Take your share of suffering for the Message along with the rest of us.  2 Timothy 1:8b (The Message)

Sometimes there will be a child who leads the pack from infancy. This child usually has a good idea of where to go and how to get there and the other kids just follow along behind.

Usually, however, there is a shift within kids when they start to come out from behind the well-established leaders. They may have lived on a farm all their lives and, when they start showing animals for 4H projects, they already know how to develop healthy animals. Suddenly, they have an expertise that they can share with others. Sometimes a painfully shy child will go into education and, finding other painfully shy kids in the classroom, the new teacher knows what may calm their fears so that they are able to learn their lessons more readily. Often a curiosity over something will lead us to learn more and more about that topic so, inadvertently, we become the experts and are asked to lead others.

Paul invited Timothy to join him in many of his travels and preaching opportunities and mentored him through his development as a leader of a congregation. Suddenly, Paul was thrown into jail, and Timothy was left to carry on the work without Paul’s immediate support. Paul wrote letters, encouraging Timothy but Timothy had to carry the burden.

Leadership is an interesting position. It’s a position that can highlight who we are as people. Some leaders need to create drama in order to provide importance. They bring their own audience to their meetings and end up staying within that group. Other leaders go about the business quietly, making suggestions, talking with everyone individually and in small groups, getting a feel for what is actually going on in any situation.

One of the kindest things in this letter to Timothy is found in this first chapter when Paul tells us of all the support that was provided by friends. There used to be an old saying that “it takes a village to raise a child.” I sometimes believe that we never actually leave childhood because quite often a village can help us through adulthood as well. No one makes it through life alone. If nothing else, we need grocery stores to provide food that we can’t make for ourselves. Our time becomes so crowded that we can’t make the cloth or the thread to create our own clothes. If nothing else, we need to be able to see another face every once in a while, so that we know that we’re not the only ones on this planet.  

If we can manage to keep putting one foot in front of the other, we can learn the truth of the saying, “Joy shared is doubled; sorrow shared is halved.” Once we learn to share those burdens with friends, we can make it through just about anything.

Becky Gillette is a former teacher, newspaper reporter, and preacher who seeks to take an original approach to life’s lessons. She has recently published her first book, Jessie’s Corner: Something To Think About, which is now available for purchase. Based on several lesser-known scriptures from the Bible, this is a collection of articles which she wrote for a weekly newspaper.