In a rainforest, most trees grow together in a dense, connected canopy — branches touching, roots intertwined, wind broken and shared long before it reaches any single trunk. But scattered above that canopy stand a handful of “emergent” trees, giants that have pushed up past everyone else, standing fifty feet or more above the shelter the rest of the forest provides each other.
These emergents catch the fiercest winds first, absorb the most lightning strikes, endure temperature swings and dry seasons the sheltered canopy below barely notices. They didn’t do anything wrong to end up exposed like that. They simply grew tall enough that the very thing offering everyone else protection — the presence of others at the same height — was no longer available to them.
Leadership does something remarkably similar to a person. The higher the calling, the thinner the air, and the fewer people left standing at the same height to share the weather with you.
Moses, Carrying What He Was Never Meant to Carry Alone
Moses reaches a genuine breaking point leading Israel through the wilderness, and his complaint to God is raw enough that it’s easy to forget it’s Scripture:
“I am not able to bear all these people alone, because the burden is too heavy for me. If You treat me like this, please kill me here and now — if I have found favor in Your sight — and do not let me see my wretchedness!” — Numbers 11:14-15, NKJV
This is not a man complaining about difficulty in the abstract. This is exhaustion specific enough to include a request to die rather than continue carrying it alone. And notice — God’s response wasn’t to toughen Moses up or remind him leadership demands this kind of solitary weight. God’s actual solution was structural:
“So the LORD said to Moses: ‘Gather to Me seventy men of the elders of Israel… I will take of the Spirit that is upon you and will put the same upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you may not bear it yourself alone.’” — Numbers 11:16-17, NKJV
That you may not bear it yourself alone. Even God, who had appointed Moses to this exact role, treated the solitary weight as a problem to be solved rather than a badge to be worn. Leadership’s loneliness isn’t a mark of faithfulness to endure silently. It’s frequently a signal that something needs to change.
David, Betrayed Not by an Enemy But by a Friend
David’s loneliness as king carries a different flavor than Moses’ — not merely the weight of decisions no one else could share, but the particular ache of betrayal from someone who once stood close enough to share it:
“For it is not an enemy who reproaches me; then I could bear it. Nor is it one who hates me who has exalted himself against me; then I could hide from him. But it was you, a man my equal, my companion and my acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked to the house of God in the throng.” — Psalm 55:12-14, NKJV
There’s a specific grief here that ordinary people rarely have to carry in quite this shape: the higher a leader rises, the fewer peers remain who can be trusted with the full truth of what they’re carrying — and the ones who do get close enough to see it fully are sometimes exactly the ones positioned to do the most damage if that trust is betrayed. Elsewhere, fleeing for his life in a cave, David names the isolation even more starkly:
“Look on my right hand and see, for there is no one who acknowledges me; refuge has failed me; no one cares for my soul.” — Psalm 142:4, NKJV
No one cares for my soul. Not “no one respects my authority” — a far more intimate ache than mere professional isolation. The king anointed to lead a nation, hiding in a cave, naming outright that no one around him, in that moment, was actually tending to him as a person.
Why This Happens to Nearly Every Leader Eventually
Part of what makes leadership lonely isn’t any personal failure on the leader’s part. It’s structural, built into the position itself. Followers often can’t offer a leader the same unguarded friendship they’d offer an equal, because the leader’s decisions affect them too directly — a friend who might disagree freely with a peer often hesitates to challenge someone whose judgment shapes their own livelihood, safety, or standing. Peers who once walked alongside a person before their rise often quietly step back once the gap in position becomes real, sometimes out of respect, sometimes out of their own discomfort. And the leader themselves often can’t share the full weight of certain decisions without undermining the very people they’re trying to lead well. None of this requires anyone to have done anything wrong. It’s simply what height does to the available shelter.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I know a pastor who led a rapidly growing congregation for over a decade, respected widely, genuinely loved by his people. In private, he described something few in his church would have guessed: he couldn’t afford to be fully honest, without managing the reaction, with more than a handful of people in the world. Every close friendship from before his rise had quietly thinned, not from any falling out, but from the ordinary drift that happens once people start relating to you primarily through your role. What kept him steady wasn’t a wide circle — it was a very small one. His wife, first and most naturally, who carried the weight of his calling alongside him gladly, never treating his doubts or fears as a threat to her own confidence in him, but as simply part of the load two people had agreed to share the day they married. And beyond her, only two or three people who worked closely enough beside him, year after year, to have already earned the right to see him without the role attached — people who’d watched him tired, uncertain, and human long enough that pretending otherwise with them would have been pointless. He has said since that he stopped assuming loneliness was simply the unavoidable cost of the calling, and started being grateful, deliberately, for the very small handful of people God had actually given him to be fully known by.
There’s a proverb worth carrying into this: the tallest palm bends alone in the wind that the shorter ones never feel — but even the tallest palm has roots it shares with the ground beneath it.
What This Isn’t Saying
This isn’t a suggestion that leaders should abandon appropriate boundaries and unload every burden onto whoever happens to be nearby, nor that loneliness in leadership is always a sign something has gone wrong. Christ Himself, the greatest leader who ever lived, still withdrew alone to pray regularly (Luke 5:16) — some solitude is a feature of the calling, not a flaw in it. The danger isn’t solitude itself. It’s the belief that leadership requires total isolation, that no one at all should be let close enough to see the real weight — a belief Moses’ God corrected directly by giving him seventy men to share the burden with, rather than commending him for carrying it alone.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
- Is there a weight I’m currently carrying alone that God might actually want to distribute, the way He did for Moses?
- Have I mistaken loneliness for a badge of faithful leadership rather than a problem worth addressing?
- Like David, have I been betrayed by someone close, and let that betrayal convince me trust itself is now too dangerous to risk again?
- Who, if anyone, sees the real weight I carry — not the role, but the person underneath it?
- Am I, without meaning to, keeping others at arm’s length because closeness now feels like a liability rather than a gift?
Final Word
The emergent tree standing above the canopy isn’t being punished for its height — it simply lost the shelter that comes with staying at the same level as everyone else. Moses was given seventy men so he wouldn’t have to bear Israel’s weight alone. David, even in his most isolated cave, was eventually surrounded by four hundred men who became the core of his mighty army (1 Samuel 22:2). Loneliness may be leadership’s most common companion, but it was never meant to be its permanent condition.
The Kingdom of God being built even now has room enough for leaders to be led, carried, and known — not despite their calling, but as part of how that calling was always meant to be carried.
