It feels like it shouldn’t be possible. People look up to you, depend on you and thank you. By most measures, the work is going well. And yet you are tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch, you have no one to tell, and the goals you reached have not given you what you expected. Leaders who feel this often assume they need a better schedule or a stronger work ethic. The people in these Jude 3 Project conversations point somewhere else. Leaders last when they stop trying to be the source of their own strength. That means being known by a few people, trusting God with what they cannot carry, resting before a collapse forces it, and anchoring their worth somewhere a platform can’t reach.
Jude 3 Project founder Lisa Fields once described talking with a pastor whose friend, also a pastor, had fallen badly and publicly. The friends went back over years of conversations and noticed what they had missed. He was the one they all went to, and he had never told them what he was struggling with. Fields summed it up: “So we had a false sense of closeness because we were confiding in him, but nobody knew him.”
That sentence quietly undoes the first assumption most leaders carry: that being surrounded by people means not being alone. Closeness that flows in only one direction looks like friendship to everyone watching. To the leader, it is solitude with an audience.