Few things crush a professional ego faster than throwing your entire heart into a project, only to watch it completely flop. Chris knows that feeling! In the early days of Mission Central, he spent weeks making phone calls, sending LinkedIn messages, and pulling every relational lever he had to launch a leadership cohort, only for the registration numbers to settle at a devastating zero. In moments like that, our default human conclusion is almost always an indictment of our identity: The project failed, therefore I suck.

As high-achieving professionals, we carry an immense amount of anxiety about our outcomes. We white-knuckle our way through the work week, trying to control every variable.

In this episode of our A Mysterious Business series, Chris riffs on the difference between lead measures and lag measures to explore the psychological and spiritual experience of failure. A lead measure is something entirely within an employee's control, like the number of calls a loan officer makes to real estate agents in a week. A lag measure, on the other hand, is the ultimate outcome, like the number of loans actually closed. You can track a lag measure, but you cannot directly force it to happen, because other human agents and a shifting environment are always involved.

In the kingdom of God, we not only have the distinction between lead measures and lag measures; we also have divine grace, which works over the course of generations.

Turning to John 4, where Jesus tells his disciples that they are reaping a spiritual harvest for which they did not labor, we see that in the economy of God, the faithful "lead measures" (the sowing) might happen in one generation, while the "lag measures" (the reaping) are held back for a future generation.

This truth helps us detach our existential worth from our immediate professional visibility. If your current project is an overwhelming success, the theology of the harvest reminds you that you cannot take credit for it; you have simply stepped into the generational labor of others. And if your current project looks like a human failure, it frees you from despair. You might just be the faithful sower whose hidden obedience is setting up a harvest you won't see this side of eternity.

Discover how to hold yourself accountable to faithfulness without letting your ego be held hostage by the bottom line. You can release the outcomes to the only one who can make things grow.

Sources: John 4:34-37 (ESV)

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