The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World

by Peter Scazzero

We like to begin every important planning retreat with a “being” experience before tackling the “doing” component of these longer meetings. For example, we began a recent staff retreat by reading about Jesus’ rhythms of solitude and ministry, followed by a discussion of a poem by Judy Brown. We read the poem twice aloud, asking people to underline and take notes on what spoke to them. Fire What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water would. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between, as much as the wood. When we are able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel, and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible. We only need lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. 12 Judy Brown Afterward, we took about ten minutes for discussion. We asked the group: What words or phrases call out to you from this poem? We then gave everyone about twenty-five minutes on their own for guided personal reflection using these questions: • When in your ministry or life in the past year have you piled on too many logs? • When has too much of a good thing not been a good thing? • What does it look like for you to create sufficient ...