Leadership happens in odd and tricky places sometimes.
I’ll bet Aaron Brantley would have been thrilled for someone be a leader as he crawled across a concrete parking lot to get help. Brantley was attacked at a busy Detroit gas station, left with a broken leg. He crawled from the gas pump to the gas station door while people drove and walked past him.
Leadership isn’t just leading others. It starts with you and ripples out. It’s about helping even if others aren’t. Leadership is doing the right thing when others are walking away. Leadership is gathering your resources and working.
I don’t mean to condemn the people who walked away. They obviously didn’t know what to do. They may have been embarrassed or busy or a little afraid. Was this a scam? Was this practical joke? Maybe they really didn’t care.
It’s clear someone needed to step up. A leader.
Leadership doesn’t spring from our brains without any preparation. We need to think ahead. We need to be intentional about goals and plans. We need to talk to others and get some training.
We need examples to help us. Especially as followers of Jesus, we want to find God’s guidance. How do I lead as a Christian? Does that look different than other leadership models?
As followers of Jesus, we often look to the Bible. We’d like to find bullet point to clarify Christian leadership. Highlighted principles would be helpful. Maybe we can find some rules of Christian leadership.
Instead, we find stories.
But stories are good. I’ve seen leadership principles pulled from stories about presidents and generals. I’ve seen leadership points gathered from a book about building a boat. Stories can teach us more than we realize.
What can stories teach us?
Real people in real situations
We’re not told proverbs but get to see the ideas in action. We learn of the emotions of people as they interact with real-life situations.
The good the bad, the ugly
The Bible doesn’t sugar coat. We’re allowed to see mistakes, wrong motives, wisdom. The people in the Bible’s stories aren’t perfect but they have the opportunity to learn. And we can learn along with them.
The context for courage
Would you rather be told “take courage” or be told the story of a person who overcame great difficulty to succeed? Courage is more nuanced than it seems. We can get away from platitudes to real-life scenarios.
Heart of the leader illustrated
Stories bring emotion and depth. We walk with the people, hear their fears and concerns, and understand better how a leader interacts with those they lead.
Engaging
We can hang with a story longer. It has conflict, people, setting, a plot. It’s much more interesting than the bullet points we thought we craved.
Fleshed out truth
Not all principles can be put in a proverb or cliche. Stories help us see the truth in its dimensions and layers.
Mistakes managed
Leaders aren’t invincible heroes. They make mistakes. Sometimes the leader in a story figures out the error. Sometimes God corrects them. Often we see it coming, sometimes before the main character does.
The beauty of human relationships
The interaction between people always enriches leadership principles. We don’t lead in a vacuum. Or we shouldn’t. Stories illustrate that beautifully.
Long before Pinterest could puncture our creative bubble, there was the nativity Christmas cookie cutter set.
I sometimes call Pinterest the dream site: I can only do those projects in my dreams.
The cookie cutter set was like that. The box seduced me with photos of beautiful cookies in the shape of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in a manger. A little piping of frosting, a few sparkles in the right place and we would have a unique nativity set.
And the best part was that we could do this project as a family with everyone helping.
I bought the set.
Yes, I knew we wouldn’t get the cookies quite as perfect as the photos. We had a two-year-old at the time. He’d produce a cute but goofy little cookie.
It was OK.
I forgot to factor in his mother.
I knew we were in trouble when I pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven. Baby Jesus in the manger resembled a toasted marshmallow.
The sheep – and I’d made lots of them – all were blimps. Some had short fat legs but, since you couldn’t tell where the head was, the legs could have been porcupine prickles, too.
The camels’ longer legs had grown together while baking. “Is this a tree?” asked the six-year-old.
The shepherds had morphed into tall planks of wood and kneeling Joseph was now a giant S.
The kids were game, anyway. They slathered on frosting that was too thin so that the blues and oranges dribbled into each other making a muddy brown on the kings.
Well, I thought those were the kings because of the lumps at the top which I identified as crowns. Maybe they were cows, in which case the muddy brown frosting might make more sense.
I had planned to assemble the stable printed on the back of the box but tossed that after our older son frosted an angel as though it were a donkey. I couldn’t see displaying these.
When we were done, with sticky frosting on our fingers and sparkles drifting to the floor, I studied the blobs of cookies. “Well, this didn’t work out quite like I had hoped.”
My husband surveyed the table, surrounded by sets of eager young eyes, and picked up a cookie. “Then we’d better destroy the evidence.”
I had just finished rinsing the shampoo out of my hair when my cell phone rang. I grabbed a towel. Who was calling?
My sister.
“Cover your eyes,” I said, draping myself with the towel. Water ran down my face.
She hung up.
Should I call her back? Should I dry myself off first?
The phone rang again. It was my sister again. Oh, good, she’d accidentally hung up.
As I pushed the accept button, I noticed that she had used FaceTime this time.
Facetime is a video phone call.
Well, it was my sister and she only had to see my dripping hair.
“Why are you FaceTiming me?” I have a knack for insightful questions.
“I wanted you to see my new tooth.” She’d just gotten an implant and so she stretched her mouth to reveal the bright tooth.
And then she started giggling. “Where are you?”
She tried to be polite. She really did. But her tale about the trip to the dentist and her report on her plans for her day were interrupted by snorts and chuckles.
When the techies worked on the chips and circuits that would allow us to combine phone calls with video, I think they had images of salesmen using charts to illustrate quarterly earnings. Or giggling babies reaching out to touch their grandmother who lived across the country. Or a soldier connecting with his wife and kids from a foreign country.
And I’ll bet all those things happen.
But I wonder if their vision ever included new teeth and dripping hair.
“The best way to eat cookies,” said our young guest as he plopped a spoonful of cookie dough on top of a baked cookie. “Best.”
And that made me think about my cookie-making history, because I thought I had seen every method of eating and snitching bookie dough. But this was new: cookie dough as frosting.
I’ve been making chocolate chip cookies for a long time, long enough that all the adult children know the rules: no snitching of dough until the flour is in.
And now I have grandchildren helping me make cookies and I’ve had to start the process all over again with the snitch rules.
Recently, I made cookies while the two-year-old sat on the counter by me and the four-year-old stood on a chair so he could turn the mixer on and off. (They know the rules about the mixer, too.) The four-year-old was busy adding ingredients. The two-year-old, meanwhile, had lifted the lid on a canister of raisins and was eating handfuls of raisins.
He’d crack the egg if I wanted, but otherwise he’d eat raisins.
He ate raisins until the chocolate chips appeared and then he traded handfuls of raisins for handfuls of chocolate chips.
Then the boys switched to spoons, once the flour and chips were mixed in. They know which drawer and they know they get one spoonful before dropping their spoons in the sink. This is making cookies to them.
I think cookies are meant to be baked but my family would differ. I could leave the dough out and it would soon be consumed.
“We’re saving energy,” one son told me. Yeah, his sons are the ones with the spoons at ready when the dough is mixed.
When I described the new way of eating cookies to our son, his eyes lit up. “That is the best,” he said and reached for a spoon.
I live in Colorado farm country. That blends a very dry climate with some hard-working and practical folks.
Which means you see some weird stuff at the farm store. As I stood in the checkout line, I saw a little display box containing little white tubes of a product called Chicken Poop Lip Junk.
It isn’t a joke product. It gets great reviews as the best lip moisturizer ever.
And there’s no poop in it, they state.
I’m a farm kid and there isn’t much that is gross to me, but I’m having trouble thinking of smearing Chicken Poop Lip Junk on my lips.
But there was more at the counter.
Near the Chicken Poop Lip Junk was another box of tubes labelled “Crack Zap It.” This stuff is guaranteed to eliminate the cracks in your fingers in three days. You roll it on like lip balm but on your fingertips, hangnails, peeling skin.
We’re talking dry skin like Mojave desert dry. This is skin that erupts from hard-working hands that handle oil, mud, and cold weather.
I asked my dear husband, who works outside a lot and knows all about cracked finger tips. He liked the idea of Crack Zap It.
“Why don’t you just use hand lotion?” I said.
“I tried it but it’s not thick enough. This stuff might work.” He stared at the wall for a moment. “Do we have any cow salve?”
Cow Salve is a thick product originally used for a cow’s chapped udder but has found new life as a heavy-duty skin ointment.
The lesson for today is that, if you live in farm country, your dry skin is not an issue. You can lather on Chicken Poop Lip Junk, Crack Zap It, and Cow Salve.
