How to Be a King: First In, Last Out, Laughing Loudest.
Learning how to lead people well has been a steep learning curve for me. I’ve been told I have some natural leadership giftedness, but I would love to meet someone for whom this comes easily. It hasn’t for me.
C.S. Lewis drops some real bombs in The Chronicles of Narnia. This bomb comes from the last chapter of The Horse And His Boy. Look at what King Lune says when explaining what a good king understands about leadership.
For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.
I naturally understand the “first in, last out” thing. You should be running sprints before the rest of the team is warmed up, and you should be shooting free throws when everyone else is watching TV with their little girlfriends. It should be evident that the king’s work ethic is unmatched. I get that, and so do most people.
After three years of running Prescott and having four, soon to be five people walk out the door for a variety of reasons, the last part of King Lune’s statement hits harder than it would have certainly 3 years ago.
Work ethic gets you in the door. Tons of people have work ethic, but work ethic alone does not a leader make. The king must also lead in joyfulness. I understand what it’s like to have $47 in my bank account. I understand what it’s like losing a deal that jeopardizes your career. I understand living on a credit card just to make ends meet. The only thing that is going to get through those perilous and soul-crushing experiences is a vision that is clear and big enough to give you just enough gas in the tank to keep going.
You might feel like you have just enough gas in the tank to keep going, but your hope has to be real enough for you to see that vision so clear that it may as well already be here. This is the thrust of my work on Joy that I will publish as soon as I can organize it more nicely.
If you have faith in your hope, then you can say with Moses, “I refuse to be called the son of pharaoh’s daughter, and hereby choose to be mistreated with the people of God than enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin because I am looking to the reward.”
In parallel, a modern day “king” might say: “I am not taking the easy way out, though it is available here to me. I am going to get shoulder to shoulder with my people. I am not going to medicate the discomfort with a passing experience of sex, alcohol, drugs, attention, vainglory, or anything else that will numb that part of my mind (or body) that is hurting right now. I am going to laugh loudly like the Proverbs 31 woman because I have confidence that my destination is real, and it is going to be better than anything we have seen yet. Not only that, but I am going to do all of this in a way that shows the world that I believe the likelihood of our arriving at our destination is so high that I am going to live and laugh today like we’re already there.”
At that point, the people who follow you will do so because either 1) they see what you see, or 2) they think you’re crazy, but if anyone can get there, you can, and they want that reality to be true bad enough to bet the house with you.
LESSON FOR ME
I need to regularly and often seek the Lord for His vision for my life. I need to then ask Him for Joy today, even when times are tough, with full Faith in that hope (little h), ultimately fueled by my Hope (big H).
