There is a strange thing that happens the higher you climb. You look around for the people who used to be next to you, and the row keeps getting shorter.
Every organization is a pyramid. Wide at the bottom, where there are peers everywhere, people in the same role, fighting the same battles, who understand your day without needing it explained. Then the rungs narrow. And somewhere along the way you look left, look right, and realize there is nobody standing beside you. Just you, and a decision everyone is waiting for you to make.
I guess I have to make the call.
That sentence has gone through my head more times than I can count. It is the quiet arithmetic of leadership. The more people who report to you, the more relationships you have running up and down, and the fewer that run across. You can be surrounded by people all day and still have almost no one beside you.
The ladder does something else, too. The higher you go, the more you have to lose. And the more you have to lose, the less inclined you are to reach. You stop taking some risks. You stop extending toward some relationships. It feels safer to keep climbing in silence than to expose how much you are actually carrying. So the isolation compounds, not because no one is there, but because reaching has started to feel expensive.
The top of the ladder looks the same in a lot of buildings
I used to think this was just a founder thing, until I started reading about pastors. Barna found that 42 percent of pastors had seriously considered quitting full-time ministry. Of the ones who had, 43 percent pointed to feeling lonely and isolated.
Think about that. The people whose entire calling is to build and shepherd community are often the loneliest people in the room. When you are everyone’s pastor, who is yours? When you are the leader, the teacher, the one with the answers, where do you go to simply be a person who doesn’t have them?
It turns out the top of the ladder looks remarkably similar in a lot of different buildings.
What I forget to do
For a long time I treated this loneliness as a problem to fix, or more often, to quietly endure. But I have started to wonder if I have been reading it wrong.
Here is what I notice about myself. When I reach the top of a hard decision and feel that no one is beside me, my instinct is to look inward. To dig for the answer in my own experience, my own judgment, my own resolve. What I forget to do, in that exact moment, is look up.
There is so much guidance I miss simply because I forget to ask for it. In the middle of the pressure, when everyone is waiting and the call is mine, it doesn’t even occur to me to stop and say, “Jesus, what should I do here? Who should I talk to? What does this look like?” It isn’t that I weigh it and decide against it. I just forget he is right there to ask. The higher I climb, the more dependent on him I should become, and yet the climb has a way of quietly convincing me to rely on myself instead.
But the rung is not as empty as it feels. I am never actually making the call alone. There is a Counselor who has walked every step of this with me, who was on the ladder long before I started climbing it.
Not as alone as it feels
There is something else I have to keep relearning. The feeling that no one is around me is often not the whole truth. It is just the easiest version to believe, because believing it asks nothing of me.
But there are other people who carry weight like this. Other founders, other leaders, who would understand mine if I let them see it. That kind of connection just doesn’t find you at the top. You have to reach for it, which is the one thing the climb keeps talking me out of.
Leadership is often lonely. But I am starting to believe it does not have to be, and that the loneliness, when it comes, is less a verdict than an invitation.
An invitation to stop looking sideways for the answer, and to look up.
And to notice that the rung was never as empty as it seemed. There is One who has never left it. And there are more people beside me than the climbing ever let me see.