By Dr. Mark Creech
Executive Director
Christian Action League
April 6, 2017
While walking the halls of the North Carolina General Assembly, a number of Republican lawmakers who voted “No” on the repeal and replace of HB 2 confided in me their discouragement this week.
Leadership can be a very difficult place, especially when you’ve tried so hard to do what is right and it still doesn’t work out.
It reminds me of that story about a late winter’s afternoon in Labrador, when Sir Wilfred Greenfell was speeding over the snow in his dog sled to the bedside of someone desperately ill. He came to a bay frozen over. To go across the ice would save him many miles. And though it was about time for the ice to break up, he felt it was worth the risk.
Half way across, the unthinkable happened. All the ice in the bay started to break up. Things were literally falling apart beneath him. Suddenly, he and his dogs were floundering in the freezing water. Greenfell managed to get himself and his dogs onto a large slab of ice, only to find they were floating out to sea.
Grenfell cut his frozen clothes off, killed his dogs and clothed himself in their skins; put his white shirt on top of a mast made with their bones and leash, in the hope that someone might see it. Then he laid down and went to sleep. The next morning he awakened to find a boat coming to his rescue.
Many years later, someone asked Grenfell how he could go to sleep under those conditions.
He replied, “I had done all I could. The rest was in God’s hands.”
The true secret to peace in leadership is to realize we are not agents, but only instruments in carrying out the divine will.
We can do no more than to do what we can do. If with all of our hearts we truly seek God, wait upon him in prayer, trust and obey him, then the rest is in his hands, and we shall find ourselves taken up into the line of his wise providence.
Story about Sir Wilfred Grenfell taken from Forward: Bible Readings and Meditations from Easter to Trinity, The Forward Movement of the Episcopal Church, Sharon, Pennsylvania, 1942