"Let Me Pray on It" Is How Some Leaders Hide From Decisions They've Already Made
The most spiritual-sounding sentence in leadership is sometimes the holiest form of hiding. Learn to tell the difference before it costs your team.
Let me give you a situation.
A leader gets asked for a decision. The information is on the table. The team is ready and leaning in. And then the leader reaches for the five holiest-sounding words in all of organizational life.
“Let me pray on it.”
Sometimes that sentence is exactly what it claims to be. A person truly seeking wisdom before they act. We honor that. We practice it ourselves.
Other times that same sentence becomes a permission slip, taped neatly over a decision the leader has already made and quietly does not want to carry out.
I know that one stings a little. It stings me too, because I have said it when we shouldn’t have. I had a made decisions in my mind that I knew had to happen, but wasn’t ready to face it. So I “prayed”.
But I’ve also delayed decisions where prayer was truly needed. I am currently coming off of a staff planning intensive that was delayed 6 months because I needed to gain clarity from the Lord in some very key areas and it made all the difference.
This week, I want to walk you through the difference between the two, because your people can feel that difference long before they can put words to it.
And the gap between praying and hiding is shaping the trust of everyone who reports to you right now.
The Fourth Clause James Never Wrote
There is a verse most leaders can quote in their sleep. It shows up on office walls and in staff devotionals, and it gives us a clean instruction for how to carry ourselves in the room.
My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry,
James 1:19 NIV
Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Slow to become angry. That is a good order for the mouth and for the temper.
But, somewhere along the way, a fourth clause got bolted onto this direction that James never actually wrote.
Slow to decide.
We took a command about restraining our words and our anger and stretched it to cover our hesitation. Now the word “slow” carries a spiritual endorsement it was never given.
Read the verse again and watch what it protects. Slow to speak protects other people. It keeps you from wounding someone with a half-formed reaction you would regret by lunch.
Slow to decide, past a certain point, does the opposite. It leaves people hanging. It keeps a team member arranging her family’s life around a maybe. It keeps a whole department building backup plans for a word that never comes.
One restraint serves the room. The other quietly holds the room hostage.
James was teaching you to guard your tongue. He was not handing you a hiding place for your decisions.
Discernment and Avoidance Wear the Same Clothes
This is what makes the whole thing so hard to catch. Real discernment and quiet avoidance look almost identical from the outside.
Both of them involve waiting. Both of them get described as “praying about it.” Both of them sound mature in a staff meeting.
The difference lives entirely on the inside, and it comes down to one question every leader has to answer honestly.
Am I gathering what I need to decide, or am I stalling because I don’t want to own the decision?
In my coaching work with executives and pastors, I have learned to test that question with markers you can actually see.
Discernment has motion in it.
It asks specific questions of specific people.
It listens for particular answers.
It narrows the options week over week.
It knows what it is waiting for and roughly when it will arrive.
Avoidance has none of those markers.
It stretches on with no end in sight.
The criteria stay foggy.
The list of options never gets shorter.
Nobody, including the leader, can name what would need to be true to finally move.
Ask a discerning leader what they are waiting on and they will tell you plainly: two conversations, one budget number, a week of counsel. Ask an avoider the same question and the answer goes soft, because the waiting was never really the point.
Not deciding was the point.
Come back to James one more time. Slow to become angry has a purpose you can name. It buys you time to respond instead of react. If your slowness has no purpose you can name out loud, it may not be as holy as it feels.
God is patient. God is never passive.
Pilate Had a Decision Too
There is a moment in Scripture we keep coming back to, because it may be the most respectable leadership failure ever recorded.
Jesus stands before Pilate. We tend to fix our attention on the cruelty of the crowd and skim right past the man holding the gavel. Pilate had a decision to make, and the text is almost embarrassing about how clearly he already knew the right one.
He said it out loud, more than once.
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”
John 18:38 NIV
He knew the truth. He had the authority. And then he did the very thing frightened leaders do when they do not want to own an outcome.
He stalled.
He shipped Jesus off to Herod. He offered the crowd a choice between two prisoners. And when none of it worked, he reached for a bowl of water in front of everyone and called the whole thing somebody else’s fault.
Notice what Pilate never did. He never did anything dramatically evil. He avoided doing the hard right thing and dressed the avoidance up as deference. Let the people decide. Let it play out. This one is above my pay grade.
That is this very temptation in its most respectable disguise, and it shows up in the performance review that never happens, the staffing change that drags for eighteen months, and the strategic pivot everyone privately agrees on and nobody will sign.
This is the part that should sit heavy with all of us.
Not deciding is a decision. It always is.
Pilate’s refusal to act on what he already knew did not keep his hands clean. It shifted the weight onto other people while he got to feel like a bystander in his own courtroom. The water was for show. The verdict was already his.
The Leaders Scripture Actually Holds Up
Set Pilate next to the leaders God commends, and a pattern jumps off the page.
Nehemiah hears that Jerusalem’s wall is broken and its gates are burned. He does not announce a plan on day one. He rides out at night, alone, and surveys the rubble for himself. He gathers what he needs quietly and thoroughly. Then he stands up in public and moves, with his own name attached to the work.
Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”
Nehemiah 2:17 NIV
Nathan carries a harder assignment.
He has to confront a king who has abused his power, and getting it wrong could cost him his life. So he waits for the right moment and prepares his words with care. Then he walks into the throne room and says the hard thing to David’s face.
Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”
2 Samuel 12:7 NIV
Both men waited. Both men prayed. And in both cases the patience had an ending. It ended in action with a name on it.
That is the pattern we try teach the people we lead, because it holds up everywhere a hard call has to be made. Waiting that ends in ownership builds trust. Waiting that stretches on forever eats away at it. Your team feels the difference long before they can explain it to you.
What Chronic Indecision Is Costing Your Organization
I have walked alongside enough organizations to say this with confidence. Indecision compounds like debt.
When a leader habitually defers, three things happen, and they happen in order.
First, the organization stalls. Projects sit in limbo. Good people build their careers around backup plans. Real opportunities expire while the leader “gathers a little more input.”
Second, trust erodes. Teams stop bringing decisions to a leader who will not make them. They quietly route around the office. The leader keeps the title and slowly loses the authority.
Third, the culture learns the lesson. Younger leaders watch the stalling and conclude that this is what maturity looks like. Avoidance gets baptized and renamed as thoughtfulness, and it spreads.
This is why we must treat decision ownership as a culture issue and not a personality quirk.
A leader’s relationship with hard calls becomes the whole organization’s relationship with hard calls. Go back to James one last time. He was training a community, not just an individual. The way you handle the weight of a decision is teaching everyone under you how they are allowed to handle theirs.
Three Questions to Run Before You Say “Let Me Pray on It”
So let me hand you the same short audit you can run before you delay your next decision. Run these three questions before the words “let me pray on it” leave your mouth.
1. What exactly am I waiting for?
Name it out loud. A conversation, a number, a piece of counsel from someone you trust. If you can put your finger on it, you are probably discerning. If you cannot name a single concrete thing, you are most likely avoiding.
2. When will I have it?
Put a date on the calendar and tell the people who are waiting on you. Discernment can survive a deadline without any trouble. Avoidance cannot, because a deadline forces the vague fog to become a real answer.
3. What would have to be true for me to decide?
Write down the actual criteria. If the honest answer is “I already know what is right and I am scared of the fallout,” then the prayer you need is not a prayer for clarity.
It is a prayer for courage.
Sign Your Name to It
Plenty of weak leadership wears patience as a costume. The question underneath all of this will never be whether you are a patient person. The question is whether your waiting ends in a decision you are willing to sign your name to, or whether you are quietly hoping that someone or something else will decide so you never have to.
So I want to leave you with two prompts to sit with this week. Do it honestly, and do it on paper.
What is the decision you have been “praying about” that you have actually already made?
Where have you been washing your hands and calling it discernment?
Prayer was never built to be a hiding place from responsibility. It was built to be the fuel for it. Nehemiah prayed, and then he picked up a trowel. Nathan prayed, and then he opened his mouth. James told you to be quick to listen and slow to speak, and he trusted you to know the difference between guarding your tongue and burying your decision.
Your people are waiting on a word from you, too. Give them one, and put your name on it.