When it comes to forgiveness, I start with me. I make way too many mistakes not to warrant at least a few apologies. For me, it’s not just an apology, it’s a lifestyle change. It’s like there is something inside me that decides I’m not doing that again, so I don’t. For me, it’s a mental plan. I figure out what conditions created the mistake and make sure I never create those conditions again.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been correcting my own behavioral mistakes, but former employers can. They’ll tell you one thing: there is documentation to prove it. It’s a record of growth, which includes several write-ups and super hard, extremely uncomfortable conversations, many I initiated, along the way. I try not to repeat any behaviors that cost someone else. And I hold myself to an even higher standard when it’s my own actions that cost me. That’s not to say I’ve always gotten it right the first time. Or the second. However, once I’ve learned the lesson, I figure out what needs to change and move on.

That’s why it troubles me when leaders in positions of power choose not to ask for forgiveness. Instead they turn on the person who brought the concern forward.

I think it happens more often than we hear about. Stories like those of Bill Hybels, the founder of Willow Creek Community Church, one of the most influential megachurches in America. After multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment spanning decades, he denied everything. The elders of Willow Creek, the ones who protected him, eventually came back apologizing to their congregation, but not to the alleged victims. I can’t imagine how those women feel. Unseen. Unbelieved. Abandoned by the very institution that should have protected them.

Then there is Mark Driscoll, pastor and leader of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. His staff accused him of being too aggressive, publicly shaming those around him, and anyone who left the church was ultimately blacklisted. He resigned, moved to Arizona, and started another church two years later.

Neither man has publicly admitted wrongdoing or asked for forgiveness.

And I’m watching all of this from the outside, carrying my own version of the same story.

And yet I’ve been reminded over and over again by pastors and leaders that forgiveness is mine to offer. That making it right starts with me.

I’ve met leaders just like these pastors. Sat under their teaching, trusting their voices, watching them move through a room the way leaders tend to do, with the quiet confidence of someone who has decided, long before the conversation starts, how it ends.

I become the very thing they need me to be.

A guilty party. Wrongdoer. Offender.

But what exactly did I do?

That’s the part that remains unresolved. And yet, in their eyes, I did something wrong. And now I owe them. For something they feel I did wrong. There is no relationship, no way to have a conversation about it, because they delivered their verdict and closed the door. In their mind, the debt doesn’t expire. I’m certain they believe it completely.

Forgiveness doesn’t require the other person to be right.

What forgiveness requires is that you stop waiting for a verdict. One that will never come.

You release them because you deserve to stop standing in a courtroom where the verdict was written before you walked in.

For me, the worst part is losing a ministry partner. Someone I believed in, someone I thought believed in me. A relationship that could have been reconciled. You trusted this leader. Once. You gave them permission to have some weight in your life. And somewhere along the way, that weight got used against me.

Here’s what nobody tells you: that’s grief. It deserves space before you release it.

I’m over here bleeding from a wound that no one else saw, no one else knew existed. What I longed for was a conversation, a reconciliation. But it never happened. Someone I trusted let me down.

The bleeding finally slowed down. But did it stop? Not yet.

Because I’m not ready to put it down. Not yet.

Like it or not, forgiveness isn’t agreeing with the story they told everyone else about you. It’s deciding that story no longer gets to write your next chapter.

Jesus forgave an unpayable debt. But the servant who weaponized that forgiveness into leverage over others? The parable doesn’t end well. Not for him.

Power doesn’t forgive.

Neither does ego. Not easily. It rarely has to.

But I do.

Not because forgiveness is easy.

Because it’s right.

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Who are you still waiting to forgive, and what would it cost you to finally let it go?