Leadership Lessons: 4 Wise Ways to Stay Strong in a Time of Crisis

In these days of the COVID-19 crisis, we face challenges we have never faced before. This past Monday, I spent almost an entire day in front of my laptop and on my phone, responding to emails and texting, crisis voice after crisis voice after crisis voice. 

I texted a friend of mine that I know who prays for me and I said, “Here’s my dilemma. I’m really too much of an introvert to be available online for hours. But I’m also too much of an extrovert to shelter in and not be with people.”

And yet in some ways, those are the challenges of someone who wants to make him or herself available. It’s the way we communicate with one another. We have to keep social distancing, and yet at the same time, we have to stay connected. 

So what I’m trying to do is offer perhaps some ways that we might just stay sane, level-headed in the midst of incredibly uncharted waters for all of us. And this includes facing the fact that we are pioneers in a very difficult situation. We are in places that we have not been before, and a part of that means some of us,  according to our various personalities, are going to take different courses of action. 

Surround Yourself with Wise Counsel

If you are by nature someone who likes to cover all your bases, someone who gets nervous about possibilities over which there is no control, you’ll want to squeeze everything together into something that’s personally manageable, with as little slipping through your fingers as possible. So you are playing in and living into worst-case scenarios, and those things inform how you’re responding in the midst of this crisis. 

On the other hand, if you are a person who takes risks, you are more than likely willing to be a risk taker, even in crises like this. Hopefully, both sides can talk to each other and come to plans that are sensible. But it’s important, depending on the kind of person you are, to surround yourself with people who are like you and not like you, so you can discover some centered sense of wise counsel. 

Take Time Alone With God

But at least for me, to be able to listen to anybody’s counsel, wise or not, there has to be within me a certain level of stillness, the capacity to not live in total reaction mode all the time. And what keeps me sane as well as still on the inside is what I do in my alone times with God. 

That means, first of all, making alone time with God is more critically important in this crisis, not less. You see, because I can be so scattered, I want to immediately get up out of bed and check my phone, look at the latest messages, figure out what’s going on online, see the latest things that are showing up in the news or what my friends are tweeting, what’s showing up on my Facebook page. And all that does is immediately suck me into the vortex of all that is happening. 

That doesn’t produce stillness in me, even though it might cause me to feel more connected. Actually, what it produces in me is the capacity to just absorb into my spirit the chaos of what it is that’s going around me. 

So as a discipline, I get up. I go to a chair that I always sit in first thing in the morning. I get up and make coffee before anybody else in my home gets up. And I sit down, and I begin to read and to pray.

I’m using as a part of my Lenten discipline the Rite I version of morning prayer. And the preface gives me, in essence, an agenda for my time. It goes like this: “Dearly beloved, we have come together in the presence of Almighty God, our heavenly Father, to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his holy Word and to ask for ourselves and on behalf of others, those things that are necessary for our life and our salvation.”

So to start off, where do I begin? I begin because I’m talking to my Father, almighty God, our heavenly Father, one whom I have learned to trust, one whom I believe is good. One whom I believe holds me in the palm of his hand, regardless of what is going on, either within or around me. Whether I feel God’s presence or not is actually quite beside the point. His promise is “I am with you always,” no matter what I’m feeling, and that sets the stage because it tells me who is with me, to whom I am addressing my prayers. 

And notice the invitation is to start, not on the downbeat, but on the upbeat, to render thanks for the great benefits we’ve received at his hand. As the psalm says, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise” (Ps. 100:4). That sets the frame for how I think about even the most difficult things, even if the best I can do when I get up in the morning is that I can say, “Well, God, to my knowledge, I’m not sick yet.”

 In other words, the baseline for thanksgiving does not have to be standing up and shouting, although there’s nothing wrong with that. The baseline is finding things for which you can give thanks, regardless of what else is going on around you. Even if you can see nothing in your circumstances, the best you could do would be to thank God for the gift of eternal life that we have received in his Son, that no matter what you’re going through, you’re heading into eternity itself. 

And then it says, “to hear His Holy Word,” because the act of thanksgiving clears the decks in your brain to make room for what it is that God might want to say to you through the Scripture. And again, allow that to form how you think about what’s going on in your day, and then going from there to ask for yourself, and on behalf of others, those things that are necessary for our life and our salvation. 

It helps me enormously in the midst of my own inner tension to focus in intercessory prayer on the needs of others. I was speaking to someone just this morning on the phone who has a really hard time getting up and making time to be able to pray, quite honestly, even though he admits he’s wrong. He doesn’t think he needs it. And what I said to him was, “You may not think you need it. But believe me, you are surrounded by people in desperate need of prayer.” 

Perhaps the best way you can use your time before God is to pray for the people God sends your way. And all things that are necessary for life and for godliness, to allow that daily form of time in the presence of God gives me the capacity that I need to be available for whatever chaos I might encounter over the course of that day.

Get Enough Sleep, Laughter and Prayer

The other thing I would suggest and offer is to make sure you’re getting enough sleep, make sure you have people in your life with whom you can laugh  and have people that you know who can also be praying for you. I emailed a friend I knew about making these videos and he said, “Oh, I’m looking forward to seeing them.” 

My automatic response was, “Oh, that means you’re going to be praying for me, right?” Because I know that the fruit of anything that I do has everything to do not so much with my efforts as the intercessory support of other people. 

I think when we get to heaven, we’re going to be extraordinarily surprised at the role other people’s prayers have played and how deeply we have been sustained. There is a web between us as members of the one body of Christ of which we are relatively unaware that when we pray for someone else, life is released and imparted to them, even in that moment  again, whether they feel it or not. 

And the same is true for us. I honestly feel an extraordinary obligation as a part of my role as bishop, to be an intercessor, to pray for the people in this diocese, to pray for people who don’t yet know Christ, to pray for people I know who have asked for prayers and to solicit those same prayers for other people. Because all of us operate as Christians in concert together, even when we are entirely alone. And the web that is built between us is something God has created. They are the highways where intercessory prayer travels from one group of people to the next, literally even beyond space and time, as well as all across this planet. Build, ask for and live into the prayer support that is yours. 

Have a Listener Who Understands

And finally, the thing I would suggest is have people around you, even if it’s just one person, with whom you can share your heart, who knows something of the stress and tension as well as the joy. These people can be for us tangible reminders of God’s promise that he never leaves us. And we’re hearing it through the mouth and in the eyes of someone who knows and loves us. 

I hope our congregations can more and more be those hands and eyes for one another. That you choose to be those yourself, even to the person checking out your groceries, even to the person at the convenience store, even to the driver who irks you on the highway. 

Pay attention, see what God will do. This is a time that in fact can be redeemed. But it is redeemed through his servants who choose by the grace of God to walk in the light and to say no to the darkness. 

What suggestions would you add for leaders who desire to stay strong in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer. 

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s video message to clergy on March 18, 2020.)  

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.