I want to tell you about a decision I made badly — not because I chose the wrong option, but because of why I chose it.
The problem had no clean answer. It was the kind every leader dreads: not a matter of right and wrong, where the road is at least clear even when it’s hard, but a matter of wisdom, where every road on the map has a ditch on both sides. Whatever I decided, someone would pay for it. There was no solution that didn’t cost something. There was only the least-bad option, and even that was far from obvious.
Everyone had an opinion. But a few of those opinions belonged to people I trust — people close to me, whose judgment I respect, whose voices carry real weight in my ear. And they were unified. They believed the situation should be handled a certain way, and they told me so, plainly and in good faith.
Here is my confession. I didn’t agree with them. Underneath it all, I had a different read. But I went with their counsel anyway, and if I’m honest about the motive — really honest — it wasn’t that they’d persuaded me. It’s that I didn’t want to be the one who overruled the room and then stood there watching it blow up. I didn’t want the egg on my face. Following them felt safer. If it went wrong, at least it wouldn’t be my idea that had gone wrong.
You can already see where this is going. It went wrong. And then the people who had counseled the plan looked at the wreckage and — sincerely, without a shred of malice — changed their minds. They weren’t manipulating me. They hadn’t set me up. They simply saw it differently now, the way any honest person does once the results are in. But their change of heart didn’t land on them. It landed on me. The decision was mine again. It had always been mine. I was left holding the bag — and the strange part was that it was a bag I had never wanted to pick up.
The Name of the Trap
What I did has a name, and I’ve found that naming it is the first step to never doing it again. I borrowed my judgment.
On a matter of clear right and wrong, borrowing someone else’s judgment is just laziness — the right answer was available and you didn’t do the work to reach it. But on a genuine judgment call it’s worse than lazy, because there is no obvious answer sitting on the shelf to reach for. Every option is a matter of discernment. And discernment is not a coin toss; it is the work of a leader before God, weighing a hard thing on his knees and asking for the wisdom God promises to give anyone who asks. In that fog, the thing that is truly yours is the judgment God put in your hands to exercise — and that is exactly what I traded away for cover. I didn’t fail because I took counsel. I failed because I used counsel to dodge the harder work of getting my own answer from God.
Counsel Is Not a Co-Signer
Here is the mechanism the trap depends on you not seeing.
When you co-sign a loan, you take on real liability. Your name on that line is legally binding; if the borrower defaults, the bank can come after you. You share the risk in a way that means something. Trusted counsel feels like that. When people you respect tell you how to handle a hard call, it feels as though they’ve put their name on the line next to yours — as though they’ve absorbed part of the risk with you.
They haven’t. Counsel is not a co-signer. The advisor’s name never actually goes on the note. They can walk away from the decision the moment it sours, and they are free to, because they were never liable in the first place. You were. You always were. When the bag comes due, there is only one signature on it, and it is yours.
That is not a knock on advisors. It’s simply the architecture of leadership — and beneath the architecture lies something weightier. The buck was built to stop somewhere, and Scripture says exactly where: “every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:12). Not to the board. Not to the people who advised you. To God, and each of us by himself. For those who shepherd, the reckoning is heavier still — we watch for souls “as they that must give account” (Hebrews 13:17). That is the real reason the decision cannot be delegated, split, or handed off, however crowded the room was when you made it: the One you finally answer to will ask you, not them. This is what borrowed judgment hides. It feels like you’ve spread the risk, when all you’ve really done is give away the one thing that was always yours to carry.
The Oldest Name for It
Strip off the leadership vocabulary and something older is sitting underneath. The real reason I folded wasn’t strategy. It was fear — a specific, respectable, well-dressed fear. Fear of looking foolish. Fear of the I-told-you-so. Fear of standing alone on a call and being wrong where everyone could watch.
Scripture named that fear long ago, and it didn’t flatter it: “The fear of man bringeth a snare” (Proverbs 29:25). Not a reasonable precaution. A snare — a trap, the thing that looks like safety and turns out to be the very mechanism of your capture. That is borrowed judgment exactly: a snare dressed up as prudence. I thought I was protecting myself. I was building the trap I would later step in.
And notice what the fear of man always promises — cover, protection, a crowd to stand in. It offers the one thing it can never deliver, because the crowd scatters the instant the outcome turns, and you are left standing alone regardless. Only now you’re alone with a decision you didn’t even believe in.
A Hundred Fathers
The most famous version of this mistake belongs to a president.
Early in 1961, John F. Kennedy inherited a plan. The CIA wanted to land a force of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs to topple Castro, and they were confident. Kennedy was surrounded by some of the most brilliant advisors ever seated around one table, and as they talked it through, the room drifted toward yes.
Here is what surfaced later. A number of those advisors carried serious private doubts that the mission would work — and never voiced them, in part because no one wanted to be the man who looked soft or timid in front of the others. Kennedy had his own doubts too, and kept them to himself; as the leader, his silence read as approval. So everyone in that room leaned on a confidence that almost no one actually felt. One of those advisors said afterward that had a single senior voice firmly opposed it, he believed the president would have called the whole thing off. Nobody did. The invasion went ahead, and it collapsed within days — a total, public humiliation.
Then Kennedy did the thing I had not. He stood at a press conference, reached for an old proverb — victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan — and instead of pointing at the CIA, said plainly that he was the responsible officer of the government. The plan had a hundred fathers going in. When it failed, it was an orphan, and the president picked it up alone.
And here is the part worth underlining for anyone convinced that owning a failure will finish them: it didn’t. Kennedy’s approval climbed to eighty-three percent in the aftermath — not in spite of his taking the blame, but because of it. People trust a leader who carries his own bag. He didn’t stop there, either. He tore apart the way his team made decisions, built dissent into the process on purpose, required people to challenge the assumptions in the room — and eighteen months later that reformed process was part of what walked the world back from nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He turned the worst decision of his presidency into the machinery that carried the world through its most dangerous hour.
The Man Who Took It to God
Scripture doesn’t only diagnose this trap. It shows us a man who didn’t fall into it.
Nehemiah is rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, and his enemies want him dead. A man named Shemaiah brings him counsel that sounds not merely reasonable but spiritual: come hide in the temple, shut the doors, they are coming to kill you tonight. It is the safe move. It is the sensible move. And Nehemiah won’t take it. He holds the counsel up against his calling — “Should such a man as I flee?” — and against the witness of God’s Spirit, and it fails both tests. The discernment lands with certainty: “I perceived that God had not sent him” (Nehemiah 6:11–12). Notice what he did not do: he did not fall back on his nerve or his instincts. He carried the advice to God and found it wanting. The counsel was a trap, and Nehemiah caught it because he ran it past the Lord instead of surrendering to the pressure in the room. The doors stayed open. The wall was finished in fifty-two days.
Don’t miss the balance, because it’s the whole point. The problem was never counsel itself. Scripture is emphatic that wise leaders gather it — “in the multitude of counsellers there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14). Nehemiah wasn’t a man who shut out advice; he simply refused to let good-sounding advice do his deciding for him. That is the entire distinction, and it is a narrow one. You seek counsel. You weigh it before God. Then you decide, as the one who will answer to Him for it. Counsel informs the call; it doesn’t get to make the call, and it never absorbs the consequences of the call.
What I’d Tell Myself
If I could go back to the man staring at that no-win decision, I wouldn’t tell him to ignore his advisors. I’d tell him to listen to every one of them — and then to take the whole mess to God, make the call he believed was right before Him, and put his name on it without flinching. Not because his read was sharper than theirs, but because a leader is meant to decide from conviction before God, not from fear of the people in the room.
Because here is what I know now that I didn’t know then. A wrong call you own leaves your integrity intact. You lose the outcome, but you keep yourself — and people will follow a leader who was honestly wrong far longer than they’ll follow one who was evasively right. A borrowed call costs you twice: you lose the outcome and you lose the very thing you were trying to protect, which was their respect and your own.
Either way, the bag ends up in your hands. That was never up for negotiation. The only thing you ever got to choose was whose judgment you’d find inside when you finally opened it — a call you sought out before God and made from conviction, or one you borrowed from the room to feel safe and are now stuck answering for. And there is a day coming when you’ll open it in front of Him, not them. The fog was real, but you were never alone in it: the God who gives wisdom to anyone who asks was there the whole time, waiting to be sought. Seek Him there, and the judgment you carry out is your own — and His. The bag is coming to you regardless. Make sure what’s inside it was forged before God, not borrowed from the room.
