For 31 years I was pastor of First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey. I served as Secretary of State of New Jersey, a constitutional officer. I was the first chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission. I have served on nine corporate boards, including public companies. Every one of those seats put me in front of more people than I ever would have stood before without it.

Every one of them also put a target on my back.

I say that plainly. Each position came with its own responsibilities, its own rules and its own expectations. Each one carried influence. And each one was something somebody else wanted. When you hold what another person wants, some folks will admire you. Some will pray for you. Some will wait for you to fall. A few will not wait. They are looking for a rope to hang you with.

I learned early that a title costs something. It costs you some of your personal freedom. The pastor of a large church does not get to have a bad night in public. The Secretary of State does not get to say everything he thinks. A corporate director does not get to talk loosely about what he heard in the boardroom. My behavior had to satisfy the law, and it had to satisfy the people watching. Those are two different standards. I was held to both.

I also knew I would be judged by a different measure than other people. Things forgiven in someone else would be remembered in me. And I knew that as a Black man, every one of those truths was amplified. The old folks in our churches understood this without needing it explained. You had to be twice as good to be judged half as fair. I did not make that rule. I did not like that rule. But I would have been a fool to pretend it was not there.

I have been able to remain free of public scandal. I say that with gratitude and humility, because it was never about being perfect. I am not perfect. It was about decisions I made early and kept. I will set them down here. Partly this is my story. Partly it is counsel for anyone who is climbing, or who has already arrived.

I surrounded myself with wise counselors who told me the truth about myself. Every leader has people who will tell her the truth about her enemies. That is easy. What she needs are a few people who will tell her the truth about herself, and who are not impressed by her title. Proverbs says in the multitude of counsellors there is safety. I found that to be true. The people who loved me enough to disagree with me saved me more than once.

I kept my private life separate from my public life. I did not socialize or fraternize with my professional colleagues. I did not socialize with my church members. Some people found that distant. I understood it as protection, for them and for me. A pastor who is everybody’s buddy will one day have to discipline a buddy. A director who drinks with management will one day have to vote on management’s pay. Friendship and oversight do not sit well at the same table.

I did not write anything I would be ashamed to see published. Letters, emails, text messages. If it would embarrass me on the front page of the newspaper, I did not send it. I assumed every word I wrote would one day be read by the person I least wanted to read it. That assumption has never once been wrong enough to regret.

I never confused my identity with my title. The title was an assignment. I was somebody before I held it and I would be somebody after I gave it back. Leaders who forget that tend to fight like their lives depend on the chair, because in their minds they do.

I did not treat my position as my personal property. The church belonged to God and to the congregation. The office belonged to the people of New Jersey. The board seat belonged to the shareholders. I was a steward. When a leader starts believing he owns the chair, he starts using it for himself. That is how decent people turn into scoundrels.

I tried to treat the people who worked for me as equal members of a team. Titles organize work. They do not rank human worth. And there is a practical side. The people under you see the most. When they have been treated with contempt, they become the most believable witnesses against you.

I did not receive gossip, and I did not spread it. When someone brought me a story about somebody else, I understood they would one day carry a story about me. And I did not treat hearsay as fact. A report is a report. It is not the truth until it has been tested. Leaders who act on rumor end up wounding innocent people and trusting guilty ones.

Every leader has enemies. Every successful person does. You cannot vote them out and you cannot preach them away. What you can do is refuse to help them. Do not hand them the rope. Do not write the headline for them. Do not give them the one thing they are waiting for.

I am grateful for every seat I was given. I am more grateful that I got up from each of them with my name intact.

I did not. I looked at her face and nothing came. That is an awkward moment for a preacher. People expect you to remember them, and you want to. I told her the truth.

Then she told me her first name. That was all it took. I knew her last name before she could say it. I knew her people. I could see her as a teenager in the youth department at First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens. I had not seen her in 33 years.

She is a grown woman now. She is married with four children. They belong to the church where I had just preached, a church led by one of my mentees. He credits our time together with helping him grow as a leader. So the young girl I once pastored is now a member of a church led by a pastor I once mentored. I stood there a minute and let that settle.

One of the greatest joys of pastoral ministry is watching young people grow up and pursue what they were made to do. You do not see the whole picture while it is happening. You see them on Sunday mornings, at youth meetings, at choir rehearsal. You see them when they are in trouble and when they are showing off. Then they leave, and years later you find out how the story went.

Some of those stories have gone very well. One of our young people from First Baptist is touring the world as a featured singer with a world-renowned artist. We heard that voice in our sanctuary first. Another opened a beauty shop that is wildly successful. Another is the pastor of a sister church. We even nurtured a hip hop star and a very successful hip hop producer. The producer learned music production while volunteering at the church. We thought we were getting help with the sound. We were watching a career begin.

It is especially rewarding when they say thank you. Sometimes they can cite something specific I said or did. A sermon. A conversation in my office. A hard word when they needed one. Often I do not remember saying it. They remember. That is humbling. A pastor says thousands of things over the years, and you never know which ones will take root.

I was an activist. I fought for social change and for better public policy. That work aimed at large groups of people. Neighborhoods. Cities. Sometimes the whole country. I believed in that work and I still do. Pastoral ministry is different at its core. It serves one person or one family at a time. A hospital visit. A wedding. A teenager who needs somebody to believe in them. A mother who needs somebody to sit with her.

So success in the pastorate is measured differently. Headlines do not measure it. Personal fame does not measure it. The size of the congregation does not measure it, though plenty of us have been tempted to think so. Success is measured by the outcomes in the lives of specific people. Names and faces. A woman in Virginia with four children and a church home.

I cannot see the whole ledger. Many young people left for college or entered adulthood, and I never heard from them again. I do not know how their lives turned out. I pray they turned out well. Some of them may have had hard roads. That is part of pastoring too. You plant the seed. Somebody else may see the harvest. Sometimes nobody sees it but God.

The ones who stay in touch are constant reminders that a lot of good came out of those 31 years. They are my evidence. On the days I wonder whether it mattered, I think of them.

I believe this is true for my clergy colleagues as well. Every faithful pastor has a list like mine. Somewhere there is a nurse, a teacher, a deacon, a business owner, a father who turned out all right, who remembers what the pastor said when they were fourteen. Most of us will never get a full accounting. We get a few moments like the one I had in Virginia.

She asked if I knew who she was. I did not, at first. But once she said her name, I knew exactly where she came from. I am grateful I lived long enough to see where she landed.

My mind went straight to the Sundays when I was exhausted. My body was tired. My mind was tired. My soul seemed tired too. But here is the irony. On those Sundays, when I was fully conscious that I did not have what it took to deliver a meaningful sermon, I depended on the power of God more than I ever did when I felt strong. That is true for preachers and parishioners alike. We seem to let God empower us only after we realize we do not have enough power of our own. Those were the most impactful sermons I ever preached. Those were the Sundays that gave meaning to the old expression, let go and let God. We cannot do anything worth doing without God’s power, and it usually takes a Sunday like that to remind us.

But physical weariness was never the hardest part.

The hardest Sundays were the ones when I had to preach after being attacked by evil inside the congregation.

Some preachers respond to church conflict by fussing in the pulpit. I always asked God to give me the strength not to do that. Part of it was that most member meanness had nothing to do with me. It was wise not to take it personally. People lash out at pastors because of what is happening to them at home, at work or at school. So I disciplined myself to pray for the people who seemed to hate me in a particular season.

The other part was simple arithmetic. It made no sense to fuss at an entire congregation when only a small percentage of the people knew anything about the matter. Leaders would be surprised how preoccupied most folks are with their own struggles. They do not have time to invest in the interpersonal or organizational business that consumes us. When somebody told me that “everybody” was upset about something, I would ask them how many people were in their everybody. The number usually got small in a hurry. Too often, addressing an issue from the pulpit only informs the people who are hearing about it for the first time.

So the contentious matters never kept me out of the pulpit. If anything, a member in the hospital captured my attention and focus more than a member who was angry with me. Sickness moved me to pray. Meanness I learned to set down before Sunday morning.

What gave me pause was preaching on the Sunday after a nasty, personal attack that carried implications for my reputation in the church, in the community and in my own family.

I served in public office, so I expected false attacks that were politically motivated. Church was supposed to be different. I was accused of being a liar by a deacon in a deacon meeting. I was accused of inappropriate behavior by a trustee who also threatened to inform the media. I was accused of stealing intellectual property from a leading member of the church. All of those accusations were brought to the leading officers of the church. One of them required me to hire legal counsel. And each one brought me a kind of stress I cannot describe.

So many scandals come out of churches now that clergy are assumed guilty even when they are proven innocent. My fear was that if any of those accusations became public, folks would assume I used my influence to escape conviction. An accusation travels faster than the truth. When you are a high profile leader, a rumor can damage your image, your position and your legacy.

So I had to stand in the pulpit, focus on God and my assignment, and preach with passion and power while looking into the faces of my accusers and their little entourages who believed what they believed. Some Sundays that seemed like too much for God to expect of me.

I have talked to enough pastors to know that my experience was not unusual. Most of us have preached on a Sunday morning while carrying something we could not tell anybody in the room.

But the same power that gave me strength when I was physically tired gave me the ability to preach past the accusers. Those other people did not come to church to hear about my trouble. They came for help with theirs.

And I thank God for the grace that kept me from smacking somebody, or beating them with the stick I carry in my car.

The first was in sixth grade. The Williams brothers threw blueberry pie in my face before school started. I can still feel the humiliation—pie dripping down, everyone watching. That moment planted an insecurity that lingered for years. It made me wonder: who else resented me that much, and I just didn’t see it coming? Like most young boys, my inclination was to get over it. And also to have my friend Al beat them up.

The second time was when I was kidnapped. I was a sophomore at Rutgers University. I had helped organize an anti-drug crusade, and the drug dealers kidnapped me, took me to a vacant lot to shoot and kill me. A police officer saved my life. That was the first time I confronted death as a reality. I had experienced the loss of two uncles, but at nineteen years old I had never thought seriously about my own death. Who knows how that affected me? But I never stopped to process what it meant to sit in the back seat of the car they used to transport me and wonder if I would see the next morning.

The third time was when my father died. I was twenty-four years old. He was forty-seven. His death was emotionally jarring and thrust me into a leadership role in my family and our church—neither of which I was prepared for, and I knew it. I had wanted to be a civil rights activist like Jesse Jackson, not a pastor. My father’s death changed all of that. And what did I do? The same night he died, I organized. I called a meeting. I planned the funeral, the run of show, the budget. I stayed busy because staying busy was easier than feeling the weight of what I had just lost. The positive impact was that I later made serving families in bereavement a priority in my pastoral ministry.

Fifty-one years later, when my mother died, I did the exact same thing. The same night she died, I called a meeting of my siblings and two cousins she had raised. We discussed the funeral run of show and the budget. The pattern hadn’t changed. Planning. Organizing. Staying busy. That has been my approach to dealing with stressful situations my entire adult life.

The fourth time I should have sought professional guidance and support was when my relationship with Jesse Jackson deteriorated. Jesse Jackson had been my hero—almost an idol to me. I had planned to work for him for the rest of my life. But the Jesse Jackson I admired from a distance was not the Jesse Jackson up close and personal. And my personal views on organizing strategies and organizational priorities had evolved and did not align with his. When I left, I used as an excuse that I was quitting my job to go home to help my mother raise my sister—which I did. But the fact is, the rupture was real and destabilizing because I had no future plans. I had lost not just a job, but the future I had built my life around. And I had no plan B.

The fifth time was before my marriage. I did have premarital counseling with my wife, and I probably should have had personal counseling also to prepare me to be a husband. Without it, I think I brought a lot of my unresolved issues into the marriage.

And the final time I think I needed counseling is now—after the death of my mother and turning seventy-five years old in the same year. It’s such a significant inflection point in my life that for the first time since speaking with my high school guidance counselor, I have made an appointment to see a counselor and to start a therapeutic counseling process.

The cost of waiting fifty-one years is not a single dramatic breaking point. It’s the accumulated weight I didn’t know I was carrying. What might I have done differently if I had stopped to process the kidnapping, my father’s death, the loss of my vision for the future? What did others lose because I was functioning but not completely whole?

There have been times when I totally shut down and the shutdown never announced itself. It took many forms. At twenty-five, I was hospitalized with stress-induced rheumatoid arthritis. The doctor told me it was caused by stress. I caught bad colds that would keep me in bed for days at a time. I would simply stop work abruptly and go dark for a week. The body forced what I wouldn’t choose—because the busyness itself had become a source of stress.

This pattern is not unique to me. Barna has done extensive research on clergy burnout, unprocessed trauma, and the toll of isolation in pastoral ministry. Most clergy are underpaid, drowning in debt, and maintaining public images that don’t match their private realities. Staying busy helps us avoid dealing with that truth. The pattern extends beyond clergy—to activists, caregivers, community organizers, nonprofit and political leaders. Anyone whose vocation is carrying the weight of others.

The data doesn’t fix the loneliness. When you feel alone, data doesn’t matter. But when you move from feeling alone to choosing solitude—embracing the reality of your situation instead of escaping it—the research can empower you. Realizing that you’re not the only one. The pattern is real. And it’s costing us more than we know.

At seventy-five, my goals for my own counseling are specific. I need help reducing the number of requests I accept for assistance, speaking and meetings. I need help phasing out of certain responsibilities I’ve been carrying that need to transition to others. And I need help identifying the proper role I should be playing—if any—in lieu of the type of leadership role that is more appropriately performed by a new generation of young leaders.

I’m not seeking counseling to process the past, though that will come. I’m seeking counseling to discover how to let go, how to stop and still flourish.

This is my confession: I have been busy my entire adult life. Planning. Organizing. Speaking. Preparing to speak. And staying busy allowed me to escape many of the realities I should have been handling. The six moments I’ve named here are not an exhaustive list. They are highlights—snapshots of a pattern that spans decades. Each one could be its own article. But what matters is not the catalog of trauma. What matters is the recognition: I chose busyness over stopping. I chose motion over stillness. And I’m only now, at seventy-five, learning what that cost me.

Those whose work involves carrying the weight of others already have permission to care for themselves. We have answered a call to serve others and need not serve at their own expense. We don’t have to wait until they’re seventy-five. We don’t have to wait until our bodies force what we won’t choose. We can pivot right now. We can name what we’re carrying. We can admit that we need help handling reality instead of escaping it.

My appointment is the beginning, not the end. But it’s a beginning I wish I had made decades ago.

Contrary to what may appear to be true, this has been one of the least productive years of my life.

Everything I just listed was done by my team. They are passionate professionals who take the work and the mission seriously. Their labor gets attributed to me because my name is on the door. I am blessed to work with them, and I cannot take credit for what they accomplished while I was somewhere else in my head.

I attribute most of my under-performance to two changes. The first is death.

I lost a friend I went to school with from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I lost the friend who embraced me my first day in Chicago when I arrived to work at Operation PUSH. I lost a friend who was a bishop in the AME Church. Then Rev. Jesse Jackson died, the man who taught me how to mobilize people and who put me on a national stage when I was 24 years old. And there were more, folks whose lives were connected to mine in tangible and significant ways.

I have officiated more than a thousand funerals. I know what to say. I know where to stand at the graveside. I know how to hold a family up when their knees go. These deaths landed on me differently than any others in my life.

And then my mother died.

My father died April 12, 1975, at 47 years old. From that day forward I was my mother’s primary support. Fifty-one years. I called her every day, at around the same time, wherever I was traveling. Her health had been in decline for the last four years, and the final six months were severe. My life was organized around supporting my sister and my cousin as they became her primary caregivers. When her suffering ended on March 26 of this year, I was glad for her. I was sad to see her go. We were more like siblings than mother and son.

Some folks think that losing someone who is 94 is easier, because she lived a long life and nobody lives forever. I am a witness to the fact that this is not true. The opposite is true. The longer you have somebody, the more accustomed you are to having them around. Fifty-one years of supporting my mother was more than a relationship. It became a lifestyle. The call at the same hour. Laughing about things only she and I knew. Negotiating with her about her choices for health care. Those were not items on a list. They were the shape of my days.

The gap left by her departure is immeasurable. There are times when I feel like doing nothing. And that is what I do. Nothing.

The second change is that I turned 75.

I allowed my wife to organize a birthday party for me, for the first time. I don’t like parties. I don’t like birthday parties. I definitely don’t like birthday parties for me. I think I allowed it because I am so grateful to be alive, having buried a father who died at 47 and so many friends this year. I think I also allowed it because the gap my mother left required a decision from me about how I would fill it. I was feeling like it is time for me to make transition decisions on purpose, rather than let life play itself out and impose itself on me.

Since retiring from my job as a pastor, I have been busier than I have ever been. And I am busy doing the things I enjoy. Serving on corporate boards. Preaching in churches around the country. Consulting with organizations that request my advice. Helping people achieve financial freedom. But 75 arrived, and the party made it undeniable. I ignored and postponed my 70th because of the pandemic. This one I could not ignore. It felt like an inflection point and not simply a birthday.

So the thoughts, the plans, the dreams and the realities have kept me quite reflective and pensive. I imagine there have been times when some have wondered if I am okay. There have been times when I have wondered if I am okay.

I have made an appointment to speak with a counselor. This will be my first counseling since I met with my high school guidance counselor. I will explain my relationship with counseling in my next post. For now, I am pacing myself through this stage of my life, taking the weight of these changes seriously, and grateful for what longevity is giving me.

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