When All You Can Do Isn’t Enough

There are seasons in leadership when effort stops feeling like progress. You show up. You speak carefully. You make decisions with intention. And still, it feels like it is not enough. Not to the people you serve. Sometimes not even to you.

We are living in one of those seasons.

The economy continues to press hard on families already stretched thin. Trans people are being openly targeted, legislated against, and spoken about as abstractions rather than neighbors. Racism has not disappeared. It has simply learned how to sound respectable. And the least of these remain where they have always been, waiting while others debate priorities, tone, and timing.

Leading in this moment is not theoretical. It is embodied. Every word feels insufficient. Every pause feels suspect. You can speak and be told you did not go far enough. You can act quietly and be accused of doing nothing at all.

For those of us who carry privilege, there is an added tension. Privilege does not evaporate because it is acknowledged. And for those who live under constant pressure, our efforts can feel thin. Apologies sound rehearsed. Solidarity can feel symbolic. Even sincere action is often experienced as too little, too late.

That frustration should not be dismissed. Anger from the margins is not entitlement. It is pain refusing to be managed.

At the same time, another truth deserves to be spoken without defensiveness. Leaders are finite. We operate inside systems we did not design and communities that do not move as one body. Many leaders are not indifferent. They are exhausted. They are trying to hold together people who do not yet agree on what justice requires. They are carrying criticism from every direction, often without the option of stepping away.

The early Church was honest about this tension. The Fathers never imagined leadership as efficiency or universal approval. They understood it as endurance under contradiction. Shepherds were not measured by how quickly they resolved conflict, but by whether they remained present when the work was slow, resisted, or misunderstood. Faithfulness was not fixing the world. It was refusing to abandon it.

That wisdom matters now.

Faith, at its best, does not promise resolution on our timetable. It shapes posture. Not certainty, but presence. Not control, but attention. Advent hints at this without demanding that we resolve it. It admits the work is unfinished and still insists we stay awake to it. The light is real, but it does not erase the night all at once.

When all you can do feels like it is not enough, you still do it.

You keep showing up. You keep naming harm even when the response is mixed. You keep widening the table even when some say you are moving too fast and others say you are not moving at all. You listen to voices that unsettle you. You resist the temptation to center yourself, even when the work wounds you.

This is not heroism. It is faithfulness.

The Church has carried this before. Leaders have stood in this tension before. They did not resolve it by strength or certainty, but by endurance. By staying. By trusting that God works not only through visible victories, but through people who refuse to disappear when the work feels unfinished.

That, too, is tradition.

That, too, is practice.