BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. Part two of my reflections on David’s leadership during collective trauma, following “Leadership Lessons from the Ruins of Ziklag.” The marathon continues, and not everyone can cross the stream.

This war reveals who we really are once the masks come off. Three years into it, we have learned something unsettling about human endurance: it has limits our moral rhetoric never acknowledged. The question haunting Ukrainian communities, and our international partners who watch from a safer distance, is not whether we can win this war but whether we can survive it with our humanity intact.

The Brook Besor runs through every one of us. On one side stand those still moving, still functional, still meeting expectations. On the other lie those who have reached their breaking point, through the simple mathematics of human limitation under infinite pressure rather than through any moral failure.

Some international partners celebrate our resilience, and I do not mean Mesa, Langham, Scholar Leaders and other friends who have gone through so much alongside us, since they know better. What is being celebrated, and please do not take offense at this, is often our performance. They need us to be consistently heroic, because our collapse would force them to confront the limits of their own capacity for sustained solidarity. Meanwhile we have learned here that resilience has to do with building communities that do not abandon their members when the performance ends, rather than with maintaining the performance itself.

In my previous reflection on 1 Samuel 30 I traced how David and his six hundred men found Ziklag destroyed by Amalekite raiders, their families taken captive, their community erased. We saw David turn to God for strength at the moment when everything fell apart and his own men wanted to kill him in their pain. That was David getting ready to act rather than giving up and waiting for rescue, and what happens next shows something about the nature of hope under sustained crisis, and about the moral complexity of leading a community through what I have come to think of as marathon trauma, where the end of the war stays invisible and human endurance reaches its absolute limits.

When David asks God what to do next, his question overturns a common misunderstanding of how faith is supposed to work in trauma. His hope in God is an active seeking of God’s will for immediate action rather than a passive waiting for divine intervention. This is neither the prayer as spiritual bypassing that avoids any engagement with suffering, nor the prayer as magical thinking that expects circumstances to change without human participation. David models something else, the recognition that meaningful action in a crisis requires divine guidance and human agency together, and his question is not whether God will resolve the situation for him but whether God is calling him to take part in resolving it. That distinction matters when a community faces prolonged suffering with no quick resolution in sight.

At the same time, divine faithfulness does not guarantee that every member of a community will keep an equal capacity for action, and that fact diminishes neither God’s calling nor the responsibility of those who can still move.

So the Brook Besor becomes more than a geographical obstacle, since it becomes the line separating those who retain the capacity for continued mission from those whose resources have been completely depleted. That division happens through the plain reality of human limitation under sustained trauma rather than through moral failure. The text says these men “were so weary that they could not cross,” and this is the exhaustion that comes with a marathon crisis, the point where a human being reaches the absolute limit of physical and emotional and spiritual resources, and it has nothing to do with laziness or cowardice or a lack of faith. It is a weariness that goes past tiredness into the depletion of the life force itself.

For those of us living through the marathon of russian aggression, which began in 2014 rather than in February 2022 and which shows no visible endpoint, this image carries a devastating relevance. We prepared for a sprint and discovered we were running a marathon. We hoped the war would end in months, then in a year, then after particular battles or diplomatic meetings. And here we are, more than three years into the full-scale invasion, with no finish line in sight, and some among us have reached their own Brook Besor, not through any lack of courage or faith, but because human beings are not built for indefinite crisis response, and because what psychologists call allostatic load means that what we could do in year one becomes unthinkable in year three.

Notice who the wicked and worthless men in this story are. They are not the two hundred who stayed behind, but some of the four hundred who completed the mission. Their wickedness lies in their attitude toward those who could not continue rather than in any inability of their own, and here we meet a difficult moral principle: worthiness is determined by how the exhausted are treated rather than by anyone’s capacity for endurance.

Social psychology recognizes the pattern as in-group bias under stress, the tendency of those who make it through a crisis to develop contempt for those who do not. Nobody could deny what the four hundred had achieved, since the families were safe, the possessions recovered, the mission complete. And that real accomplishment became a weapon the moment it was turned against people too weary to go on, carrying the assumption that moral worth correlates with functional capacity, that those who keep going through marathon trauma possess superior character while those who reach their limits are marked down as failures.

David’s response is one of the most radical acts of leadership in the whole story, since he reframes the situation by rejecting the assumption that contribution must be measured in visible action. Those who “stayed by the supplies,” which is a generous reinterpretation of people who simply could not continue, receive an equal share in the victory. This is a fundamental redefinition of community membership rather than charity or pity, since David recognizes that the success of the four hundred was possible only because the two hundred had taken part in the earlier stages of the journey. I want to say that again: the success of the four hundred was possible only because the two hundred had walked the earlier stages. Their present inability to continue negates neither their prior contribution nor their ongoing membership.

Living through this marathon has taught me that endurance follows patterns our initial expectations could not anticipate. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion we believed resilience meant maintaining consistent performance under pressure, and many people from abroad praised us for exactly that. Now, in the fourth year, we have learned that resilience means building sustainable systems for long-term resistance, in which not all participants can keep the same pace.

The stream runs right through our communities, our projects, our seminary hubs and programs, and our humanitarian work. On one side stand those who led the charge in 2022, mobilizing whole networks and seeming unstoppable. On the other side those same people now struggle with what once was automatic: getting dressed, answering a message, facing another day. Devoted parents who held their families steady while supporting the war effort now face a depression that makes basic tasks overwhelming.

The temptation for those of us who can still function is to measure ourselves against those who cannot, either to feel superior or to feel guilty about our own continued ability, and both responses miss David’s insight, that membership is determined by a shared commitment to the mission rather than by current functional capacity. None of this means lowering the bar, abandoning standards or pretending that differences do not exist. Those four hundred accomplished something the others could not manage. The thing about marathon trauma is that it scrambles everything, since your strongest people hit walls you never saw coming while others find reserves they did not know they had.

“They shall share alike” sounds like a simple rule, and David is in fact overturning our whole way of measuring success, saying that in God’s arithmetic the success of a community includes the people who could not cross the stream. What does that look like in practice? It means our communities become places where the exhausted belong, rather than places where they are managed as problems. The man who ran evacuations in 2022 and now struggles in crowds is not broken, since he is still human and still belongs here. The volunteer who organized aid convoys and can no longer handle logistics is exhausted rather than failing. We should stop dividing ourselves into the functional and the struggling and treating the second group as an obstacle on the way to success.

This needs a practical application that goes beyond sentiment, which means learning to build differentiated participation, systems that let members contribute according to their present capacity while keeping equal dignity and belonging. Some weeks you lead and other weeks you follow. Sometimes your contribution is organizing aid, and sometimes it is sitting with someone in their pain. When people reach their breaking point, we learn to surround them with care rather than with a timeline for their recovery, instead of demanding that they simply get better and return to their previous level of function.

And here is the uncomfortable question: when we see someone who cannot keep going, do we feel superior or do we feel afraid? Because marathon trauma teaches that strength and weakness trade places without warning, and none of us knows when our turn will come. Everyone will reach their own Brook Besor sooner or later, some already have, others will meet it tomorrow or a year from now, and the question is not whether we will reach our limits but how we treat those who reach theirs before us, and how we hope to be treated when our own turn comes.

So what? The stream does not care about our geopolitical strategies or our organizational budgets, and it does not distinguish between Ukrainian activists and international partners, or between seminary leaders and church ministers. It runs wherever human beings are asked to endure the unendurable for a cause greater than themselves. To those who measure our worthiness by our continued functionality: your support will be tested by how you respond when we can no longer perform at the level you have come to expect. Will you remain when we can no longer be your poster children for resilience?

To fellow Ukrainians who have reached your own Brook Besor: your exhaustion is not betrayal, your limitations are not moral failure, and your inability to continue does not disqualify you from the victory that will eventually come.

The ultimate question this war poses, to Ukraine and to our partners and to humanity itself, is whether we can build communities that honor both strength and weakness, that make room for the functional and the depleted alike, and that understand victory as the preservation of belonging for everyone who shared the journey rather than as the triumph of the capable. David’s radical inclusion was prophecy rather than charity, since in the end communities survive by keeping their souls rather than their standards.

The marathon continues. The stream divides us, and it need not define us. The question is no longer who will cross the finish line, but who will stay human enough to carry those who cannot cross alone.

Peace be with you, and may we learn to carry each other across the streams we cannot cross alone. Keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine
Day 1229 of the full-scale russian aggression against Ukraine