Noah Inside the Ark

A reflection on Susan Beaumont's "How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going"

I've always loved the story of Noah, but I'd never sat with it the way Susan Beaumont made me sit with it — inside the ark, in the dark, with the animals, waiting on a world that hadn't been remade yet.

Beaumont's first two chapters gave me language I'd been circling for a while without landing on: the liminal period. The space after separation from what was, and before reorientation into what's next. It reminded me immediately of Brueggemann's description of the disorienting new season — that same intentional lack of clarity, the same discomfort that comes before anything resolves. I don't think that concept gets enough respect from the larger community of leaders and institutions I move through. We are so quick to treat unclarity as a problem to be solved instead of a season to be lived inside of.

We're familiar with liminal space in a much more literal sense — birthing rooms, waiting for a baby to be fed, are as liminal as it gets. But Beaumont's use of Noah is what stayed with me. Noah inside the ark is the perfect image of what it means to be human, undergoing transformation, while the world outside is changing in ways you cannot see and cannot control. We rarely look at Noah and his family as living on the ark, with the animals, as its own transformative season from the inside. We jump straight from flood to dove to rainbow. We skip the part where he just had to stay, in the dark, not knowing.

Beaumont offers a few practical concepts for staying in that space without losing yourself in it — what she calls blind spot markers: an open mind, an open heart, an open will. An open mind suspends judgment. An open heart shifts your perspective from your own view to someone else's. An open will means letting go of what you expect the outcome to be, and letting come what may.

I'll be honest — some of this language felt like it was working harder than it needed to, dressing up a familiar idea in new packaging. I wondered, at moments, if this section existed more to classify the book as self-help than to say something new. It didn't fully land for me, even while I understood exactly what she meant underneath the terminology.

What did land, without qualification, were the three internal voices Beaumont names as the ones that keep a leader stuck in liminal space: judgment, cynicism, and fear. And the three spiritual shifts she offers against them — from knowing to unknowing, from advocating to attending, from striving to surrender — are both refreshing and, honestly, a relief. They reminded me that we are so eager to be seen working on Christ Consciousness that we end up hindering the very power we're claiming to seek.

Beaumont writes:

"The authenticity of any leadership action depends upon the interior condition of the leader — on his/her ability to be true to self and true to the institution, to remain non-anxious, and to connect with the Divine." (23)

Here's why I'm telling you this.

Almost every organization I sit with is in some version of the ark, whether they'd name it that way or not — between what they used to be and what they haven't become yet, uncertain of the shoreline, unable to see land. And the instinct in that season is almost always to strive harder: more strategy, more urgency, more certainty demanded of leadership than the moment can actually offer.

What Beaumont names, and what I've watched play out in real organizations, is that the leader's interior condition during that liminal season shapes everything downstream of it — whether the culture they lead can tolerate not-knowing, or whether it fractures under the pressure to look resolved before it actually is. Judgment, cynicism, and fear don't just live in individuals. They become organizational habits, passed down through how leadership behaves when no one has the answer yet.

Part of the work I do is simply this: helping a leader, and the system around them, stay honest about which season they're actually in — instead of performing a resolution the organization hasn't reached yet.

LaSheena T. Jenkins is the founder of LTJ LLC, offering Strategic Organizational & Prophetic Counsel to churches, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations.