What Does Healthy Look Like?
Leadership in Context with Keith Tucci
Episode 051
What does healthy look like? What does a healthy church look like?
The outcome of a healthy church is a harmonious church, a worshipping church, a giving church, a serving church, a mission church, a discipleship church, an embracing church.
What is the essence of that health? How does a leader know if they are healthy?
Ecclesiastes 10:10 If the axe is dull and the edge unsharpened, more strength is needed. But skill will bring success.
Often in leadership, we are depending on sheer force to get something done rather than the edge of the blade being sharp. I remember one time, watching someone cut down a tree. I joked that he was trying to burn the tree down. His saw blade was so dull that you could literally smell the little tree burning. He spent a lot of time trying to cut down a small tree with a dull blade. There is a life lesson there. Health is being sharp.
1. Healthy looks like the ability to care for yourself.
The highest form of government is self-government. The essence of health is the ability to take care of yourself. In an airplane, in an emergency, you are always instructed to put your mask on first. Why? Because if someone else needs help, it will be a lot easier for you to help them if you aren’t dying of oxygen deprivation. A healthy person can take care of themselves—physically, spiritually, emotionally. If there is something going on in a leader’s life where they can’t do that, it’s not a sin or a crime. If it were a physical issue, you go to a doctor. Spiritual, you come under pastoral care. Emotional, you seek out emotional support or go to counseling. If I can’t take care of myself, my axe is dull and I will burn the tree down and not get a clean cut.
2. Healthy looks like living pain free without distraction.
I have hurt my back a few times. It’s disruptive and painful. The thing that has bothered me the most is not just the physical pain, but the distraction. The mental drain that it takes on me. When we are living in pain—spiritually, emotionally, or physically—there is an ominous distraction that zaps our energy in any or all of those areas. There are pains in life, and dealing with those pains will not be pleasant. But I believe if we are healthy, we can go through pain and not be completely distracted by it.
Ways to Deal with Pain:
· Ignore your pain, and hope it will go away—but that usually doesn’t work.
· Manage your pain. Take medicine, exercise, get more rest.
· Plan to limit your pain. If your back is hurt, there are certain things you won’t do so as to not cause or increase your pain (like helping someone move).
· Go to therapy to get rid of it—enlarge emotional scope, or stretch and strengthen muscles.
3. Healthy looks like serving beyond yourself.
A healthy person serves beyond themselves. A healthy business gives back to the community. A healthy family shares with their neighbor. A healthy church goes beyond the walls of the church. A healthy leader serves beyond the things that are on his agenda.
Idleness deteriorates health in every realm.Some people go beyond a replenishing rest, and move to just doing nothing. What some people call rest, the Bible calls idleness. Doing nothing is not a solution. Taking a break doesn’t do anything. But taking a break to help build up your stamina so you can go back at it is productive.
4. Healthy looks like the ability to fight off disease and attack.
Pain in life will come. If it hasn’t come today, it will probably come tomorrow. When you are healthy and you take those blows and have disappointments, you can fight them off. Just like your body fights off an infection. If you are constantly being bruised or infected, it will lead to death if you aren’t healthy enough to fight it off.
These things, I believe, are what healthy looks like. At my yearly check-up, I was sent a questionnaire where they asked me all kinds of introspective questions about my physical health. It made me think. Evaluating our health beyond our physical is important, too. Take some time this week to review these four areas I have covered, see how healthy you are, and check on the health of the people around you.
Join us next week as Keith Tucci continues to put leadership truth in the context of the local church. And as always, please like, share, rate/review, and invite others to listen. See you next week!
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