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"If you cry 'forward', you must make it clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go precisely the opposite directions."
Anton Checkhov

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I have a friend, and a mentor, The Rt. Rev’d Jim Cruickshank, a retired Bishop. Jim is also one of the smartest people I know. And more importantly, he is very, very wise. This past Sunday, we were sitting in the office between services, and Jim was telling stories, as he is wont to do. Part of one of the stories was how, as a bishop, he was on a particular mission. In the past, people who hadtaken their own life, or people who were not baptised would be buried outside of the fence surrounding the graveyards. Whenever a parish would want to have a new section of graveyard consecrated, they would call “the bishop.” Jim would ‘d arrive, then set an appointment and at the appointed day and time, he’s show up and consecrate the land. But what he always did before he came, was he’d instruct the parish to move the fences, to have them move out from the original boundaries of the graveyard. What that meant was that all the people buried on the outside of the fence all those years ago would now be buried in the consecrated ground.

Now for some of you, you may be wondering what all this talk about church stuff has to do with leadership? Well, I’ve been thinking that leadership is often about moving the fences we all have in our minds. It means pushing out of our comfort zones, the parts of our minds that are consecrated by our own narratives and beliefs, and pushing out, making our minds bigger.

I wonder what fences in my mind and yours need to be made bigger?

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