Storied Leadership: Foundations of Leadership from a Christian Perspective (Christian Non-Fiction)

Chapter 1: Storied Leadership

One afternoon I walked in on my daughter having an existential crisis. Simone’s big beautiful eyes beamed through her plastic bedazzled glasses. “Dad, what’s it all for anyway? We go to work, go to school, make money, buy stuff, go to sleep, get up, go to work, eat dinner, go to school, have kids, go to sleep, get up…” Nearly in tears, she went on. I was taken aback. I expected these kinds of questions, but I did not imagine her asking them before finishing the second grade. 

My wife and I had always hoped for inquisitive kids. There Simone was, standing with curled-up toes on the cold ceramic tile, asking the same big questions I explore with emerging adults in the laid-back cafés and classrooms of the college campus. Although my wife and I were surprised, we shouldn’t have been. For years we endeavored to shape a home life that encourages curiosity and awe in the face of a grand world. But on that day, the curiosity led her to difficult questions. Her seven-year old words echoed the ancient opening of Ecclesiastes:

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

A generation goes, and a generation comes,

but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,

and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south

and goes around to the north;

around and around goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;

a man cannot utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

nor the ear filled with hearing.

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun. 

(Ecclesiastes 1:2-9)

These words have spoken to the human experience for millennia. Considering Ecclesiastes, novelist and playwright Thomas Wolfe writes, “Of all I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth.”[Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Scribner, 1990), 628.] 

It is telling that old playwrights, poets, seven-year-olds, college students, and pastors come to the same questions, isn’t it? There is something so universal and human about these queries. How do we make sense of a world that doesn’t always seem coherent? How do we find meaning when, at times, being in the world feels like running on an eternally spinning treadmill? What is it all for anyway? How do we lead others who are also asking these questions? 

Philosophers, theologians, artists, students, and yes, even dads have toiled to answer these questions for themselves and for those whom they try to lead. However, we do not ask these questions in isolation. Communities consider them together and search for answers within a context of interpretation. That is, they look at the world and ultimately tell stories about the nature of reality. They find themselves in groups that make very local decisions about the most important questions: What does it mean to be human? Why aren’t things the way they should be? What is valuable? What is the reason for being? Asking is part of being human and it is a fundamentally communal experience.