A game of two halves

Following on from Monday's blog…. The next most significant thing that encouraged that year me was in the autumn of 2001.

A few years before I had resigned a management position that I really enjoyed. Despite the fact it was the corporate treadmill, with all the political bull, posturing and positioning, I enjoyed the film industry we were in, the customers and clients (mostly!), the company, the staff and my team. I left to stay at home as primary carer for my son and stepson, while my wife returned to a high-flying career. I also joined the staff of my church - fantastic - all of it - I loved it. Problem - my marriage went down the pan - and though I returned to work, partly in an effort to save my marriage, the toilet flushed in early 2001, as described below.

So, here's how I'm feeling at that time: as a partner rejected, as a husband bereft, as a parent divided, as a provider inadequate, as a potential employee pessimistic, as a leader discredited, as a Christian ashamed, as a man…surviving.

It was perhaps the greatest relief of my life to date - there I was at half time (on a three score plus ten basis) feeling totally trashed... I felt that any achievement or sense of significance in life was now beyond me. Not so…

I read a book (as you do!) called The Making of a Leader, by Dr J Robert Clinton, or Bobby to his friends. In it he told me that God had primarily been working in me, in the first half of my life, to prepare me for what He was going to do in the second. Wow! All my experience, as crap as it was, would be useful somehow.

Question: what does that say about our impatience for maturity? Avoiding risk for fear of failure? About covering up our mistakes and so not learning the lessons of them? About deciding to be self-contained or independent? About what we communicate - with whom and when? More to follow….