I think it was my friend Michael-Ray Mathews who first shared David Whyte’s poem “Loaves and Fishes” with me several years ago. I was moved then by the poem’s clear call to say “Enough” to all the information that comes at us, all the data, trends, tips, theories, and reems of paper that tempt us as leaders who want to understand and offer something of value to the people we serve. The poet reminds us that something else is at stake, and he calls us to let go.

The poem came to me again recently, and I included it as a prologue to a paper on leadership development for the United Church of Christ-related Council for Health and Human Service Ministries. The paper explores our yearning for a different kind of leadership: a leadership that leaves aside fixing things and instead attends to Good Work already underway; a leadership that lets go of anxious striving after information that will somehow make us better than we are and instead leans into the truth that God delights in us, that we are enough.

Here is David Whyte’s poem:

“Loaves and Fishes”

This is not the age of information.
This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news
and the radio
and the blurred screen.

This is the time of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.