Here’s our last leadership question…
The decision is sitting on your desk right now.
Maybe it’s a staff transition you’ve been circling for months. A confrontation you keep rescheduling. A direction change you know is right but haven’t announced. Whatever it is, it feels enormous, and it fills the whole frame.
You’ve replayed the conversation in your head a dozen times. You’ve imagined the fallout. You’ve calculated who will be upset, who will leave, who will question you.
The weight you’re carrying is legitimate. The size of the moment is where you’re being deceived.
The Moment Distorts Everything
Pressure has a way of making the present feel permanent.
When you’re inside a hard moment, it looks like the whole story. Every possible consequence feels immediate and lasting. The discomfort of the next thirty days crowds out the next thirty years.
Here’s what actually happens. The moment passes, the hard conversation gets absorbed, the transition settles, and the church keeps moving. A few years from now, this decision that feels overwhelming today becomes a paragraph in a much longer story.
You will tell that story someday. To a young leader asking for advice. To your team when you explain how the church got here. To yourself, honestly, when you look back at how you led. The fear rarely survives the retelling, but what you did always does.
One More Question
So before you decide, ask it: What story do I want to tell?
The honest version. The one you’ll give when someone asks what happened, how you handled it, how you treated the people involved, and whether the mission moved forward because of you or in spite of you.
Play it forward. Three years from now, you’re recounting this season to someone who trusts you. One version sounds like, “I saw the problem, and I addressed it with clarity and care.” The other version sounds like, “I knew what needed to happen. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
Nobody wants to tell the second story. Leaders write it every day anyway, one postponed conversation at a time. The story gets told either way, so the only real choice you have is which one.
Borrow Perspective From Your Future Self
You’re a pastor, so let’s be clear about what this question is doing. It’s a perspective exercise, and it works because your future self is standing on the other side of this decision, where the fear has evaporated and only the facts remain.
That version of you sees the moment at its actual size. Small enough to move through and big enough to matter.
Future you already knows the right call. Ask him.
Run It This Week
- Name the decision. Take the hardest one you’re currently carrying, the one that keeps sliding to next week’s calendar.
- Write the story. Before your next meeting about it, write three sentences describing the story you want to tell about this season three years from now. How you led, how you treated people, what happened to the mission.
- Compare it to your calendar. Read what you wrote next to what you’re actually doing. If the story says courage and your calendar says another reschedule, you have your answer.
- Close the gap. The distance between the story you want to tell and the actions you’re taking is the exact distance you need to close. Schedule the conversation this week.
BTW: The Chapter Gets Written Either Way
Here’s what’s at stake if you wait.
Avoidance keeps writing the story, and it writes a worse one. Every month the decision sits unmade, the plot develops without you. The problem compounds, your team draws conclusions, and the version of events you’ll eventually have to tell gets harder to say out loud.
You won’t be the only narrator either. Your staff will tell this story. The people affected will tell it. They’re watching how you lead right now, and their version will include whether you did the hard thing or dodged it.
Fear is a terrible author. Do the hard thing so you can tell the best story.
Quotes to Share
- “Every hard decision eventually becomes a paragraph in a much longer story. Lead like you know that.”
- “Future you already knows the right call. Ask him.”
- “Fear is a terrible author. Do the hard thing so you can tell the best story.”
Helping You Add More Intention To Your Mission,
Dr. Gavin Adams
