There’s a shelf in my garage that I started building three summers ago. One side is plumb and solid. The other end lists slightly to the left, held in place more by studs and optimism than by any real craftsmanship. I keep telling myself I’ll fix it. I keep not fixing it.
Every time I walk past it, I think about all the things I’ve left in that condition — not just woodworking projects, but conversations, apologies, plans. Half-finished things have a way of accumulating quietly, like leaves in a corner of the yard you stopped raking.
For a long time, I thought leadership was mostly about momentum. Get moving. Keep moving. Finish what you start. There’s real wisdom in that, of course. But somewhere along the way I began to suspect that a life — and a ministry — is also shaped significantly by what you don’t finish, and why.
There’s a difference between something left undone because you gave up and something left undone because you chose better. I’ve done both, and they feel very different on the inside, even when they look the same from the outside. The guilt has a different texture than the peace does.
I once walked away from a committee I’d committed to lead. I told myself I was overwhelmed. I told other people I was overwhelmed. Both things were true. But somewhere underneath the overwhelm was the quieter truth that I’d said yes to the wrong thing in the first place — not to be helpful, but to be needed. Leaving that unfinished was actually a kind of completion. It took me a while to see that.
I think growing up — in leadership, in faith, in ordinary life — involves learning to tell the difference between the shelf that needs fixing and the shelf that just needs forgiving. Some incompleteness is failure waiting to be addressed. Some is just the honest record of a human being moving through time with limited hours and imperfect judgment.
The shelf in my garage probably does need fixing. One day I’ll get out there with a level and do the thing properly. Or I won’t, and it’ll hold whatever I put on it anyway, listing slightly to the left, a quiet reminder that not everything requires resolution.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe sometimes the unfinished thing teaches you more than the finished one ever would have.