by Andy Crouch
This is why both of the distinctive callings of transformative people involve vulnerability, hidden and chosen. This is why the evidently vulnerable are such crucial parts of all of our flourishing—why my niece Angela is not just the object of our care but a subject in her own right, someone who draws out from us the capacity to be truly and fully human. This is why our hidden and obvious flaws, failures and limitations are in fact the path to true strength. This is the good news for everyone who feels too vulnerable and powerless to have real authority: in the upside-down economy of the Kingdom, you possess the pearl which everyone must seek. Like Paul, who discovered that his “thorn in the flesh” was in fact the path toward God’s power being made perfect, you have with you, and within you, the secret of a life that unlocks true power.
Invitations to Risk
Pursue authority by itself and you will not only end up without the authority you seek but plunged into the very kind of vulnerability you hoped to avoid. But the reverse is not true. Because God is for us in our vulnerability, because “all things are ours,” because even the ultimate vulnerability of death cannot hold us in its grip—the pursuit of vulnerability actually leads to authority and to the flourishing that comes when authority and vulnerability are combined.
Only those who have opened themselves to meaningful risk are likely to be entrusted with authority.
I am reminded of this in my frequent conversations with students and emerging adults about their callings and careers. Understandably, the felt need of nearly every young person is how to acquire authority—how to gain the capacity to act in the workplace and in the broader world. And yet, my advice to them almost always comes down to this: embrace more risk. Only those who have opened themselves to meaningful risk are likely to be entrusted with the authority that we all were made for and seek. Indeed, to seek out meaningful risk actually is its own kind of act of authority, because in the economy of the world’s true Creator and Redeemer, meaningful risk is the most meaningful action, the life that really is life, the flourishing for which we were created.
This does not mean, as the narrow sense of the word vulnerability might mislead us to think, that we all have to spend our lives quivering like emotional Jell-O. The invitation to risk takes many forms, and while some of them take us down and to the right, requiring the sacrifice that every leader must eventually make, many other forms place us squarely on the path to flourishing. When we lead with these kinds of vulnerability, we find the best kind of authority is given to us as well.
Accountability. In the most literal sense, we invite others to examine our “accounts”—to probe the records we keep and the stories we tell for signs of truth or falsehood. The best accountability runs a spectrum from daily honesty to expert scrutiny, “downward” to those with less power and “upward” to those with more. If we manage a business, we open its accounts both to the firm’s own bookkeepers and to the gimlet eye of outside auditors who are expert in assessing financial statements. If we teach, we seek out the evaluations of our students, our peers and more experienced, wiser mentors. We embrace the kinds of community where our façades of competence can fall and we can be known in all our messy glory. We seek out friends who ask hard questions and then ask them again; we find confessors who will hear our account of our own sins and failings and offer us severe mercy rather than mushy indulgence.
Confrontation. Years ago I read of researchers who had followed a cohort of middle managers in an American firm over many years. Some of them advanced to senior levels in the firm, while others did not. What was the difference between these two groups? The researchers found only one significant difference: one group was consistently quicker than the other to speak up when something was going wrong in their area of responsibility. When they spotted impending failure, they grabbed anyone who would listen—coworkers, their boss, their boss’s boss—and got them involved in figuring out what was going wrong and what could change. The other group tended to minimize potential failure, avert their eyes from warning signs and cover up the eventual damage.
Which managers ended up more “successful” in their careers? The ones who pretended everything was basically fine, telling others, and probably themselves, what they wanted to hear? No.
The ones who succeeded were the ones who failed loudly, quickly and boldly—rather than softly, slowly and timidly.
The ones who succeeded were the ones who failed loudly, quickly and boldly—rather than softly, slowly and timidly.
We pursue true vulnerability, the kind that leads to flourishing, when we use our authority to recognize and address failure rather than using our authority to conceal and minimize failure. We learn to speak up early when something feels wrong. To raise the possibility of failure is always a risk—but it is a risk that can actually increase, not diminish, our authority.
Delegation. We learn that the desire to control others is an idolatry that will not deliver what we seek and will certainly not lead to their flourishing. So we turn over power to others, giving them authority to act on their own behalf, to cultivate and create in their own right rather than just implementing our vision. We discover the joy of true power, which is to make room for others to act with authority. We measure our lives increasingly by what others have done—and received credit for—thanks to our advocacy. By exposing ourselves to the risk that others will fail us, we also open up the possibility that they will surprise and delight us with the flourishing they create.
Solitude, silence and fasting. Embracing the three most essential spiritual disciplines opens us to the deepest kind of risk: the risk of discovering who we really are, in all our flaws and confusion. Solitude forces us to step away from the continual affirmation of our authority by others; silence compels us to practice quietness rather than noisy self-assertion; fasting exposes our dependence on food and other good things to prop up our sense of agency and capacity. All of them, practiced regularly, will humble us, bringing us up against our own limits and our own foolishness. Without solitude, silence and fasting, we have no true authority—we are captives of others’ approval, addicted to our personal soundtracks and chained to our pleasures. But on the other side of this vulnerability is true authority, grounded in something deeper than our circumstances.
Take a Risk Every Night
The speaker’s arrival had been keenly anticipated—the room was full and hushed as he stepped on stage. The message was masterfully delivered, with down-to-earth yet dramatic stories. There were memorable turns of phrase, well-honed principles and a few disarming personal disclosures.
And it all was strangely familiar—because I had heard it, down to every emotional catch in the throat and pregnant pause, delivered to a different audience nine months before.
Repetition and reproduction aren’t bad things in themselves. Every copy of this book, after all, contains the exact same message, delivered in the same way to each reader. We sing songs over and over again, repeating the same lyrics and tunes until we have learned them by heart. As someone who speaks frequently to new audiences, I certainly appreciate the value of a well-crafted presentation, one that has been tested and tried many times before.
And yet on this particular evening, something felt off. Surely there had been some real vulnerability involved in the original writing, crafting and delivery of this talk. But that was months or years in the past. What risk was happening now, tonight, with this group of people gathered in hopes of hearing a true and transforming word? It was hard to see how such distant vulnerability could match the evident authority granted by the stage, the setting and even those self-deprecating anecdotes—not to mention the private plane that had brought him, at the conference’s expense, to the meeting.
Some experiences like this lead to cynicism, a quick and jaded judgment on people with privilege and power. But this particular night, I felt something more spiritually beneficial—an overwhelming fear that I could easily end up in the same condition. Perhaps not with all of the same trappings of p
ower and fame, but cocooned nonetheless in self-protective, safe repetition of the moves and words that had gained me whatever power I had.
So I started seeking out the people who have to find a way to repeat the same words night after night and yet make every repetition real: professional actors. In the months after my moment of conference déjà vu, I asked several actors how they kept their performances authentic even while delivering precisely the same well-rehearsed lines.
“Every performance, I ask myself what risk I’m going to take that night,” one friend told me. “Some nights I focus on just one line and try to express a new emotion through it. Or I think about doing something new in a scene that is becoming predictable.”
I called James, another friend who spent eight years acting in New York. He told me,
Actors have to memorize our lines, but the goal is not to memorize only the words—the goal is to live the story out truthfully on stage, and we can’t do that if we have already decided how we are going to act. Take a famous scene, one every actor and every audience member knows, like Romeo going into the tomb where he will discover Juliet, dead. The actor knows that she’s dead, the audience knows that she’s dead, but Romeo doesn’t know. Romeo has to discover it every time. You have to enter the scene, dream your dreams, hope your hopes—and let the play crush them.
James spent years training to have authority as an actor. But every night he plays Romeo, he has to find a way to make Romeo’s vulnerability his own.
Do Your Homework
I learned a very different lesson about public speaking from a man I’ll call Terry, whose remarkable career in business had culminated with an assignment as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Terry was an unusual figure for a CEO, quiet almost to the point of shyness. After years leading smaller, privately held firms, his new role required him to give speeches to auditoriums full of investors or managers. Intimidated by the public-speaking demands, he had sought out his pastor.
“Terry, it’s easy,” his pastor said. “You only have to do three things to be an effective public speaker. Do your homework, love your audience, and be yourself.”
“Do your homework, love your audience, and be yourself.”
Do your homework—acquire the proper authority to address the topic at hand. Love your audience—open yourself up to their vulnerability, their fears and dreams, their ambitions and failures, and see them for the image bearers they are, with their own authority and capacity. And then be yourself—bring your own authority and vulnerability together, in all your beloved incompleteness, in their presence. Like all the best maxims, it is both utterly simple and a life’s work to fulfill.
Terry found that this simple framework gave him exactly what he needed to step into his new role. Before every speaking engagement, he would ask himself, Have I done my homework? Years of accommodating a learning disability had taught him how to master material through painstaking effort, so the answer was always yes. He could shift his attention to the central question, Do I love this audience? That became his primary focus in the hours or days before a speech—envisioning the particular people who would be in the room and tuning his mind and heart to what would serve them best. Then, when he walked on stage, he had just one assignment: to be himself. The anxiety that used to surround public speaking disappeared. In its place was the authority and vulnerability that has led his company to flourish.
I mentioned Terry’s three-step framework to James, the actor. “Exactly,” he said. “And I would add that to love your audience is actually to need something from your audience—to go out on stage knowing that if they don’t meet you, give you what you need, you can’t do what you came to do. Real love only exists where there is a mutual need.”
Given his busy schedule, I am certain that Terry has to repeat and reuse material, just like the speaker I heard twice in the same year. For that matter, Terry, too, arrives at many of his engagements on a private plane. They are superficially similar in their status, wealth and position. But the demands of leadership that have made one of them more distant over time have made the other more present. The same pressures that have led one to retreat into his authority have led the other to open himself up in vulnerability—to need others, to ask for advice and to continue to learn.
I want to be like Terry. I want to be like Karl, Drew, Isabel and the others who have shown me what real authority and real vulnerability mean, the ones who have drawn me into true flourishing. Like Paul Farmer, I want to be a saint—to become part of the ultimate meaningful story, taking hold of the life that really is life.
The great news is that it is possible. Do your homework—prepare for authority. Love your neighbor, enough to need them, enough to know what they need—open yourself to vulnerability. And then be yourself—show up with all that you have and all that you are and all the truth of what you will never be.
Laughter
The stories we tell our friends, and often tell ourselves, fall overwhelmingly into two categories: stories where we are the hero and stories where we are the victim.
Hero stories feature us overcoming great odds and fierce opposition, often with a note of righteous triumph thrown in for good measure. Sitting on planes, I’ve overheard a lot of hero stories as people settle into their seats and call their loved ones. They tell them how they beat the traffic, how they got the last spot in the overhead bins, how they persuaded an unwilling agent to upgrade them to first class. Sitting in college dining halls, I’ve heard stories of turning in papers just before the deadline after a brutal all-nighter.
Hero stories are authority stories—ways of signaling to our friends that we are lucky, good or both. They are always selective at best, exaggerated at worst.
Then there are victim stories, which of course are vulnerability stories. We describe being cut off by an aggressive driver in a luxury car, missing the flight because the security lines were so long, being stood up by the world’s most horrible date.
The theme of victim stories is actually the same as the theme of hero stories: our own vindication in an unfair world. We are well-intentioned and undeserving of our fate, at the mercy of petty or cosmic conspiracies, too small for the forces arrayed against us.
Our true story is not really about us—it is about our rescuer.
Whether we tell hero or victim stories, we are constantly tempted to exaggerate. As I write this chapter, America’s most prominent television news presenter has seen his career rocked by an untrue tale of barely surviving a helicopter crash after coming under fire in Afghanistan—a tale that managed to present him both as victim and as hero. (In fact, his helicopter was miles away from the incident he “misremembered.”)
But there is another kind of story we all could tell—a story that paints us in a very different light. It is a rescue story.
“I once was lost, but now am found”—that is no exaggeration. The more we grasp how truly we lost hold of our true calling, how completely we were in the grip of injustice, safety and poverty, the more we realize how great the rescue has been, how little we ourselves can claim for our own credit.
Our true story is not really about us—it is about our rescuer. He arrives in our story and acts with authority—he is the true hero. And yet he also bears our vulnerability—he offers himself as the victim. His arrival in the story sets us free to flourish. And the mark of his arrival is not the hero’s grim shout of triumph or the victim’s grim cry of despair, but the distinctive sound of those surprised by joy: laughter.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.” (Psalm 126:1-2)
If you want one last picture of authority and vulnerability together, laughter will do the trick.
If you want one last picture of authority and vulnerability togeth
er, laughter will do the trick. To laugh, to really laugh out loud, is to be vulnerable, taken beyond ourselves, overcome by surprise and gratitude. And to really laugh may be the last, best kind of authority—the capacity to see the meaning of the whole story and discover that our final act, our only enduring responsibility in that story, is simply celebration, delight and worship.
After we have borne our hidden vulnerability, even after we have descended to the dead, after we have been rescued from our suffering, our withdrawing, our exploiting—we will be raised up, restored to our rightful place. And we will laugh.
The Life That Really Is Life
The summer I finish this book brings my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. We converge on their rambling house in Massachusetts for a simple celebration that begins at church on Sunday morning and continues on the large screened porch that faces the woods in their backyard. The cousins—my sisters’ children and mine—gather to play music and games. In our midst is Angela, almost eleven years old.
I would never want to romanticize in the slightest the great burden Angela has placed on my sister’s family, how much caring for her has cost them in every possible currency—sleep, freedom, finances, personal health. On the worst nights, deep in the winter darkness of northern New England, on the rushed and anxious drives to the hospital for yet another baffling change in her condition—dealing every day with the literal weight of a human being who requires every kind of care but cannot care for herself—Angela has exposed them to deeper vulnerability than any of us would choose for ourselves. The only way the burden has been even remotely bearable has come as others have chosen vulnerability as well—my parents’ innumerable trips up and down the long highway between their homes, the checks we all have written toward special equipment and supplies, the friends who relieved my sister for a few hours just when it seemed the tedium and challenge of constant attendance to Angela’s needs were too much, the community, state and nation that provide programs to support families like hers.
