Met with two of my student leaders last night – male and female – we’re leading one of the eight small groups on our campus (they got relegated to be co-leaders with the staffworker, haha)…
During the course of the hang out (the desired purpose to get to know each other better…), the following was directed towards me…
“When you lead, you’ve got a game face.”
“You like to be in control.”
“What intimidates you about a man?”
“How does a man approach Christy if he’s interested in her?”
“Older, younger?”
“What do you say about me when I’m not there?”
It’s not going to be a boring year, that’s for sure…both of them are going to keep me on my toes. ;) I’m excited, though. They’re fabulous individuals.
I train students and talk about authentic community quite often – being real with each other, not wearing masks with each other, etc…and my students really make me proud in that area – their community on campus is vibrant, real, deep and still growing. They just sometimes ask me to live out what I preach at the most unexpected times, haha, and they dig into my life. Striking the balance between authentic realness and being a leader who cannot always get into the details is always an organic, sometimes messy, ever-changing process.
The leaders I respect are the ones who wear their flaws on their sleeves, who don’t pretend to have it together, who are real. That’s always my hope with students – that I would be accessible and just…seen as a real human being. I just sometimes find myself in “staff” mode…and when you have 80 or more people vying for your time and attention, you do learn at times to put up walls and carve out necessary boundaries. Learning when to take them down and sometimes moving back and forth from “leader” whose job it is to equip and motivate a lot of individuals to simply “Christy” is a nuanced art and takes quite a bit of skill.
without condition 