Scars Don't Bleed
Why healed leaders lead differently, and how to become one
An excerpt from Abiding Leadership | Coming Spring 2027
Every leader carries two stories. There is the one on the bio page, and there is the one underneath it, the story that never gets told publicly but shapes nearly every decision a leader makes.
I know because I have lived both. For years I led from unnamed wounds. On the outside, competence and a track record. On the inside, a place still tender from people who were supposed to be safe and were not. If you have led long enough, you have your own version. The mentor who dismantled you. The friend who discarded you. The board that deemed you unnecessary. The betrayal that came from someone who sat at your table and prayed your prayers.
A wound is still open. Still bleeding, still reactive, still making decisions from pain we have never brought into the light. A scar is healed. Still visible, still part of the story, but no longer running the show.
Betrayed by the People Who Should Have Protected Him
Joseph was seventeen when his own brothers threw him in a pit and sold him for twenty pieces of silver. His family, the people who were supposed to protect him, became the source of the damage.
When that happens to you, something specific happens to your leadership. You build invisible walls. You struggle to trust people who have given you no reason for mistrust. Some of us become controlling, because control feels like the only defense against being vulnerable again. Some of us become people-pleasers, managing everyone's approval because the memory of rejection is too painful to risk repeating. I have done both. Neither was a strategy. They were survival mechanisms, and they worked, until they did not.
What stuns me about Joseph is what the suffering did not do to him. In the pit, in slavery, in prison, "the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a successful man" (Genesis 39:2, NKJV). And when he finally stood before his brothers, holding all the power, he wept, forgave, and said the words only a healed man can say: "But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20, NKJV).
He did not pretend it had not mattered. He named the evil, then held it alongside a larger truth: God was present in the worst of it, weaving something Joseph could not see from the bottom of the pit. That is what a scar sounds like.
Moving From Wound to Scar
Your wounds and scars are not disqualifications. In God's hands, they become the very material He uses. Your story is HIS-tory and He will use it for good. Start here:
1. Name what happened. Write it in plain language. This happened. It was wrong. It affected me deeply. The leader who cannot acknowledge the wound cannot heal from it.
2. Trace its fingerprints. Where are you controlling, people-pleasing, isolating, or resisting accountability? Ask someone who loves you enough to answer truthfully.
3. Forgive without requiring resolution. Joseph's brothers never fully confessed. Forgiveness is not the door out for the person who hurt you; it is the door out for you.
4. Pursue healing, not management. Humor, workaholism, and spiritual performance keep the wound hidden without closing it. Real healing takes honest community and sustained, undefended time in God's presence.
"But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5, NKJV).
The scar will still be there. But scars do not bleed. And in the right light, they tell the most important part of your story.
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