out of control

Lots of stuff is changing in my life right now in a variety of areas. Change, in this case, is good, but it's not easy.

Some of the major changes are my "retirement" from a variety of leadership positions related to both school and church. I'm passing on the torch to others so that when I leave the city (oh, please be soon!) the groups I've been helping with will be in very capable hands. It's almost like giving up a baby to someone else - I've put in a lot of time, effort, though, and energy into the groups, and while I embrace the shift of leadership, I find it hard to completely let go.

In essence, I'm going "out of control".

There are good things and bad things to not leading. One of the very good things is not being criticized - criticism is a natural reaction to leaders, and I think it's important for a leader to seriously consider all criticism that he or she receives. That doesn't make criticism any happier to hear, though. Another benefit of not leading is that you are less responsible for dealing with conflicts that arise within the particular group you lead. Already I've seen a new conflict sprout in one of the groups I no longer lead, and I'm so glad I'm not the one who has to mediate the differences. Not leading also gives (in theory) one more time to focus on things in life other than the project being led. This was one major motivation for me to step down from leading one group in particular - I want to devote more concentrated effort to my thesis research in these hopefully last few months of PhD studenthood.

However, with the benefits come difficulties. It's hard to completely let go and allow someone else to go a different route with something one had led for a time. Inevitably new blood brings new ideas and new direction, and such is the way of innovation and progress. However, I find it easy for even the most secure and most detached people to feel a bit of resentment or hurt when a program or concept he or she created or nurtured gets revamped by a new leader. One quickly begins to question if all their previous followers hated the Old Way so much as to so willingly embrace the New Way. The old leader wonders if he or she could have done better and dreams about what might have been if this, that, or the other thing had been done just a tad differently when he or she was leading. And sometimes it gets more personal - ideas that had been offered by the old leader and shunned by the followers but are accepted under the new leadership cause the outgoing leader to wonder if anything he or she said ever spent more than a second between the ears of the followers. It's hard to let go of the power and watch traditions or concepts that had been dear and assumedly vital to the group become abandoned and forgotten. It's hard not to step in and demand, "You have to do this! Because...I said! Because, I know - I led this group for so long, don't you think my experience has taught me anything?"

Not leading is teaching me a lot. It's causing me to trust more and to think harder about how to lovingly convey what I'm thinking when I disagree. In the terms of the Green Lady from C.S. Lewis's Perelandra, it's "making me older."