The Value of Quiet Moments

A note to young leaders.

Take a guess.

How long do you suppose it was, after the light threw Saul of Tarsus to the ground on the road to Damascus, before he became the evangelist we know as St Paul?

The following day? A fortnight? A few months?

Three years.

Three years, much of it in the Arabian desert. That’s how long it took him to sit with his experience and cross-examine his certainties one by one.

Paul went into the desert a zealot for one cause and came out a zealot for its opposite. The difference between those two men was three years, in a place where no one applauded and no one condemned.

If you’ve never sat with your ideals long enough to argue against them – to discover which parts survive doubt and which were merely inherited – you’re still trading in borrowed beliefs. And what is borrowed must one day be returned.

Leadership is lonely work. Lonely work feeds on conviction. And conviction, unlike belief, must be earned.

But the first act of conviction is doubt. If you never doubted, in what sense can you say you ever believed?

So if something is at work in your soul – make room for your own wilderness years. Make room for solitude. There ought to be seasons in any serious life when nothing is being launched, broadcast or crowd-funded.

Solitude is negation. Solitude is gestation. Solitude is that dark and silent country where belief is reborn as conviction.