IVP - Strangely Dim

Leadership Is for Losing

By David A. Zimmerman

Which of the following is a better example of leadership?

 “I have a gun. Put the money in the bag or I will hurt you.”
 “I have a gun. Put the money in the bag and nobody gets hurt.”

Comparatively speaking, the second thief clearly gives the better example of leadership: she offers a “win-win” scenario. In contrast, the leader in the first example sets up a natural antagonism: she gets her way, or everyone suffers.

But really, neither of these examples is good leadership. Each thief is exploiting an arbitrary position of power to manipulate others. The idea of setting up these two people as examples of leaders is absurd.

But we live in a leadership culture. People are commonly divided into two classes: leader and follower; shepherd and sheep. Invariably leaders are cast as better than their follower friends, though in democratic cultures we minimize that distinction to protect the followers’ fragile egos or to protect the leaders’ subtle power base.

In reality, followers are good at surrendering power and following orders, but few followers are good at following their conscience or holding the powerful accountable. Leaders are good at gaining and using power, but few leaders are good at setting power aside forever or even only for a moment.

Most people don’t need to be led through most of their life, even most of their day. We agree to a task or a role and are competent under most circumstances to make decisions relevant to it. We may need leaders to intervene in a crisis, but crises eventually end, and most of our calling can be pursued without such interventions.

Even in the life of faith we don’t often need direct leadership:

[God] has showed you . . . what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)

Pretty straightforward: God has a job for us to do and gives us what we need to do it. Occasional crises call for divine intervention or for people particularly gifted in one way or another to lead others through troubled times or difficult circumstances, but such times are temporary. The trouble is, how does a leader stop leading once he or she is invested with such authority? How does a follower stop following when to do so distracts from his or her calling?

Leaders are as accountable to God as followers because each is fundamentally a follower of God. If we lead unnecessarily, we intrude on the relationship of our sometimes-followers to our always-leader. We make ourselves idols, and we cause our sometimes-followers to stumble.

There may be days when we are called to give leadership, but may we never love leadership more than we love God and our brothers and sisters. And when the day comes—and it will come—when our time of giving leadership or followership has ended, may we have the will to set aside our position of power and take up once again our calling.

Hurry Up and Genuflect

by David A. Zimmerman

Over Christmas I visited my parents, which generally involves attending mass with them. As an adult I’ve most commonly attended nonliturgical churches, so an occasional return to the church of my youth makes for a nice, reflective hour for me.

Nevertheless, you’d be surprised how much can change in an ancient church over the course of a year. In this case, the year had brought ever-so-slight revisions to the liturgy. The most pronounced change came right in the middle of the Nicene Creed, which wouldn’t be a problem if my sister and I hadn’t been right in the middle of a lifelong, informal competition--I’ll call it “The Creedal Invitational.”

Chalk it up to intense individualism or chronic nonconformity or sibling one-upmanship, but for most of my childhood the congregational reciting of the Nicene Creed was an opportunity, for my sister and me, to prove that we could read the creed without the support of our parish. We paused at all the normal breath points, of course, but we were in a race to finish first, which meant that we were, generally, radically out of sync with everyone around us.

If you’ve taken part in group readings of any kind, you know that there’s an unstated agreement in advance about when to pause, when to breathe, which words to emphasize, that sort of thing. You fall into a natural rhythm when you speak with other people; for my sister and me, that rhythm was merely a bit more caffeinated.

But then the priest interrupted our recitation—or, in my sister's case, the victory lap. “At this point in the creed we kneel to honor Christ’s coming to earth.” The priest knelt, and the congregation knelt with him. Then we picked up where everyone else had left off.

I admit I was a bit stymied by the interruption. I had to get my bearings and refer back to the monthly missalette to find my place. My mind was pulled in two directions: on the one hand, any chance of meditation for me was complicated by the mechanics of getting back with the congregation and operating the retractable kneeler; on the other hand, I was forced to revisit the Incarnation of the Christ, which no matter how you slice it is time well spent. So I guess the question is, what do I gain by following my own pace through creedal statements and other group readings, and what do I lose?

In this case, I lost the context for why we were kneeling—for those of us who had finished the creed prematurely, we might as well have all been looking for the priest’s lost contact.

I lost the full intended experience of the reading—to soak in the realities that the creed proclaims.

I did, however, gain bragging rights over my sister in what may necessarily have been the last Creedal Invitational ever (at least in my telling of the story). You take what you can get, I suppose.

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AU, Idiot!

By David A. Zimmerman

We’re far enough removed, I think, from my last Christmas letter for me to own up to an embarrassing error I made in it.

I was riffing on a theme—abbreviations—and in my enthusiasm I misrepresented the abbreviation for gold from the periodic table of the elements. It is, of course, AU; I think I inadvertently stuck lead in its place, a kind of reverse literary alchemy.

I was embarrassed for all sorts of reasons. First off, the periodic table doesn’t contain abbreviations per se; it’s more precise to refer to the elements’ representations as symbols. Beyond that, I wouldn’t expect to know any of the periodic table by heart because I am by any measure completely disinterested in things scientific—landing on the symbol for lead would have been entirely accidental—except that I had no excuse for not knowing the symbol for gold. As a student of late-twentieth-century American social/cultural history (they actually let me major in this), I should have remembered that political campaigns from the 1960s represented the name of Barry Goldwater using symbols from the periodic table: Goldwater = AU-H2O. (I’m pretty sure that AU = gold and H2O = water, though I’ve given up on making such bold assertions.)

Not to mention that I make my living as an editor, which involves (make that “should involve”) checking facts. The periodic table is prominently displayed in my dictionary, which I supposedly use every day. I would insert my mea culpa here, but I’m too lazy to make sure that means what I think it means.

The weird thing is that only one person pointed out the error, even though very nearly everyone I know received my Christmas letter. I don’t know which scenario I prefer:

1. All my family and friends are embarrassingly uneducated about the periodic table of the elements and late-twentieth-century American social/cultural history.
2. All of my family and friends have come to expect such errors from me as a matter of course and see no reason to comment on them.
3. None of my family and friends reads my Christmas letter.

In any event, I’m not sure if I’d rather have my mistakes pointed out so I can become a better person or remain blissfully ignorant of any fallibilities I might suffer from (such as, for example, ending a sentence with a preposition, which I narrowly avoided here by inserting this parenthetical comment).

Needless to say, I intend to be a bit more careful with this year’s Christmas letter. The news that I had potentially embarrassed myself in front of my whole universe of relationships was not my favorite gift this past Christmas, but it’s also the only gift I haven’t been able to return for money.

Oops—did I just print that?

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The Truth About Flying

by David A. Zimmerman

I dream of flying, and it’s the happiest dream I know. It’s one of the few dreams I remember, actually, which is funny, since there’s nothing much to the dream besides the flying.

Flying for me is like swimming—a matter of willing the body to push against a countercurrent. My flying is not so much an event, like Thor’s spinning his hammer till it propels him through the air or Iron Man’s activating his boot-jets, as it is a change of status: Once I was landlocked, but now I am airborne.

Flying in my dreams is silent, peaceful—not the ear-splitting adrenaline rush of the comics. I suspect that something in my dream compels me to be in the air, but once I’m there I’m in no hurry. I enjoy the sensation of being untethered more so than the opportunity to get where I need to be by any means necessary. I get a sense from this dream of just what control gravity has over me.

Ah, gravity, my arch-nemesis. Let me be clear that I don’t wish to stop gravity; rather I wish I could control it. Gravity keeps everything around me literally grounded; it brings predictability to falling (if I drop my pencil, I know to tilt my head down rather than back—unless, of course, I’m suspended from the ceiling); I even count on gravity for, among other things, drip-brewing coffee and watering plants.

Having said all that, there’s a case to be made for being outside of gravity’s control. If gravity couldn’t restrict my movement, I could hover wherever I felt like being or quickly remove myself from any uncomfortable situation to where no one could follow—and no one could do anything about it. I would not have to suffer the claustrophobia of too many people confined to one “two-dimensional” setting. I could be literally above the fray.

I’ve always dreamed of flying, I suppose. When I was a kid, I had a recurring apocalyptic fantasy in which I grew wings after being exposed to nuclear radiation. I flew around rescuing all the pretty girls in my class. When I was in college, all the characters I created in various role-playing games could fly. Interestingly enough, however, my favorite superheroes not only cannot fly but have few exceptional abilities whatsoever. Though I dream of ascending to the heights, I am inspired by people much more down to earth.

Maybe I should be concerned by that. Why am I so motivated to fly when the characters who have struck me as the most heroic do it all from the ground? My dreams of flying rarely involve acts of heroism. Heroes charge into battle, but I fly simply to escape.

Escape is one way of looking at my relation to the world, I guess. In fact, some end-times scenarios amount to pretty much just that—people flying off to heaven while everyone else experiences seven years of very bad luck. But what all my heroes would do—and what Jesus has done, for that matter—is to face such challenges head-on and use any resources available to them to deliver people from evil. If those resources include the power of flight, so be it, but we shouldn’t underestimate what a person can do standing on the earth. The sky’s the limit, you could say . . .

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What's your dream superpower? Post a comment.

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