Wilderness Wanderings 2016
Leadership is broken because leaders are unbroken
Wilderness Wanderings 2016:
Learning to Live the Zigzag Life
Happy New Year and welcome to Broken Leadership, the blog of Leader Formation International (LFI). My name is Bill Lawrence, founder and president of LFI, and I want to take a moment to greet you and inform you concerning our early 2016 blog plans.
I want to write a series of blogs on the subject Wilderness Wanderings: when a zigzag line is the shortest distance between futility and fruition.
If you’re in any kind of leadership position, whether business or professional, educational or governmental, or—the most important—parental, you surely have wondered at times what God is doing in your life. There are moments, days, and even seasons, when He seems to have you lost in the wilderness looking for your ball in the sands, sweating it out in the desert heat or in the freezing cold of the dark desert night.
Sometimes God doesn’t seem very well organized. He leads you one way, then the other, then completely out of the way, and then back to where you were in the first place…
There are moments when you want to scream at God in frustration and take control of your life because you’re certain you can do a better job than He can.
But as you gain more experience with God’s ways, you realize that He is moving you from the futility of your own wisdom to the fruitfulness of His omniscient foolishness. You also learn that, like the Children of Israel, you are bringing most of the zigzag line on yourself, that your unbelief and efforts to control life are actually taking you away from the fulfillment and joy God alone can give you.
It’s at that point that you begin to make progress, but you understand that, unless you trust God by following His cloud by day and His pillar of fire by night, you will get lost in the zigzag of your own wilderness wanderings.
I plan to write fourteen entries on Wilderness Wandering in our blog which will take us through the early part of 2016. However, I am going to release all fourteen of these blogs as a book under the title Wilderness Wanderings on March 3, 2016, so, if you get the book, you can see every entry in one place.
Below are the titles I plan to give to each entry. My hope is that I can serve you as we seek to change the leadership conversation wherever the Lord enables us around the globe from what we do with our hands to what He does in our hearts. You realize, of course, that our hands are only as effective as our hearts are strong, and my prayer is that God will use us to strengthen your heart is some way that glorifies Him.
Here are the topics I plan to include in our LFI blog book.
1. The Sacred Wilderness
2. The Inescapable Wilderness
3. The Imperative Wilderness
4. The Shoeless Wilderness
5. The Self-Pity Wilderness
6. The Profitable Wilderness
7. The Lifetime Wilderness
8. The Wasted Wilderness
9. The Parenting Wilderness
10. The Seminary Wilderness
11. The Island Wilderness
12. The Unjust Wilderness
13. The Lucky Wilderness
14. The Ultimate Wilderness
We start with the Sacred Wilderness next week. I look forward to serving you as we walk the zigzag line together from futility to fruition.
From "Wilderness Wanderings 2016" on www.leaderformation.org/blog
About: The Broken Leadership Blog is about changing the leadership conversation from what we are doing with our hands to what God is doing through our hearts.
Bill Lawrence
Bill Lawrence is the President of Leader Formation International, Senior Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Ministries and Adjunct Professor of DMin Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary where he served full-time for twenty-four years (1981-2005). During this time he also was the Executive Director of the Center for Christian Leadership for twelve years.
