We All Win

We All Win

All the world is mine and everything in it.

Jim hired me straight out of law school to be his fifth judicial law clerk. He was a district court judge in a rural Minnesota county, and my husband and I were twentysomethings moving to a community in which we knew almost no one.

I attended his funeral, almost exactly seventeen years from the day he interviewed me. As I hugged law clerks number one, three, seven, and eight, I couldn’t help but recognize Jim’s enormous influence on my life—on so many of our lives—despite our tenures as his law clerks being only a year or two.

Jim cheered for each of us, calling out our best qualities before we knew enough to recognize them for ourselves. He let us sit in on every aspect of legal decision making—for example, his wrestling over lunch about a particularly hard decision in a case that would have no winners. He was training us to leave him, and it showed. He developed us, refined us, and then did his best to help launch us forward into a wide variety of jobs using his networks and his influence. I eventually went to work for Jim’s former law firm, and Aaron went to work for Jim’s former client. He leveraged his connections endlessly on our behalf—probably in some ways I’ll never realize.

As I work with women coming up behind me, I now find myself emulating so much of what Jim did for me. My success and the success of the woman next to me are not mutually exclusive. I can be fully and enthusiastically in support of another woman, introducing her to all of the people in my circles without fear that she will move forward at my expense.

This is God’s economy—and there is enough for her and for me. Her win is not my loss, and our success (both hers and mine) are not mutually exclusive. There is no scarcity in God’s economy; after all, he owns the whole world.

— Julie

— Today’s Act of Friendship —

Consider which women need access to your circles of influence at work, at school, in the neighborhood, and in your extended family, and be wildly on their side.