We spent last week in Mexico City, and there is a lot I could write about the place. It is enormous, crowded, colorful, loud and beautiful, sometimes all at the same time. There are houses painted in colors we would probably never have the nerve to use at home, magnificent old buildings, town squares filled with people, and food everywhere.
And then there are the tacos.
I could probably write an entire post about the tacos. What struck me was how simple they were: a tortilla, meat, salsa, maybe some onion and cilantro, and a lime squeezed over the top. No mountain of cheese. No sour cream. No attempt to turn lunch into a construction project. Just a few good things done well.
There may be a leadership lesson hiding in there somewhere.
But as much as I enjoyed the city—and believe me, the tacos—I haven’t found myself talking nearly as much about the places we saw as I have about the people we met.
Part of our week was spent at a small Christian school where Julie and I already knew some of the students. Several times a year, we join them on Zoom for something they call Conversation Club. They’re learning English, and having conversations with people who actually speak it gives them an opportunity to practice.
We talk about pretty ordinary things: school, family, food, what they like to do, and what life is like in Ohio compared with Mexico City. Over time, those little faces on a computer screen begin to become people you know, but this time there wasn’t a screen between us.
We could sit beside them, eat with them, play games and laugh together. We also got to watch them when they weren’t talking to the Americans on Zoom, and that may have been one of my favorite parts of the week. The older kids helped the younger kids without somebody constantly telling them to do it. The students were respectful without seeming rehearsed, and they were curious, funny and thoughtful. We listened as children recited entire chapters of the Bible from memory.
And slowly, we began putting personalities with those familiar faces.
One of them was a girl named Julia.
Naturally, Julia and Julie found each other pretty quickly. When you’re in another country and somebody has almost the same name as you, apparently that’s enough to begin a friendship.
At first, I thought it was cute. But as the week went along, I noticed Julia finding Julie again and again. They sat together, talked and laughed, and Julia seemed to gravitate toward her whenever she had the opportunity. There wasn’t a program for this. Nobody had assigned Julie to mentor Julia, and there wasn’t a lesson plan, an objective or some measurable outcome we were trying to achieve.
Two people simply found each other.
Then Julia started calling Julie Oma.
That’s what our grandchildren call her. Around our house, Oma isn’t simply another word for grandmother. It’s Julie’s name to four little people who occupy an enormous part of our lives, so when Julia began using it—and then some of the other girls began calling her Oma too—it meant more to us than I can probably explain.
They hadn’t merely learned another English word. They had taken a name that means something in our family and made a little room for themselves inside it.
I’ve spent a lot of my adult life thinking about leadership. I’ve led organizations, worked in business, planted churches, coached leaders, preached sermons, taught classes and, lately, even managed to write a book about some of it.
After all those years, I’m increasingly convinced that we sometimes make the whole thing far more complicated than it needs to be.
We like programs, strategies, vision statements, goals, metrics and five-year plans. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of them. I’ve used all of them, and some of them are necessary. But I’m not sure the most important difference we make in another person’s life can usually be found on a spreadsheet.
Sometimes leadership is simply presence—being there long enough to notice someone, listening long enough to hear more than their words, and putting down whatever seems important to us at the moment so we can give another person our attention.
Julie didn’t arrive at that school with a strategic plan to become Oma.
She just showed up as Julie.
And a young girl decided that wasn’t quite a big enough name for her anymore.
There’s another part of this I’ve been thinking about since we came home. We went to Mexico City to serve. That’s what you say when you’re taking a trip like this: we’re going to help, encourage and serve.
And we did. There were things we could contribute, jobs that needed doing and opportunities to speak, work, encourage and help. I even had the privilege of preaching at the church on Sunday through an interpreter.
But there’s a subtle danger in believing that because you’re the one who got on the airplane, you’re automatically the one bringing something valuable.
That isn’t how it worked.
We stayed in Pastor Lazaro’s home and got to know his family. We received their hospitality and ate their food. People patiently worked through the limits of our Spanish, which in my case gave them plenty of opportunity to practice patience. We received laughter, stories and friendship, and we were welcomed into people’s lives in ways I didn’t expect.
Julie even received a new group of kids calling her Oma.
Maybe service works best when nobody keeps score.
A lot of leadership happens where nobody is applauding or even calling it leadership. It’s the parent who gets up one more morning and does what needs to be done, the grandparent who listens to the same story for the fifth time as though it were the first, the teacher who notices the kid sitting quietly in the corner, the friend who makes the phone call, or the older student who helps a younger student simply because that’s what you do.
Sometimes it’s a woman from Ohio sitting beside a girl in Mexico City and giving her enough attention that somewhere along the way Julie becomes Oma.
Nobody puts those things on a résumé, but I’m beginning to wonder whether those are the things that matter most.
Leadership isn’t always getting someone to follow you. Sometimes it’s making another person feel like there is a place beside you.
I went to Mexico City hoping we might make a difference, and I came home realizing again how often the people we think we’re going to serve end up changing us.
Maybe that’s one of the gifts of getting outside our normal world. We get accustomed to our routines, our problems, our people and our way of doing things, and without realizing it, our world can become pretty small.
Then you travel a couple thousand miles and sit across a table from somebody whose life looks very different from yours. You struggle to understand one another, laugh anyway, share a meal, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the distance doesn’t seem nearly as great as it did on the map.
I’ve been home for a little while now, and I’m still thinking about Mexico City, those kids and especially Julia. We went there hoping to leave something behind, but it turns out we brought quite a bit home with us.
Including a few more grandchildren, apparently.
Who started out as a stranger in your life and somehow became family?
Maybe you can’t identify the exact moment it happened. That’s probably the point. The most important relationships in our lives aren’t usually built in one big moment. More often, they’re built through thousands of little ones—conversations, meals, laughter, showing up and paying attention.
Maybe there’s somebody in your life who needs to know you’re glad they found their way into yours.
Might be worth telling them.
— Jeff