Recovery Is Leadership Work: How Healing Changes What the Crack Means

For the past several months, I have been quieter than usual.

If you’ve noticed my absence, there has been a reason.

One of the dearest and most formative influences in my life is gone.

My father—known to many simply as “Pastor Rick”—died earlier this year after a brief battle with cancer.

Even now, those words feel so very strange to write.

Some people shape your life through a handful of significant moments. Others shape it through thousands of ordinary ones accumulated over decades. Papa was both for me. He was a pastor, teacher, encourager, storyteller, lifelong learner, and one of the wisest leaders I have ever known. More than that, he was my safe place, one of my closest advisors, and one of the people whose voice carried enormous weight in my life.

His absence has left a crack.

And if there is one thing Kintsugi leadership has taught me, it is this: the crack is not the end of the story.

The Japanese art of Kintsugi repairs broken pottery with gold. Rather than hiding the fracture, the repair becomes part of the object’s history and beauty. The vessel is not restored to what it once was. It becomes something different.

Too often, leaders believe recovery means returning to normal as quickly as possible. We want to “get back” to who we were before the disappointment, loss, burnout, failure, betrayal, diagnosis, or grief.

But life rarely works that way.

Recovery is not the work of becoming who we were.

Recovery is the work of becoming who we are now.

And that work takes intention.

Over the past months, I have intentionally stepped back from some things and reinvested my energy into others. I have spent time grieving, resting, reflecting, healing, writing, walking, learning, and rebuilding. I have had to accept something many leaders resist: healing is not weakness. It is leadership work.

The strongest leaders I know are not the ones who never break.

They are the ones who refuse to waste the breaking.

They ask hard questions and make meaning. They allow suffering to deepen compassion rather than diminish it—and they integrate the scar instead of pretending it does not exist.

Papa understood this.

He experienced hardship, disappointment, conflict, and profound loss during his lifetime. Yet he remained remarkably curious, hopeful, faithful, and committed to growth. One of the last things he told me was that he did not want to stop growing.

Neither do I.

So this strange time has also brought transition.

After many years in healthcare leadership, I have stepped into a new season focused more intentionally on writing, speaking, teaching, and equipping leaders through Transformationship Leadership Group. It is both exciting and unsettling—a reminder that every meaningful calling eventually requires us to trust God with what comes next.

I do not return unchanged.

None of us do.

But perhaps that’s the point.

Healing does not erase the crack.

It changes what the crack means.

Thank you for your patience during my quiet time. Thank you to those who checked in, encouraged, prayed, listened, and simply stayed.

I suspect there will be more conversations ahead about grief, leadership, recovery, and the gold that can emerge from broken places.

For now, I am grateful simply to be back—and grateful that the story is still being written.

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