I used to think leadership was about vision-casting from the front of the room. Then I sat at my father’s bedside while he died. Then I held my friend’s hand while cancer finished its cruel work. Then I closed the eyes of strangers who somehow became family in the last days of their stories. In every one of those rooms, I learned the same lesson the hard way. Real leadership doesn’t happen on a stage. It happens in a chair pulled close to a bed when there is nothing left to fix, only to love.

Mission isn’t a department. It’s a way of being.

Jesus never delegated abundant life to a committee. He became it. He moved into the neighborhood of our pain, pulled up a chair, and stayed. He washed feet the night before His own were pierced. He forgave while He was dying. He turned the worst death imaginable into the doorway we all walk through to get home. That is the only leadership model that still works when the monitors go quiet.

So here is the quiet, daily work I keep inviting hospice leaders into—and the work I keep coming back to myself:

1. Remember who you are before you remember what you do. When I walk into a dying person’s room, I am not first a director, a chaplain, a coach, or even a “professional.” I am a child of God who has been loved through my own valleys of shadow. Everything I offer after that flows (or fails to flow) from that single identity.
2. Let the moment press on your deepest values instead of your deepest fears. Every shift brings a hundred temptations to compromise: to rush the visit, to placate the angry family member, to chart “patient resting comfortably” when we both know the pain is brutal and the morphine is late. Leadership from the inside out means I feel the pressure, name the temptation, and choose the value anyway—because I decided long ago who I was going to be when no one was watching.
3. Ask, in every room and every meeting, “How is love trying to become flesh through me right now?” Sometimes love looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like fighting for one more dose of comfort medication. Sometimes it looks like laughing with a family about the patient’s terrible jokes one last time. The question is never “What is easiest?” The question is always “What is truest?”

I help leaders do this work—connecting identity, values, and purpose with the relentless realities of people, pressure, performance, and progress through the RESTORE PATHWAY . My own strange journey through ministry, classrooms, groups, boardrooms, and bedsides has only convinced me of one thing: We don’t need more clever strategies nearly as much as we need braver souls.

So today, before your next admission, your next family meeting, your next impossible conversation with a burned-out nurse, pause long enough to pray something like this:

Jesus, You who sat with the dying and then conquered death, root me again in who I am in You. When the pressure comes—and it will—let it reveal me, not ruin me. Show me which value You are inviting me to live right now, even if it costs me. And use these ordinary hands, this tired voice, this stubborn heart to make Your love take on flesh one more time in a room where someone is terrified to let go.

Mission isn’t a department. It’s a way of being. And the people we serve deserve leaders who live it.

I’m in this with you. Let’s keep choosing love—one brave, tender, love-shaped day at a time.