Nobody Knows Where the Power Is

A British politician named George Brown spent his entire career chasing power. He started in local government, convinced that once he got onto the council, he could change things. But the real decisions happened somewhere else. So he ran for Parliament. Same story. He pushed his way into the Cabinet. Still nothing. He ended up Deputy Prime Minister — one step from the top of the entire British government — looked around, and still couldn't find where the power actually was. Everyone, he said, just seemed to be doing the next thing that came to hand.

I read that story recently and sat with it for a while. Not because I find British parliamentary history especially gripping, but because it named something I keep bumping into here in San Francisco.

Power is supposed to be somewhere. At the top of the org chart. In the right room. With the right people. Accessible, finally, once you've done the work to get close enough.

But what if it doesn't work like that?

The City That Runs on Power

San Francisco is not a modest city when it comes to power. Within a few square miles you have the machinery of global technology, one of the most politically active urban populations in the country, serious money, serious influence, and an almost theological conviction — shared across almost every ideological faction — that if you can just get the right people into the right positions, things will finally change.

I moved here from Berlin seven years ago, which means I arrived as an outsider trying to read a new culture. And one of the first things I noticed was how much of the city's energy goes into the question of leverage. Who has it. How to get it. What to do with it once you do.

It's not cynical. Most of the people I know who are chasing influence here genuinely want to use it well. The question is whether the thing they're chasing actually exists in the form they imagine.

Ephesus Had the Same Obsession

The ancient city of Ephesus was its own kind of power center — religious power, political power, and something the ancient world took with complete seriousness: magical power. Practitioners kept expensive scrolls containing names, formulas, and rituals believed to give the holder access to forces beyond ordinary reach. The market was serious and the prices were high. Everyone wanted leverage over outcomes.

Into that city came Paul — a first-century follower of Jesus who had already turned several cities upside down — and what followed is one of the stranger episodes in early Christian history. Healings. A failed exorcism attempt by a group of practitioners who figured the name of Jesus was just another tool to add to their repertoire, only to discover that the spirit they were addressing had no respect for people using the name without the relationship behind it.

The difference between Paul and the scroll-keepers wasn't what they wanted. Both wanted to see things change. The difference was that the scroll-keepers wanted power they could own and operate. What Paul had wasn't ownable. It came from somewhere else, and it came on terms he didn't set.

The Price of Real Power

C.S. Lewis defined magic as the attempt to gain power without paying the price of humble submission to the God whose power it is. You locate the lever, you pull it, the result arrives, and the control stays with you. Clean. Efficient. Yours.

What Paul was practicing looked nothing like that. And at some point during his time in Ephesus — he doesn't name the crisis specifically, but he describes it as being crushed to the point of despair, certain he was going to die — something broke open in him. Whatever happened, it changed how he talked about power for the rest of his life.

Before Ephesus, Paul wrote about the power of God with confidence and force. After, he wrote about it differently. He started saying things like: "I will gladly boast of my weaknesses, so that the power of the Messiah may rest upon me." Not despite weakness. Through it. The power of Jesus, he was discovering, doesn't flow toward people who have secured their position. It flows toward people who have stopped pretending they have one.

That's a hard thing to sit with. It was hard for Paul. It's hard for me.

What I Keep Watching Here

I follow Jesus in San Francisco, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about what that actually looks like in a city that is, on the whole, deeply skeptical of religious claims. I don't experience that skepticism as hostile. If anything, it keeps me honest. It pushes me to ask whether what I believe is actually true, or whether I'm just pulling levers and calling it faith.

The people I've met here who carry genuine weight — not status, not leveraged influence, but actual gravity that changes the temperature of a room — tend to be people who stopped managing their outcomes quite so tightly. Who got interested in something other than their own position. Who stayed when it would have been easier to leave. Who kept showing up to relationships that didn't advance their career or confirm their existing convictions.

I think that's what Jesus was pointing at when he kept saying, in different ways, that the people who insist on saving their own lives are the ones who lose them. It's not a warning. It's closer to a description of how things actually work.

An Open Hand

I don't have a clean resolution. George Brown's question — where is the power? — is real and worth asking. But perhaps it's pointing at the wrong thing. The power that moves things, the kind that actually changes people and neighborhoods and cities, doesn't sit still long enough to be seized. It shows up in the gap between what you planned and what actually happened. It looks, from the outside, a lot like weakness and a lot like trust.

I've started to notice the moment when I'm trying to pull the lever — when I want the clean transaction, the controlled outcome, the result I can point to. And I've started to wonder whether that's exactly the moment to open my hand rather than close it.

Maybe that's where it starts. Not with more leverage. With less.