gifted they were, God humbled them before he used them. A. W. Tozer believed that the experience of pain is essential for any leader to become pliable in the hands of God. In one of his most famous books he wrote, “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.” God’s methods may vary, but he always manages to get a person’s undistracted attention to teach the most fundamental lessons of trust.  

What makes you tick? Wherever we serve, each of us is an incredibly complex blend of God-given strengths and deficiencies, noble goals and selfish desires, drivenness and apathy, giving and grasping, love and fear. If we aren’t aware of the powerful forces at work under the surface of our lives, we’ll be caught off guard when we encounter pain; we’ll be reactive and defensive instead of wise and strong.