Invidious: The Hidden Cost of Long-Term Leadership

Note: This post is a general piece on school leadership and does not reflect any recent event or any particular circumstance

There is a word I have been thinking about lately: invidious.

It is not a word we use often, but perhaps administrators should.

Invidious can describe a circumstance in which a person is required to make a choice that will almost inevitably produce resentment, criticism, or ill will. It is especially appropriate when the available choices are imperfect—when choosing one legitimate good means sacrificing another, or when responsibility requires a decision that someone else will experience as unfair, painful, or deeply disappointing.

The longer I have worked in administration, the more I have come to recognize these situations as an ordinary, though largely invisible, part of leadership. And after 35 years as a coach, teacher, and an administrator (for 25 of those years)- I can see physical, mental, and physical wear and tear even in my own life.

We often describe administrators as decision-makers, which is accurate but incomplete. Many administrative decisions are relatively uncomplicated: there is a policy, a precedent, a budget, a calendar, or a clearly preferable course of action. Those decisions consume time, but they do not necessarily consume much of us.

The decisions that remain with us are different.

They involve people we know. They contain incomplete information, competing obligations, institutional consequences, and relationships that may be altered permanently by whatever we decide. Often there is no clean answer—only a judgment about which consequence the institution can responsibly bear and which principle must take precedence.

Over a long career, those judgments accumulate.

And I am increasingly interested in what that accumulation does to the person making them.

"Diffusing Atomic Bombs"

There is a metaphor that has occurred to me repeatedly over the years. I often joke about it- how my day was basically diffusing bombs that were ticking......The daily grind of administration can often feel like that.

A situation arrives on your desk already armed- one you did not ask for- and many times one that has nothing to do with you: a personnel matter, an accusation, a student crisis, a parent conflict, a financial problem, an issue involving competing accounts of what happened. Perhaps it has been developing quietly for months before anyone brings it to you. By the time it reaches the administrator, however, there are consequences attached to almost every possible response.

There is a green wire and a yellow wire. You would prefer not to cut either. But there has to be an action or it will get out of control in a hurry.

So you gather information. You listen to people whose accounts do not entirely agree. You consider policy, precedent, mission, personalities, legal implications, institutional history, and the possibility that some important fact remains unknown to you. You consult people you trust. You try to separate what is urgent from what merely feels urgent.

Eventually, however, the responsibility cannot be delegated any further. Someone has to clip a wire.

You choose green. Then you wait. Nothing happens.

The organization continues functioning. Classes begin the next morning. Employees return to work. Students move through the hallways. Parents drop their children off.  What might have become a significant institutional problem simply disappears into the category of things that did not happen.

From an organizational standpoint, this is success. Psychologically, however, something more complicated may have occurred. Everyone else gets to forget the bomb because, in their experience, there never was one.

The administrator remembers holding the wire cutters- and thinks about it sometimes long into the lonely night.

I think this is an under examined aspect of long-term administrative leadership.

The psychological cost of leadership does not arise only from major crises. In fact, those may be easier to recognize because everyone agrees that they are stressful. The more subtle burden comes from the repeated exposure to lower-level conflict, consequential judgment, interpersonal tension, uncertainty, and anticipated reaction.

Any single episode may be manageable. The concern is cumulative exposure.

Over time, an administrator develops an extensive internal archive: conversations that went badly, employees who were terminated, parents who remained angry, students whose situations had no satisfying resolution, accusations that proved unfounded, accusations that did not, decisions made with insufficient information, and decisions that were correct but nevertheless damaged relationships.

Some of those memories remain unusually accessible.

Years later, we can sometimes remember exactly where we were sitting when we made the decision.

This is where ordinary reflection can gradually become something closer to chronic vigilance. An experienced administrator learns to anticipate consequences several moves ahead, which is one of the great advantages of experience. Yet the same capacity can have a psychological cost. We begin rehearsing not only what might happen, but how people might react if it does.

Before sending the email, we can already imagine the response. Before making the decision, we can already anticipate the meeting that will follow it. Before clipping the wire, we remember the last explosion. Experience makes us better at recognizing bombs.

It can also make us increasingly convinced that everything might be one.

This may help explain why some long-term administrators become jaded.

Cynicism is easy to condemn as a character problem, but I suspect that in many veteran leaders it begins as a form of psychological adaptation.

After enough conflict, skepticism can feel safer than trust. Emotional distance can feel more sustainable than continued investment. If caring deeply about every situation repeatedly produces distress, one predictable response is to care less.

The shift is rarely dramatic.

Another angry email arrives, and instead of wondering what is behind it, we think, Here we go again.

Another employee comes into the office with a concern, and before hearing the details we recognize a familiar pattern. and before we know it- this person, made in the image of God, who hasn't been through this before... isn't really heard.

Another parent insists that the situation is completely different from every previous situation, while years of experience suggest that it probably is not.

Sometimes that recognition is wisdom. Pattern recognition is one of the legitimate benefits of experience. But sometimes it is scar tissue masquerading as wisdom.

That distinction deserves our attention.

A healthy veteran administrator should be more difficult to manipulate than a novice, less easily destabilized by criticism, and more capable of recognizing recurring patterns of organizational behavior. But becoming less naïve should not require becoming less humane.

The challenge is to develop discernment without suspicion, resilience without emotional detachment, and compassion without fragility.

That is considerably harder than simply developing a thicker skin.

The Moral Residue of Necessary Decisions

There is another phenomenon that deserves attention: the emotional residue left by decisions that may have been correct but were nevertheless painful.

Not every difficult feeling following a decision is evidence that the decision was wrong.

Sometimes discomfort is telling us something important. Perhaps we acted too quickly, spoke too harshly, relied on incomplete information, protected the institution at someone's unnecessary expense, or allowed our own frustration to influence our judgment. Healthy leadership requires enough humility to examine those possibilities seriously.

But there are other occasions when the decision survives careful examination and still hurts.

A valued employee may no longer be effective in a particular role. A student consequence may be necessary even when we understand the circumstances that produced the behavior. A financial decision may protect the institution while eliminating something meaningful. A parent's disappointment may be entirely understandable even though granting the parent's request would create an inequity elsewhere.

In situations like these, two things can be true simultaneously:

The decision was responsible, and something valuable was lost.

Experienced administrators need a psychological framework capable of holding both truths.

Otherwise, we tend toward one of two unhealthy conclusions. We either assume that because someone was hurt, we must have done something wrong, or we defend ourselves against that possibility by minimizing the person's pain.

Neither response is particularly mature.

There is a third possibility: we can acknowledge the loss without repudiating the judgment.

We can grieve what the decision cost and still believe it was necessary.

The Danger of Carrying Both Sides of the Decision

Administrators also have to become increasingly precise about the boundaries of responsibility.

Leadership makes us responsible for our preparation, judgment, fairness, communication, use of authority, and willingness to correct mistakes. We should be accountable for whether we listened carefully, whether we applied principles consistently, whether we treated people with dignity, and whether our decisions can withstand honest scrutiny.

We are not, however, fully responsible for another adult's interpretation of those decisions. That distinction sounds obvious until one has spent years in leadership.

A person can sincerely believe that an administrator treated him unfairly while the administrator, after careful examination, remains convinced that the decision was fair. Someone can feel betrayed even when no betrayal occurred. Someone can be angry because a boundary was necessary rather than because the boundary was inappropriate. This is the cruel part of "Invidious".

If we are not careful, administrators begin carrying both sides of these encounters. We carry responsibility for making the decision, and then we also assume responsibility for resolving every emotional response the decision produces.

That is an unsustainable psychological arrangement.

We should listen to criticism. We should remain corrigible. We should apologize when warranted and repair what can be repaired.

But eventually we must allow other adults to own their reactions to our decisions.

Otherwise, administration becomes a form of permanent emotional indebtedness.

This is where I think our usual conversations about administrator self-care are inadequate.

Self-care is often reduced to vacation, exercise, sleep, hobbies, boundaries, and taking occasional time away from work. All of these are important, and chronic neglect of them eventually extracts a price.

But veteran administrators may require something deeper than recovery from fatigue.

We need practices that preserve the quality of the person who is making the decisions.

That means having trusted people outside the immediate emotional system of the problem—people who can tell us both when we are carrying guilt that does not belong to us and when we are rationalizing conduct that needs correction. Leaders need relationships in which their authority is largely irrelevant and where they do not have to manage the emotional temperature of the room.

We also need a disciplined distinction between reflection and rumination.

After a consequential decision, reflection asks useful questions: What did I know? What did I miss? Which principle governed my decision? Was I fair? What would I do differently? Is there anything I need to repair?

Those questions improve judgment.

Rumination asks the same questions repeatedly after they have stopped producing new information.

At some point, healthy leadership requires closure. Not certainty—we rarely get that—but a reasoned acceptance that, given what we knew at the time and the responsibility entrusted to us, we exercised our best judgment.

The case cannot remain permanently open in our heads.

We also need to monitor cynicism as carefully as we monitor exhaustion. When people increasingly appear to us as problems to be managed rather than human beings to be understood, when every complaint begins sounding identical, or when irritation becomes our default response to another person's distress, we should not automatically interpret that as veteran wisdom.

Sometimes it is fatigue asking for attention.

And perhaps most importantly, we need portions of life in which nobody hands us a bomb.

We need friendships, family, faith, recreation, solitude, laughter, physical activity, reading, travel, or whatever allows us to inhabit an identity larger than the administrative role. We need places where nobody requires a decision from us and where our value is not measured by our capacity to stabilize a system.

Those are not luxuries added to leadership after the important work is finished.

Over a long enough career, they may be part of what makes continued good judgment possible.

Remaining 'Christian' After Thousands of Decisions

The question facing a beginning administrator is often, How do I make good decisions?

After enough years, I think another question becomes equally important:

How do I remain a whole person after making thousands of them?

Because the bombs do accumulate.

For Christian administrators, there is another dimension of this work that cannot be separated from the psychological disciplines of healthy leadership: we were never intended to carry its weight entirely by ourselves. Dependence on Christ is more than seeking divine confirmation that we made the correct decision; it is the recognition that our judgment will always be limited, that we will sometimes get the green and yellow wires wrong, and that grace extends even to the person holding the wire cutters.

 Prayer creates a place where responsibility can be taken seriously without becoming an illusion of control, while forgiveness—both receiving it and extending it—keeps the inevitable wounds of leadership from hardening into resentment. The compassion of Christ also reminds us that the difficult employee, angry parent, struggling student, frustrated board member, and exhausted administrator are all more than the particular conflict in which we encounter one another. Just as importantly, Christian leadership was never meant to be practiced in isolation. 

A healthy administrative team can become a kind of sustaining community: people who share the weight of discernment, challenge one another's assumptions, pray together, absorb some of the emotional impact of difficult seasons, and occasionally remind one another that not every bomb belongs to one person. There is something profoundly protective about being able to walk into a trusted team, close the door, speak honestly about the weight of a situation, and know that others will help carry it—not by removing responsibility, but by refusing to let responsibility become isolation. Perhaps one of God's provisions for the long-term health of leaders is precisely this combination of grace above us, compassion within us, and faithful people beside us.

So do the criticisms, the confidential stories we cannot explain publicly, the people we could not satisfy, the situations in which there was no green wire that guaranteed a good outcome, and the occasions when we discovered afterward that yellow might have been better.

If we are not intentional, armor accumulates as well.

Some armor is necessary. Administrators cannot remain psychologically exposed to every criticism and survive indefinitely. But armor has an unfortunate characteristic: it protects us from being wounded by people while simultaneously making it more difficult to feel them.

The task, then, is not to remain unchanged by leadership. That is probably impossible.

Nor is the goal to reach the end of an administrative career having disappointed no one. Meaningful leadership under that standard would be equally impossible.

Perhaps the better measure is whether, after years of holding the wire cutters, we can still approach the next situation with curiosity rather than cynicism; whether we can still distinguish someone's anger from evidence of our wrongdoing; whether we can acknowledge our mistakes without allowing them to define us; whether we can make an unpopular decision without needing to make the disappointed person into an enemy.

And perhaps, after all the crises that did and did not happen, we can still say that we tried to see clearly, listen carefully, act justly, remain open to correction, and preserve the dignity of the people affected by our decisions.

Most people will never know about the bombs that did not explode.

And sadly, sometimes the bombs do go off- but I have also been around long enough that often those crises gain perspective over time. Romans 8:28 is not a flippant verse- it is not casual- God does indeed work miraculous good results in His good providence.

That is probably as it should be.

But those of us who have spent years clipping the wires should acknowledge that the work leaves a mark—and that caring for that mark is not weakness, indulgence, or an escape from leadership.

It is part of the work of remaining capable of leading well.

Crown, Crime, and Cross

This blog post was some reflection from an excellent sermon by Dr. Scott Redd at Briarwood on Psalm 51.......

“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah…” — Matthew 1:6

There are verses in Scripture that seem almost incidental until, for some reason, one phrase catches the eye.

Matthew 1:6 is like that.

The first chapter of Matthew opens with a genealogy, and genealogies are easy to hurry through. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Perez, Hezron. The names proceed in solemn succession, carrying the story of Israel forward until Matthew reaches the great king:

“Jesse the father of David the king.”  He is David the king.

Then, in the same verse, Matthew writes something unexpected:

“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”- Not Bathsheba.

Matthew certainly knew her name. He had already named Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, and before the genealogy ends he will name Mary. Yet when he comes to Bathsheba, he identifies her through the man David had killed.

It is difficult not to hear an accusation in that wording.

David's crown remains. Matthew does not strip him of it. But neither does he permit the crown to conceal the crime. The genealogy remembers both.

To understand why those few words carry such weight, we have to return to the rooftop in Jerusalem.

Second Samuel 11 begins with a quiet observation:

“In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab…”

The sentence is already suggestive. It is the season when kings go to war, but David does not go - he remains in Jerusalem.

One evening he rises from his couch and walks on the roof of the palace. From there he sees a woman bathing. David asks who she is, and the answer should have ended the matter.

“Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”

The reply places her within a web of relationships. She is not an anonymous woman on a rooftop below. She is Bathsheba. She is Eliam’s daughter. She is Uriah’s wife.

Yet he sends messengers. She is brought to him. He sleeps with her. Then she returns home.

The prerogative of a King? The power- the subjects who do his every request?

The biblical account is strikingly spare. There is no language of romance, no suggestion that we are meant to watch the beginning of a tragic love affair. The verbs keep returning to David: he saw, he asked, he sent, he took.

Then Bathsheba sends word back to the palace. “I am pregnant.”

Three words, and suddenly the private act has a public future.

At this point David has another choice. He could confess what he has done. Instead, he begins to construct a cover.

David sends for Uriah from the battlefield.

His plan is obvious. If Uriah goes home and sleeps with his wife, the pregnancy will explain itself. No scandal. No questions. No threat to the king’s reputation.

But Uriah does not go home. Uriah is a Hittite- an outsider- yet in this moment he appears more faithful to Israel’s life and obligations than Israel’s king.

When David asks why, Uriah gives an answer that should have shamed him:

“The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife?”

David tries again. He keeps Uriah in Jerusalem and gets him drunk, hoping lowered inhibitions will accomplish what persuasion could not.

Still Uriah does not go home. The plan has failed twice- but David WILL NOT stop.

Instead, he writes a letter to Joab:

“Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down, and die.”

And then comes one of the coldest details in the story - David gives the letter to Uriah.

Joab obeys. Uriah is placed where the fighting is fierce. Men die and Uriah dies with them.

The prerogative of a King? The power- the subjects who do his every request?

When the news reaches Jerusalem, David tells Joab not to be troubled. The sword devours one man and then another. Such things happen in war. That is how thoroughly David has begun to speak the language of his own concealment.

Bathsheba mourns her husband. When the period of mourning is over, David brings her into the palace. She becomes his wife. She bears his child.

From the outside, perhaps the whole thing can now be made to look respectable. A loyal soldier has died in battle. The king has taken responsibility for his widow. The child can be absorbed into the royal household.

Then the narrator gives us one sentence:

“But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.”

Everything David has worked to hide remains entirely visible to God.

The prerogative of a King? The power- the subjects who do his every request?

Not so in God's view......

This is where Psalm 51 becomes more than a general prayer of repentance.

David begins by using several different words:

“Blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.”

The English can sound repetitive, but the Hebrew vocabulary opens the confession outward.

The word often translated transgression, peshaʿ, carries the sense of rebellion or breach. David has not simply made a poor choice. He has violated the allegiance he owed to God.

The word translated iniquity, ʿavon, can carry the sense of guilt, perversity, or crookedness.

That word seems especially fitting for 2 Samuel 11 because nothing in the chapter stays simple. One wrong leads to another. Desire leads to taking. Taking leads to pregnancy. Pregnancy leads to deception. Deception fails, so David moves to manipulation. When manipulation fails, he arranges murder. Then murder itself has to be disguised.

The more David tries to straighten the situation, the more twisted it becomes.

Then there is the ordinary biblical word for sin, ḥaṭṭāʾt, related to the Hebrew root ḥṭʾ. In some contexts the root can carry the idea of failing or missing, which is why people often explain sin as “missing the mark.”

There is truth in that image, but David’s story will not let us make it too gentle.

He did not merely aim well and come up short.

He knew where the boundary was. More than once, someone or something reminded him of it.

Psalm 51 needs all of its vocabulary because David’s failure is not merely a missed target. It is rebellion, distortion, and sin braided together.

God sends Nathan the prophet.

Nathan does not confront David immediately. He tells him a story.

A rich man had many flocks and herds. A poor man had only one little ewe lamb. The lamb grew up with the poor man’s children. It ate from his table and lay in his arms.

When a traveler came to the rich man, the rich man did not take one of his own many animals. He took the poor man’s single lamb.

David is furious - The man deserves judgment.

For a few seconds, David sees his own actions clearly because he believes they belong to someone else.

Then Nathan says:

“You are the man.”

The parable has brought David outside himself.

Now God names what David has done. God had given him the kingdom. He had delivered him from Saul. He had given him wives, power, security, abundance. David was not a poor man desperate for something he lacked.

He was the rich man taking what belonged to another. And this is where the story becomes not only a story about lust and adultery but about power.

David is king. The servants who inquire about Bathsheba serve him. The messengers who bring her serve him. Uriah serves him. Joab serves him. The soldiers whose positions are manipulated serve him.

The whole machinery of David’s authority becomes useful to David’s appetite and then useful again to his concealment.

The shepherd-king who had once risked his life for the flock now uses the flock to protect himself.

Psalm 51 contains a line that can sound strange at first:

“Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.”

Clearly David sinned against more than God.

Uriah was wronged. Bathsheba was caught in the exercise of royal power and bore terrible consequences. Joab was drawn into murder. Other soldiers died because of David’s scheme. The kingdom itself was damaged by what the king had become.

David is not denying any of that.

He is recognizing that beneath every horizontal wrong was a deeper vertical rebellion. The king of Israel had acted as though he were answerable to no one.

The phrase “in your sight” is especially powerful because seeing begins the whole story.

David sees Bathsheba. After that, much of the chapter is about controlling what other people will see.

He tries to make Uriah’s return home create an acceptable explanation for the pregnancy. He uses the confusion of battle to hide a murder. He uses marriage to make scandal appear respectable.

David thinks the problem can be solved if he can manage appearances.

Psalm 51 is the prayer of a man who finally understands that he never managed God’s sight.

There was no hidden rooftop. Confession begins when David stops trying to control the story.

At first David asks God to blot out, wash, and cleanse.

Then his prayer deepens:

“Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.”

The word create matters.

David has reached the point where he no longer sees his problem as merely an embarrassing action requiring forgiveness. Something within him has become disordered enough that he asks God not simply to improve him, but to create.

He needs more than better judgment the next time he stands on a rooftop - He needs a different heart.

That is one reason Psalm 51 remains so powerful. David is not bargaining with God. He does not appeal to his record, his victories, his psalms, his service to Israel, or his years of faithfulness.

Psalm 32 has long been read alongside Psalm 51. Its heading does not explicitly connect it to the Bathsheba episode, so we should not claim certainty where the text does not give it. But the language makes the connection compelling.

David writes:

“Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.”

Then he remembers what concealment felt like:

“For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away…”

And finally:

“I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity.”

That language echoes the entire plot of 2 Samuel 11.

All of this creates an obvious question.

How can this be the same David who is associated with the phrase “a man after God’s own heart”?

The answer cannot be that David’s conduct with Bathsheba somehow reflected the heart of God. Nathan’s confrontation rules that out completely.

The phrase first appears in 1 Samuel 13:14, in the context of God rejecting Saul and choosing a king according to his own purpose. Acts 13:22 later echoes the language when describing David as the man God raised up to carry out his will.

So we should be careful with the phrase. It does not mean David was consistently noble.

It certainly does not mean God found adultery, manipulation, and murder compatible with his character.

Rather, David is the king God chose, the king through whom God intended to advance his covenant purposes. And when David’s sin is finally exposed, one of the defining features of his story is that he does not remain forever at war with the truth. He grieves his sin the way God grieves all sin- and the proof of that grief is the cross of Christ.

Nathan’s response is astonishingly direct:

“The LORD also has put away your sin.”

David is forgiven - But forgiveness does not send him backward in time.

Uriah remains dead. The first child born to Bathsheba dies.

Violence spreads through David’s household. His family fractures. The sins of desire, power, and bloodshed that appear in David’s life reappear with terrible force among his sons.

The Bible does not confuse forgiveness with the erasure of consequences. That matters because cheap versions of grace always depend on making the sin smaller.

Scripture does the opposite.

It allows the full weight of David’s actions to remain visible while also insisting that God’s mercy remains real.

David is not restored because the crime was minor. He is restored because God is merciful.

After the death of the first child, 2 Samuel tells us that David comforts Bathsheba. In time she bears another son.

His name is Solomon.

And Scripture says:

“The LORD loved him.”

Solomon will inherit the throne.

The line of David will continue through the woman David first took as Uriah’s wife.

That does not mean the adultery and murder were secretly necessary pieces of God’s plan. Providence does not require us to call evil good.

The point is more profound. Human evil does not have the power to make redemption impossible.

God can take a history that has genuinely been damaged and continue to work within it without pretending the damage never occurred.

That becomes unmistakable centuries later when Matthew writes his genealogy.

YES- Matthew could have written, “David was the father of Solomon by Bathsheba.”

Instead:

“David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”

The victim remains in the family record. David is forgiven, but Uriah is not edited out of David’s redemption.

That may be one of the most important details in the whole story. Grace does not require historical dishonesty.

God does not restore David by rewriting 2 Samuel 11 into something less ugly than it was. Nor does Matthew need to protect David’s reputation.

The genealogy remembers the king and the man he wronged. It remembers the crown and the crime.

And then the genealogy keeps moving until it reaches Jesus.

Matthew begins his Gospel by calling Jesus the son of David.

Yet Jesus does not merely repeat David’s kingship. He reverses its deepest failure.

David uses royal power to take. Jesus uses royal power to give.

David remains in safety while others fight. Jesus enters the battle himself.

David arranges the death of a faithful servant so that the king might preserve himself.

Jesus gives himself so that his servants may live.

That contrast is where the story finally reaches the Cross.

David’s sin shows us what corrupted kingship can become: power turned inward, authority used for self-protection, another human life treated as expendable.

The Cross reveals a different King.

Jesus does not ask Uriah to carry his death sentence. He carries ours.

He does not withdraw the troops and leave a servant exposed. He stands exposed himself.

He does not preserve the crown by sacrificing the servant.

He accepts the Cross for the sake of the servants.

And this is why Matthew’s genealogy is already preaching the Gospel before Jesus has spoken a word.

The Messiah does not come at the end of an immaculate family line. He comes through a lineage marked by courage and cowardice, faith and betrayal, outsiders, broken families, sexual sin, violence, repentance, and grace.

He enters the real human story.

David remains one of Scripture’s great figures.

He remains the king to whom God made covenant promises.

Perhaps that is why Psalm 51 still feels so contemporary. We know the instinct to manage appearances, to explain ourselves, to control the version of the story other people receive. David knew that instinct too, and he had a kingdom’s resources with which to act on it.

The crown is still there.

So is the crime.

And beyond both of them stands the Cross.

Song Link: We All Alibi

Pain, Mystery, Glory

In 35 years of coaching football- I remember losses more than wins... losing hurts more than winning feels good. Isn't that true of a lot of competitors?

 Especially those close ones... where just a few bounces and inches could have flipped the script. You can't hide from the the pain, and a coach must quickly turn minister and know that even though I hurt - I  have been through this many times and I now know you must gird up and go help young men who are still young enough to be vulnerable in these fragile situations.

It is just football... and though the the pain is real enough-  it is  nothing in a world of famine, cancer, war, crime, and poverty.

It seems a little dramatic to use a football loss in this sense, however folks, the pain is palatable to the young men, coaches, parents... it is there.. it just plain sucks. And the harder you work, the closer victory seems to be that just falls short... it is a soul deep hurt. One that lingers into the night and early the next day .... before slowly subsiding.

Football is rarely undefeated- life is never undefeated.

And our young men ALWAYS DO what you are supposed to do when the scoreboard winds down with a very public "L"- accept it, shake the hand of the victor and start leaning on each other as we wait for the healing that comes in time. But there is still a myriad of internal obstacles that must be navigated in time, prayer, and perspective from the Word of God.

These lessons are in the Bible- the Book of Job for example....

The deeper the pain, the less we need to use words... we just need to be there.

Football injuries are a reality with that as well. It hurts to see a player physically wounded in battle, but that is also a noble reality... to put on pads is similar to a warrior; and sacrifices of blood, sweat, tears, and pain are payments that come due which elevates this ABOVE mere play.

I am so thankful that God has designed young bodies to heal... not without scars mind you. But as Jacob walked with a limp from the day He wrestled the Angel, so we too bear the marks of struggle and it creates in us a rugged disposition to battle!

The Bible has some sobering reminders that 'lamenting' is a God ordained process with a purpose. It is an acknowledgement of hurt to our heavenly Father that we are grieving, and He wants us to grieve, to pour out our sorrows to Him, our complaints, our fears, our anxieties, our frustrations, our disappointments.

But what makes lamenting different and beneficial is that we still worship the Lord and testify to His sovereign control and goodness!

It is all through the Bible- Psalms, Job, both Old and New Testaments... here is an example in the Book with that title, Lamentations:

[19] Remember my affliction and my wanderings,

the wormwood and the gall!

[20] My soul continually remembers it

and is bowed down within me.

[21] But this I call to mind,

and therefore I have hope:

[22] The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;

his mercies never come to an end;

[23] they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

[24] “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

“therefore I will hope in him.” (Lamentations 3:19–24 ESV)

Indeed... this is a strange twist- we never want our children, our players, or ourselves to experience the pain of loss.

And we would NEVER orchestrate it.

But pain, loss, hurt is a necessary training tool to prepare us for life.

Learning to live through, walk through, persevere through football pain as a young man made me a better man. It also makes us better believers. 

Consider this passage:

2 CORIN. 1: 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. 7 Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.

I think the greatest team builder in the world is suffering. 

Over the decades, my  closest football teams have been teams that experienced some type of shared pain.

None of us want it that way and we want to avoid it as much as possible. But at the end of the year, we realized that while we enjoyed good times when we celebrated, we actually grew together when we cried or hurt. 

Football pain, whether it is a hard practice, a tough loss, or physical injury, is often used by God as a ‘strange minister’ in our lives- producing fruit of perseverance and love.

I’m not exactly sure why this is true. It may be the first time we see one another without masks or we see how much individual’s truly care- but pain is a useful tool in forging a team of one heroic purpose. That is one reason why we push them so hard in summer camp and in the weight room- they have to experience hardship to break down all the barriers to brotherhood.

When pain comes, we should be urgent and diligent to support each other and comfort one another. The best comfort is time and understanding. It is not an easy road. We recite the words, but it is hard to live them. I never really ever want to preach to my team following a loss- it is usually a one on one evaluation of who needs support the most. It is a time to seek out the injured and quietly stand with those that are taking it the hardest.

When we receive God’s comfort, it helps us to be sensitive to others in similar pain. 

There is a creed of football that simply says “We suffer together so that we WILL persevere together”- which is related to Romans 5:3,4 which says, “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

When we suffer and comfort, we eventually heal. That healing produces unity and strength. If you ever have to compete against a team with this type of unity- look out- it may be a tough fight!

If you are hurting, go comfort others. If you see someone hurting, comfort them. You will reap a great harvest of hope!

I close this post with a few poems and thoughts that has helped me over the years when I am hurting.. coaches experience loss in a more common way than the average person.. not the intensity of real life suffering.. but the frequency is under appreciated by society as a whole:

When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man,
And skill a man
To play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!
How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes of clay which
Only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands!
How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses,
And with every purpose fuses him:
By every act induces him
To try his splendor out--
God knows what He's about.
--Author Unknown

Seeing the whole story from beginning to end gives ample evidence that God is great and that He is good.
But what about the middle? Think about those long, dark nights. Imagine all the hauntings and accusations. Is God there? Does He care? Why don’t you answer me God? Am I being punished? HELP!

But this is JUST THE MIDDLE.. hang in there- the END IS SWEET!

“God will not give us grace for our vain imaginings. It is when we are actually
in the time of trial that the grace is given.”
(Dr. Lane Adams, former pastor, Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis)

“If you want a comfortable religion, do not pick Christianity” CS Lewis, God in the Dock

Aragorn in “Lord of the Rings”

"Hold your ground! Hold your ground my brothers,
I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.
A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.
An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down,
but it is not this day!
This day we fight!!"

Songs:

We Are What We Are

We Stood Against the Wind (Hemingway)

Thorns, Splinters, Stones

'Serein' on My 62nd Birthday

There is an old French word—serein (pronounced 'SAY- RAN')—that describes the fine rain that falls from a clear evening sky. It seems almost contradictory. How can rain fall when there are no clouds? But we have all experienced it.

Perhaps that is why the word has stayed with me.

Much of my writing over the past two years has been an attempt to make sense of turning sixty. The essays, the series on hope, the music I have written—they have all been part of the same pilgrimage. I have wrestled with time, change, loss, expectation, and the unsettling awareness that more of life is behind me than before me.

Septennium reflected on the rhythms of life. Vicissitude acknowledged the certainty of change. Ambivalence admitted that maturity often means learning to hold joy and sorrow in the same hand.

Today, on the occasion of my sixty-second birthday, I find myself somewhere different.

Not because every question has been answered. Not because every disappointment has faded. And certainly not because life has become easier.

Rather, because I have discovered a contentment that no longer depends on life's circumstances.

I have been taught by the Lord and His Scriptures to accept where I am- to look forward to the years ahead and not fear!

There is a serenity that comes only after weathering storms—not the naïve confidence that storms will never come again, but the quiet assurance that they no longer define the landscape. The tempests of turning sixty have passed. What remains is gratitude—for family, for friendship, for meaningful work, for music still waiting to be written, for faith that has deepened more than it has changed.

Like serein, this peace feels unexpected. It is gentle rather than dramatic, quiet rather than triumphant. It arrives not with fanfare but almost unnoticed, until one day you realize the anxious striving has given way to settled trust.

Perhaps this is one of the hidden gifts of growing older. Not certainty, but perspective. Not the absence of struggle, but the presence of peace.

Today, I have found serenity in serein. A soft gentle rain that heals and is so peaceful.

A serenity!

Contentment, however, is not complacency. It is not the quiet surrender of someone who has stopped dreaming or serving. If anything, it has liberated me to embrace this season with renewed purpose. I still coach because there is another generation to encourage. I still write because there are truths worth sharing. I still publish music because the Lord continues to place melodies in my heart. I still care for my body because it remains a gift entrusted to me. These are no longer attempts to recapture yesterday, but grateful expressions of the life God has given me today. I have discovered that contentment does not diminish one's calling—it frees one to pursue it with joy, without fear, and without the need to prove anything.

Today, at sixty-two, I find myself overwhelmed not by what I have accomplished, but by the grace of God that has brought me here. His grace has sustained me through seasons of uncertainty, corrected me when I wandered, strengthened me when I was weary, and quietly reminded me that my life has always been held in His hands.

If there is serenity in me today, it is not because I have mastered life, but because I have come to trust more deeply the One who has mastered my days.

The evening rain still falls. It always will. But now I see it differently. It is no longer something to fear, but another gentle reminder that the God who has faithfully led me for sixty-two years will continue to lead me until I see Him face to face.

Today, I have found serenity in serein—and even more, I have found rest in the unfailing grace of God.

Song Links:

Here is my latest list of songs:

The Best So Far

Rain on Me

Vicissitude

Yes- I read a lot of old dead guys... and often I stumble across an old word that refuses to let me go.

Over the past year there have been a few of them. Septennium. Ambivalence. And a few days ago, Vicissitude.

We rarely use the word anymore. If we do, we usually mean little more than "change." But our ancestors packed much more into it than that.

Vicissitude comes from the Latin vicis—a turn, an exchange, one's lot, a succession. It describes life not as a straight line but as a series of turns. High places and low places. Beginnings and endings. Gain and loss. Health and sickness. Youth and old age. We are not simply changing; we are continually passing from one condition to another.

When we are young, we tend to imagine life as a direct route toward our destination. We picture ourselves setting out with a clear goal and arriving there by determination and hard work. We expect progress to be linear.

The Scriptures certainly don't describe life that way.

Abraham leaves home with no map beyond God's promise. Joseph reaches leadership only after passing through betrayal, slavery, and prison. David is anointed king long before he wears the crown. Paul plants churches while spending years in prison.

And Israel's journey may be the greatest illustration of all. A trip that could have taken weeks became forty years in the wilderness. We often think of those decades as a delay. Deuteronomy tells a different story. The wilderness was not a detour around God's plan. It was God's plan.

We tend to think providence is a straight road interrupted by unexpected events. The Bible presents providence as the sovereign hand of God working through the unexpected events.And that is a profound difference.

The older I become, the less my own life resembles the neat timeline I imagined when I was twenty. Careers changed. Opportunities appeared and disappeared. Some prayers were answered quickly; others took years. Children grew up. My parents passed away. Friends came into my life and some departed it. Every season carried gifts I could not have predicted and losses I could not have prevented.

Looking backward, however, something surprising happens. What once looked like random turns begins to resemble a path.

Never a straight one- but a faithful one.

This is where the Christian doctrine of God's immutability becomes so breathtaking.

Everything in my experience changes- Even my understanding of God deepens with time.

But God Himself does not.

"I the LORD do not change." (Malachi 3:6)

The One who calls me through every changing season never experiences a season Himself. He does not become wiser, stronger, kinder, or more faithful. He has never had a better day or a worse one. His character never fluctuates. His purposes never require revision.

Long ago, I heard the late Dan Dehaan say it "When things change, they either get better or worse- God can't get better, and He certainly would not choose to get worse"

The Biblical life is a path rather than a destination. No one stands at the trailhead able to describe every mile ahead. We simply take the next faithful step.

I wonder if our greatest mistake is expecting life to be free from vicissitude.

Maybe the real invitation is learning to recognize the immutable God within it.

After all, if the path never climbed, we would never discover the view from the summit. If it never descended, we would never learn that valleys have their own beauty. If it never turned, we might begin to trust the map more than the Guide.

The older words often teach us what the newer ones forget.

Vicissitude reminds us that change is not an interruption of life. It is the ordinary condition of a beautiful, adventurous life in a fallen world and above every turning path stands the God who does not turn.

And because He does not change, we need not fear every change that comes to us. Because God never changes- His promises also do not change- for eternity. The Guide never loses His way.

Song Links:

Looking Backwards 

Big Enough For Me

Long Enough To Be Me

 SEPTENNIUM

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be  steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as you know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” —1 Corinthians 15:58

“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” —2 Peter 3:8

We counted birthdays. He counted mornings.

We measured life by seasons, championships,

Paychecks, marriages, and funerals.

Perhaps Heaven - keeps only one week.

Hear the song here: Septennium

Monday Morning

Pop Pop’s patio, Ruffner Mountain,

Evel Knievel, neighborhood fountains,

NASA dreaming, Vietnam,

Bear Bryant Saturdays, Southern calm.

brown bag sandwich, baseball dirt,

grass-stained knees and hand-me-down shirts,

Lightning bug chasing, a little bit sleeping,

Leonard’s Losers softly speaking.

John Denver drifting through the heat,

East Lake Park and Cascade feet,

Wahouma lights, streetlights blinking—

never once remember thinking…

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Tuesday Afternoon

Hardy Boys and comic pages,

football seasons, growing stages,

Pasquale’s pizza, PCB nights,

Lake Mitchell big bass fights.

Nerf footballs and weight-room chalk,

Coach Cutcliffe and after-school talk,

Reagan shot, MTV,

certain that’s how life would be.

Touchdowns, trophies, classroom praise,

books that filled the quieter days.

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Wednesday Night

Banks High Friday, autumn sky,

blue Camaro rolling by,

JBL shaking windows free,

Journey blaring who I’d be.

Student positions, quarterback,

newspapers folded in my lap,

pizza, beer, senior beach,

dreams still somehow out of reach.

Shuttle rising. Classmate dying.

Church pew waiting. Grace arriving.

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Thursday Evening

Bryant Tower, houndstooth gray,

wishbone fading day by day,

George Strait and Dreamland smoke,

English books and private jokes.

Wedding vows and Briarwood fun

Building and working on the run

whistles blowing, classrooms full,

ordinary, beautiful - loved it all

Children laughing down the hall.

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Friday Midnight

Nashville skyline, Harpeth rain,

cardboard boxes, changed again,

phone calls no one plans to hear,

dreams that disappeared this year.

Wedding dresses, hospital rooms,

office keys and empty rooms,

mother had left, father now gone—

still somehow the road went on.

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Saturday Dawn

Colorado, fishing line,

Donne and blog posts marking time,

Invoices, drafts, proposals nearby,

morning spreading through the sky.

Schools still growing, students gone,

grandkids laughing, coffee on,

trips and songs and mountain air,

finding God had waited there.

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Sunday Morning

Still climbing—places new to go,

books half-read and trails below,

grace that never kept a score,

love that opens every door.

One more morning, one more rise

under patient, caring eyes.

Not a finish, not a rest—

just the week He counts as best.

Steadfast. Unmovable.

Fighting all the way.

Hold fast. Keep faith.

The work is never in vain.

Ambivalence

I have been reading a biography of John Donne and spending time in his poetry, prose, and sermons. I'm sure I'll have much more to say before I reach the final page, but this morning I found myself lingering over a single word.

Ambivalence.

It is a word we still use, but I suspect we've thinned it out over time. Today it usually means little more than having mixed feelings or being unable to decide. It has become the language of hesitation.

Its roots tell a richer story.

The word joins two Latin ideas: ambi—"both"—and valentia—"strength" or "power." Ambivalence is not weak indecision. It is the experience of being pulled by two genuine and powerful forces at once. 

John Donne knew that world well. He lived between eras, between faith traditions (the war between Papists and Reformers), between ambition and surrender. His poems reveal a man capable of breathtaking devotion and painful self-examination in the same breath. He rarely presents himself as a finished man. Instead, we meet someone wrestling with contrary desires—someone who refuses to pretend that the human heart is simple.

If I'm honest, I recognize the same struggle in myself.

I want to be humble (I hope), yet I enjoy recognition. I long for rest, yet I keep filling my calendar. I believe God's providence, yet I still worry about tomorrow. The conflict is not only around us—in politics, culture, and competing ideas. It lives quietly within us.

Augustine captured it with remarkable honesty when he prayed, "Grant me chastity and continence—but not yet. (Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, Chapter 7)."

(quick side note) The reading has been a little bawdy due to the fact that Donne wasn't quite the Anglican priest in his younger days- and there are consequences to that lifestyle, but also a type of wisdom- I laughed out loud when I read this quote from the Donne bio:

‘chastity is not chastity in an old man,’ he declared, at a time when he was a chaste and ageing man himself, ‘but a disability to be unchast’

These lines have survived for sixteen centuries because it exposes something we would rather hide. It is not hypocrisy. It is ambivalence.

Hypocrisy conceals the divided heart - Ambivalence admits it.

Perhaps we have become uncomfortable with that admission. We live in an age that rewards certainty and polished appearances. We curate our convictions until they seem perfectly consistent. Yet the people I revere as impressive men—David, Augustine, Donne, Lewis—rarely sound polished. They sound honest.

Maybe maturity is not the absence of opposing desires -  it is the slow ordering of them.

Hypocrisy hides the divided heart. Ambivalence reveals it. Wisdom slowly orders it.

That thought has been following me around all morning. I suspect John Donne has more to teach me before I'm finished with him.

How Nations Flourish – Final Post

Do Nations Acknowledge Their Dependence on the Divine Creator?

The Bible

Over the past few weeks, we've explored one enduring question:

How do nations flourish?

Rather than looking first to politics or economics, we turned to literature.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reminded us that flourishing nations give their people hope—a belief that tomorrow can be better than today.

A Gentleman in Moscow taught us that while institutions matter, character ultimately sustains a civilization. A government can confiscate property, but it cannot manufacture virtue.

The Grapes of Wrath challenged us to remember that behind every policy is a person, behind every statistic is a family, and that compassion is one of the marks of a healthy people.

Finally, C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man warned that civilizations cannot long endure if they lose the ability to distinguish truth from preference and virtue from mere opinion. We cannot expect courage, honesty, justice, and self-sacrifice if we no longer believe those things are objectively good.

Those four books ask remarkable questions.

But none of them answers the deepest one.

Where do hope, character, compassion, and truth come from?

For that, I return to The Bible and suspect that makes some readers cringe a bit.

Sadly, cultural allusions today tend to be negative or dismissive when we speak of the Bible. It is a Book referenced a lot but read very little. But the Bible (66 books) has shaped Western civilization more than any other book ever written, but because it begins where every discussion of human flourishing must begin—with humanity itself.

Genesis opens with a breathtaking declaration:

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Before there are nations, governments, markets, cultures... there is just one BIG miracle I believe in-

There is God. If He is who He says He is in His Word- everything else is easy.

Humanity is not an accident of chemistry or a fortunate product of evolution's blind forces. Men and women are created in the image of God, entrusted with stewardship, creativity, meaningful work, relationships, and the care of creation itself.

That is a remarkably hopeful beginning.

It tells us that human dignity is not something governments grant. It is something God bestows.

Genesis also tells us why every civilization struggles.

The Fall in Genesis 3 is not simply the story of two people eating forbidden fruit - It is the story of humanity believing it can flourish apart from its Creator.

The temptation in Eden was, in essence, this: "You shall too be gods."

Ever since then, every generation has been tempted to believe that if we can simply build the right political system, accumulate enough wealth, educate enough people, or invent enough technology, we can overcome the deepest problems of the human condition.

If we only read history or watched last night's news - we would know how bogus this is- Our greatest problem has always been spiritual.

We have had a lot of media attention on socialism and I do worry that we have an unstable (and an uneducated one as well) electorate who will listen to that same old Gen. 3 lie....

Who knows? And some of this series was sparked by the growing debate-

As I've worked through this series, one conviction has grown stronger.

Markets generate prosperity. Governments preserve order. Communities provide support.

But only a people shaped by transcendent truth can sustain a civilization over generations.

An individual may flourish even in a broken nation. In other words, I hope America keeps flourishing and becoming a more perfect union- but I'm going to be taken care of- even if no one goes with me.

History gives us countless examples of faithful men and women whose character shone in the darkest circumstances. But imagine a society where millions of ordinary people sought to love God and love their neighbor.

Where honesty was valued above deception, service mattered more than status, marriage was honored, children cherished, the weak protected, work was embraced as stewardship, forgiveness practiced, justice was pursued with mercy......

No law could compel such a society into existence but such virtues have the power to transform one.

The Bible is not merely a collection of religious writings.

It is a vision of what human flourishing looks like under the loving rule of the One who made us.

And that brings us to one final beginning- the opening words of John's Gospel deliberately echo Genesis:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The story that began in a garden finds its fulfillment in Christ.

If Genesis tells us who we were created to be, John tells us how God restores what has been lost.

As our nation celebrates 250 years of history, I remain grateful for its freedoms, its opportunities, and its remarkable experiment in self-government.

But every nation, including our own, must ultimately answer one final question:

Will we acknowledge our dependence upon the Divine Creator who holds our destiny in His hands?

I believe those hands are not only sovereign- they are loving.

And perhaps that is the greatest secret of all.

Nations flourish not because they have discovered the perfect system. They flourish because enough of their people discover the One for whom they were created.

I wish all people could have the blessing of knowing the humbling mercy of God in that while I am a miserable sinner- I have hope in Christ. He is my father and I am His Son.

And writing that- still brings tears to my eyes - even after all these years.