They Kept Peter's Worst Night

Two people know and she can tell you their names in the order she told them.

The first one was eleven days after. The second one was four years later and she has never been entirely sure why she did it, except that it was two in the morning at a conference and something had loosened.

Nine years now.

It is not a crime and nobody was hurt in any way you could put in a sentence. It was a stretch of about seven months in which she was not the person she says she is, and there was a decision in the middle of it that she made deliberately, knowing exactly what she was doing, and it worked.

She has never done anything like it since. That is true and it does not help as much as it should.

She leads. She is good at it and she is not a fraud, and that is the part that would surprise people if she ever said any of this out loud: she genuinely is what she appears to be now, and has been for nine years, and it is precisely because of the seven months.

But there is a machine running underneath everything, all the time.

It runs when a certain name comes up. It runs when somebody says something about integrity from the front. It ran for a whole weekend last spring when one of the two people was in the building and she did not know they were coming.

The machine is: keep it at two.

And what has begun to arrive lately, at about half past five in the morning, is not guilt. She has dealt with the guilt properly and she would not go back over it.

It is exhaustion. Nine years is a long time to run anything continuously.

The worst night of the first leader is in the record in detail

Let me be clear about what this article is not, before you brace for it.

Nobody here is telling you to stand up and tell four hundred people. That is not repentance, it is a different kind of management, and the wreckage of it usually lands on people who did not consent to be in your story. Anybody who tells a leader to make a public confession of a private thing has not thought about who else is in the room.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a let-off: what you are inside of has never once required its people to look impressive, and it proves that in its own founding documents. That is not my kind reading of nine years, it is what stands written in the fourteenth chapter of Mark, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been up with you at half past five.

Read what the record keeps about its first leader.

He began to call down curses, and he swore to them, I do not know this man you are talking about. Immediately the rooster crowed the second time. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken to him. And he broke down and wept.Mark 14:71-72

Three denials. Curses. Swearing. And then the crying. That is what is written, kept exactly, and the Holy Spirit did not require it to be cleaned up before it could be used.

Now hold that against the ordinary way an organization treats its founders, and notice how strange it is.

By the time this was written down, Peter was not a private individual. He was the most significant figure in that movement, and there is an early and widely repeated tradition that this particular account is closely connected to his own preaching. That tradition is not a certainty and honest people note the arguments about it, and you should not accept it from me as more than a tradition.

But at minimum, this is in the record. It was kept, in detail, with the curses left in, about the man everybody was looking at.

So this is yours right now rather than pending some future disclosure: you are not required to be impressive in order to be used, because the written word keeps its first leader's worst night with nothing edited out, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the version with the curses in it is the one that survived.

Now the honest limit, because this house does not overclaim. That is an argument about invention, not a proof of everything. Documents that damage their own leadership are behaving oddly for fabrications and that is worth something, and it is one consideration among several, and people argue about how much it establishes.

What it means for you at half past five is not historical. It is that the founding record of the thing you lead is the record of somebody who failed badly and was not deleted.