The Leader’s Return: Why Renewal Is Not a Reward — It’s a Responsibility

There is a story I return to often from the prophet Elijah — one of the great leaders of the Hebrew scriptures. After one of the most remarkable demonstrations of courage and divine power in the entire Old Testament, Elijah collapsed under a juniper tree and asked God to take his life. He was not being dramatic. He was depleted in the truest sense of the word. And what is striking about what happens next is not that God rebuked him for his weakness or gave him a new assignment to snap him out of it. What happened was this: an angel touched him and said, Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you. Rest. Food. More rest. More food. And only then, miles later, the still small voice with something to say. I have spent a long time sitting with that sequence. God's first prescription for a burned-out leader was not a strategy session. It was restoration. And the framing is important: the rest was not a reward for good work. It was a preparation for what was still to come. Renewal, in other words, is not optional for leaders who intend to keep leading well.

We have a cultural narrative in leadership circles — especially in ministry and faith-based organizations — that treating yourself to rest is somehow self-indulgent. That the truly committed leader pushes through. That the need for renewal is a sign of insufficient faith or insufficient toughness. I have believed versions of that lie myself, and I have watched it hollow out some of the finest leaders I know. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. The leaders who refuse to be renewed eventually become the leaders who cause the most damage — because they lead from scarcity, from unexamined wounds, from a defended inner life rather than an open and honest one. Sustainable leadership does not come from gritting your way through. It comes from periodic return to the Source. It comes from knowing, in your body and not just your theology, that you are a human being and not a human doing. That distinction is not semantic. It is foundational.

Leadership renewal — the real kind, not just the kind you perform for your board or your congregation or your team — requires an environment that is structurally different from the one that depleted you. You cannot find stillness in the same noise that drowned it out. You cannot hear God in the same relentless pace that made you stop listening. I say this not as a criticism but as a simple observation about how human beings and their nervous systems actually work. We need interruption. We need a place that does not ask anything of us for long enough that we can actually stop bracing and start opening. That kind of space is rare. It has to be intentional. And for a lot of leaders, it has to be someone else's job to create it, because they have long since lost the capacity to create it for themselves.

That is the work I do through The Lake House Sessions, a spiritual retreat for leaders on the shores of Lake Norman in North Carolina. I created it because I needed it once, and because I have seen what happens to leaders when someone finally gives them permission — and a place — to stop. The retreat is small and intimate by design, because real renewal does not happen in a crowd. It happens in quietness, in honesty, in the kind of unhurried conversation with God that most leaders have not had in years. If you are in ministry, in executive leadership, or in any high-capacity role that has been quietly draining you, I want to extend that invitation to you. Renewal is not a luxury. For the leaders this world needs, it is a responsibility — to yourself, to the people you lead, and to the calling you have been given.