Of the four questions from Known and Called, this is the one leaders skip.
Who am I, really? They'll wrestle with.
Why am I here? They'll sit with.
Where am I going? They'll plan around.
But who loves me? — most leaders treat that question like it's beneath them. Soft. Sentimental. Something for a counselor's office or a hard season, not for a Tuesday afternoon when there are decisions to make.
And yet of the four, it's the one I've watched derail more leaders than the other three combined.
Because a leader who can't answer it goes looking for the answer in places that can't give it. He looks for it in performance. In approval from people who don't actually know him. In achievements that briefly hush the question without ever answering it. In affairs. In addictions. In the next deal, the next title, the next pat on the back. He builds a life that's brilliant on the outside and starving on the inside, because the question underneath everything he's doing has never been answered.
Who loves me? — not who admires what I produce, not who depends on me, not who needs something from me, but who knows the actual man underneath all of it and loves him anyway?
It's the question every leader is asking in his quietest moments, even the ones who'd never say it out loud. And it's the question God answers first, before any of the others, because the other three can't be answered honestly until this one is.
The signpost on this part of the path is small. It's a single line of Scripture, said over a man at his baptism, before he had done a single thing worth mentioning:
This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.
Beloved. Before the ministry. Before the miracles. Before the cross.
If you've been running on the strength of being admired, depended on, or needed — but you haven't sat with the question of who actually loves you — that's the signpost. Don't keep walking.
You are beloved before you are useful.
This is the last of the Heart-First Signposts series. Six questions, six signposts. The path keeps going. You're not on it alone.