Wayward Lines
From Moral Injury to Moral Leadership
Welcome to issue #4 of Wayward Purpose. Each week, we write for veterans, leaders, and wayward minds. For those who gave everything to a mission and lost themselves in it, or when it ended. The structure fades. The silence gets loud. When faith feels distant, service turns to burnout, and discipline without meaning becomes exhaustion.
We’re building Wayward Purpose to rebuild what burnout breaks; through faith, discipline, and direction. Turning moral injury into moral leadership.
But we can’t do it alone. If you believe in this mission, or know someone walking that same path, we need your help. Upgrade, share, or gift a subscription. Every act of support fuels future coaching, community, and care for those still finding their way. You’re not just backing a Substack; you’re helping build a movement. One life, one story, one comeback at a time.
Content Warning: Suicide. This article contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, especially if you are an active-duty service member or veteran, please reach out immediately. Call the Veterans/Military Crisis Line by dialing 988, then press 1, or contact your local emergency number.
For someone who likes to write, I have come to realize I tend do a pretty shitty job of communicating sometimes.
But here’s me trying; clean, plain, no mask.
I know what it feels like to lose your sense of direction; because I’ve lived it. And the way back doesn’t start with a program or a promotion; it starts in the quiet act of making something true again: one line, one word, one drawing, one prayer, one disciplined step at a time.
If you’ve been following along:
Our first article Wayward Mind was me dropping the last mask. Naming moral injury and ADHD out loud, trading paperwork-and-optics for presence and connection. Measure resilience by connection, not compliance.
Our second article Wayward Flame decoded the emblem and the creed: structure holding chaos, a refining fire with a still white core, and the blue field of service. Leadership became spiritual service. Translation: No matter what, I got you.
Our third article Wayward Grief walked through loss, not around it. Naming how grief, moral injury, and neurodivergence braid together, and choosing movement: feel it, connect in real life, rebuild with small acts and accountable love.
This piece is the hinge, the shift from self-image management to soul integration, and the through-line from moral injury to moral leadership.
These past few weeks I’ve bled on this Substack spilled my heart, and worked through a lot. So, I want to keep it a little lighter this week on where we’re going: the design from moral injury to moral leadership through faith, discipline, direction. We are focused on turning wayward from defect to design.
Lately, I’ve been diving deeper into the research and lived experiences around moral injury; the invisible wound and lines that cuts through conscience, not just combat. Some of the work that’s helped shape my understanding includes Psychology Today’s “The Hidden Wound Driving Suicide and Despair”, the U.S. Army’s workshops on healing moral injury, and Give an Hour’s exploration of moral injury’s impact and support. For the clinical and VA perspective, the National Center for PTSD offers powerful insight into assessment tools and treatment approaches. On the research side, Affinity Health at Work’s report explores how moral injury also shows up in business and leadership environments. Spiritually, Warriors to Lourdes continues to remind me how healing the soul and restoring purpose go hand in hand.
I remember the candles first. Hundreds of them, each a fragile flame cupped in paper (some caught fire, honestly thousands of people, small miracle in itself there weren’t more fires. Check out this YouTube video for the idea.), bobbing along as my wife and I processed through the dark. We were just two people among thousands in Lourdes, France; wounded veterans, caregivers, pilgrims from every corner. We moved together in uneven cadence, a river of strangers, each a different cup of water changed with every step. I’ve talked about this; but not much about the reason why we went. (Check out the video from our trip. Or, check out the 28-minute film that highlights the transformative experience of the annual Warriors to Lourdes pilgrimage for wounded, ill and injured veterans seeking physical and spiritual healing, here.)
Moral injury didn’t hit me in some vague way, it split me right where my values are stitched to my actions, a clean tear at the seam. For years I lived as two people (or three, or four, but who is counting). Switching between old names, new names, given names, last names, all names. I learned a bad habit to triage myself last (can’t use a tourniquet for a head wound, or at least that’s what they tell you in training).
Comparison became my morphine. I’d scroll faces and stories and tell myself, others have it worse; so swallow it. Imposter syndrome sat on my shoulder like a smug chaplain whispering;
Who are you to hurt?
Who are you to need help?
So I put the mask back on. When paperwork and stern conversations showed up disguised as care; I stuffed the grief and guilt back into tight, labeled boxes and stacked them neatly inside my insidious shack sized temple in my chest until the hollowness rang when I breathed. Later. I’ll deal with it later.
But “later” is a mirage you can chase for miles. Keep chasing it long enough and your soul will mutiny. Mine sure of the hell did.
What I experienced in Lourdes was the start of moral leadership; though I didn’t have that term for it yet. Moral injury had shown me exactly where I was broken: at the juncture of my values and my actions. Moral leadership became the practice of rebuilding myself right there, at that broken juncture, through faith and discipline. It meant taking responsibility for my healing and recommitting to the values I’d compromised. In Lourdes, and thanks to my priest, I prayed, “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?” and I meant it. I realized that if I kept waiting for someone else to fix me or for the pain to just fade, I’d be waiting forever.
That journey hasn’t been easy, and still is tough. It has been an awkward dance through guilt and grace. I had to confront the betrayals, both my own and those of others, that constituted my moral injury. I had to seek forgiveness (from God, from those I hurt, and from myself) and extend forgiveness in turn. While moral injury breaks us at the site of our values, it also pinpoints the place where we must build back stronger. For me, that meant if my loyalty was betrayed by poor leaders, I needed to become a loyal servant-leader who would never abandon my own. This is how moral leadership began to grow in me, as a direct answer to the injury. It’s taking the very values that were violated and living them out louder, clearer, with a fervent kind of discipline and faith. In a sense, moral leadership is moral injury redeemed. Tuning that discipline is another story, and making sure its not with still unprocessed grief, or other issues, require strong accountability partners on that journey with you; an article for another time.
Faith has been crucial in my process. Before, in my darkest years, I had dismissed God. I called myself an atheist, sneered that faith was a crutch for the weak. But hitting rock bottom has a way of cracking open the hardest heart. Warriors to Lourdes reintroduced me to the possibility that God was not an abstract idea or a distant judge, but a living presence who met me in the muck of my life. The priests, chaplains and fellow pilgrims I met showed me that healing moral injury has a spiritual dimension, it’s not just about psychology or therapy, but about reconciling with the moral order of the world, with God’s grace. I began to see my pain as not just something to be erased, but as something to be transformed. I stopped asking “Why me?” and started asking “What now?” What can I do now with this pain that could help someone else? How can I lead from it instead of just hurting?
One answer to those questions was to finally open up and bring my moral injury into community. Instead of isolating in shame, I began speaking about what I’d been through, first in closed-door support groups and now, later, here in writing. I learned that transformation comes through sharing our story with others, seeking understanding and offering it. Every time I admitted, “I’m hurting, I messed up, I’m carrying this guilt,” and someone listened without judgment, a small miracle happened: the isolation lessened. And I could be that listener for others too.
God draws straight with crooked lines.
It’s a line my priest loves to use. One I nodded at politely in the beginning without really believing. Back then it sounded like poetic damage control. Something people said to make chaos holy. But lately, I’ve sat with it long enough for it to start feeling true. Could God really write something straight through my mess? Through my detours, my betrayals, my guilt?
Sometimes I even wonder, is there some mathematical coefficient that makes sense of all this? Some unseen variable that turns all my angles, failures, and reroutes into a perfect curve only heaven can graph? Who has that graphing calculator?
Not fear, not flashbacks: shame, grief, and the sick feeling of having violated what I believe…and sometimes being violated by the people and systems I entrusted with those beliefs. The hurt wasn’t in my body; it was in my conscience. Moral injury shows up a few classic ways: seeing others cross lines you thought were sacred, crossing them yourself (or feeling complicit), and the slow nausea of betrayal by institutions you’d swear were on your side (how could you get rid of the dollar menu McDonalds!!!). It isn’t a DSM label, but it’ll hollow you out just the same. Ask any service member, nurse, cop, border patrol agent, or social worker who’s had to pick between policy and the face in front of them.
I’ve been working on understanding, and my own moral injury, since 2023, but May of 2024 was the hinge. My priest, and the Knights of Columbus, helped get my wife and I to Lourdes; an unexpected mercy I still don’t feel worthy of. That’s where the healing started in earnest. I brought fractures from childhood, misalignment in marriage, and a tangle of military years that felt a little like Jarhead: train, train, train; then watch the system decide when, how, or if your readiness ever matters.
I still remember the plane diverting for microbursts, the musical chairs of passengers, and me landing in a seat next to an old F-16 pilot and former squadron commander. We talked. He said you rarely get a chance to be at the ground floor of anything. That sentence tipped the scales. I said yes; not just to a transfer, but to a calling a mentor, and great human being (now gone far too soon), had whispered to a few of us: Come help me build this. I said yes, and then the Space Force sent me to school for a master’s, to the Pentagon to help shape a career field, and then life happened fast and hard. Where I thought I’d find shared conviction, I ran into moral ambiguity. Old wounds I’d bandaged resurfaced: unprocessed grief, shame, betrayal, loss of identity. A quite prayer led to a quiet directive: stop outsourcing your soul.
Therapy helped me name the pattern that ran under everything like rebar. I told my therapist, “I’m still letting other people control how I think.” They didn’t blink. “That’s a loss of internal authority.” It hit like shrapnel. Because that’s exactly what it was.
You learn early that belonging can become conditional. Childhood whispers it: Do well, you’re loved. Fail, you’re rejected. The uniform engraves it deeper: Perform and you belong. Dissent and you’re expendable. You repeat that enough years and performance stops being a behavior; it becomes an identity. Image maintenance masquerading as purpose. A paradox that bites hard: the tighter you hold the image, the further you drift from your true self.
Moral injury isn’t only the awful things we’ve seen; it’s the slow dismemberment of authenticity.
My childhood taught me love is earned. The institution taught me belonging is conditional. Add them up and you get a man polishing medals while his soul rusts underneath. That’s how I lost internal authority.
So I wore masks. The stoic leader. The tireless husband. The NCO that was not allowed to have a bad day. The unshakable senior enlisted. The friend and leader who always had time to listen but never time to fall apart. Underneath was chaos. When the seams finally ripped a few years back, it didn’t come out as honesty; it came out as frustration, anger, restlessness, despair. People saw volatility. I saw fire. They saw mood swings. I saw a mind trying to map an earthquake.
ADHD didn’t help. My brain doesn’t idle; it accelerates. When I feel unseen or unheard, it redlines; over-explaining, overreaching, over-feeling, trying to connect the unconnectable. Excuses most of the time now; but I could not buffer for or help what I could not name at the time. That’s the curse of intensity I’ve learned in therapy: it looks like arrogance when it’s really pain.
Betrayal is the bullseye of moral injury. You give everything to a mission, to an organization, to a spouse (happy spouse, happy house), and when you’re no longer convenient, when misalignment sets in, the mission moves on, the room grows cold. Silence gets loud. You’re left holding the silence where meaning used to be. You start to wonder: If they don’t see my worth, maybe I’m not who I thought I was.
I used to think leadership was lines drawn in permanent marker: standards, discipline, excellence. As a new Technical Sergeant, I mistook rigidity for righteousness. I shouted from the roof and expected everyone to be up there with me by noon. My team racked up awards; my people racked up quiet injuries. That’s the worst kind of moral injury: the kind you inflict while thinking you’re serving the mission. Leadership without empathy is just dressed-up insecurity. Now I try to meet people where they are and lift together. It’s slower. It’s also real. And I’m sorry for anyone I led back in those early days as I tried to figure out how to take care of those I led.
There are pieces I’ve never said out loud.
This last April, and important afternoon, I sat alone in a gas-station parking lot eating a half-frozen salad, a gold bowtie tossed in the passenger seat because I dislike wearing ties, a Wounded Warriors to Lourdes, Knights of Columbus white button-up under my jacket from that trip to France. The journey I’d started with my wife by my side had become a pilgrimage of one.
At the Vigil I lit a candle and carried its trembling flame into the chapel, and as the lights turned on, my mind flashing back to the bath houses of Lourdes and to the person who once locked eyes with me there, someone I couldn’t reach now at this point, both of us cut off by systems, self-limiting beliefs, and policies, as if other people got to write our chapters. A few hours later I was officially Catholic. Following that Easter Vigil, I drove to a quiet place and prayed; silent tears, unexpected peace, the kind that steadies the hand even as it shakes. I couldn’t share it with the one person I wanted to, so I carried it home.
On my birthday this year, I took the day off; not to celebrate, but to finish my ICF ACC. Hundreds of coaching hours, late nights, and lessons that reshaped how I listen. A small step toward moral leadership. It meant the world to me; it meant almost nothing to those around me. Most people don’t understand what that credential really demands; the rigor, the mirror it holds up, the way it forces you to face how rarely you show up for yourself.
Work stayed cold.
The kind of cold that seeps into your bones until numbness feels normal. I prayed, cried, survived, kept going. Fight, flight, and freeze; all at once. Drowning while standing up.
A mentor once told me there’s always a straw that breaks the camel’s back, but no one talks about the thousands that came before it. The quiet ones labeled “help” but handed like weights instead of relief. By mid-August, it wasn’t one breaking point but the echo of a wound I’d felt before: that hollow hum where conviction meets exhaustion. Moral injury.
I’ve lived a life of letdowns and hollow promises, a soul that trusts only action. And yet, God still shows up. Not in thunder, but in mercy: a shared meal, a quiet prayer, the warmth of peace returning where the cold once was.
As we dug through the ashes, my wife and I have learned to sit with the discomfort together. My fire met her water and, shockingly, didn’t go out. It made steam, energy, movement.
My words, her art; one line. A small bridge grew what we are calling The Wayward Line, the tiny shop we’re building out of survival and sacrament. We call the pieces by many names, accountability anchors; crooked-path bookmarks etched with the phrases that have kept us going.
For some, a bookmark is just paper and ink. For us, it’s a lifeline, a way of saying, I’m not done yet. The semicolon speaks for survivors of suicide; for us the bookmark, a physical piece, speaks to those still in the middle of the sentence; the ones who need to pause, breathe, and promise, “I’ll return to this page.” Each one is a small, physical reminder to stay. To rest without quitting. To put a bookmark in the pain instead of closing the book. We are developing it. There will be prints, little tokens, for Bibles, and pockets; journals and notebooks bearing my wife’s art; her water meeting my flame. Not merch; reminders. Discipline as devotion. Design as prayer.
Moral injury thrives in silence. It isn’t a fear disorder; it’s a conscience wound. And the research is catching up: whether you wear a uniform or a badge or scrubs, suicide risk tracks less with fear and more with guilt, shame, and betrayal. If that’s you, hear me; your pain isn’t proof you’re weak; it’s evidence your moral compass still works. The goal isn’t to be seen as good; it’s to become whole again. Take have faith, take discipline acts, and have direction.
Adler helped here too. The Courage to Be Disliked isn’t scripture, but it might as well be a field manual for recovering approval addicts. Our lives go sideways when we live for an imaginary audience. Guilty. A therapist once asked, “When you say you’ve let everyone down, who is everyone?” I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I’d been auditioning for ghosts. Another clown moment revealed. The beginning of shifting from self-image management to soul integration. Self centeredness; to social concern. From proving to being. From “How do I look?” to “How do I love?”
I’ve learned a simple practice these past few months; something given to me through grace and guidance. I write three moments when someone saw who I truly was, not what I did. Then three moments when I was unseen or unheard, hidden behind an image I was trying to hold together. After that, I ask myself: what was I protecting: dignity, love, belonging? And then the harder question: what would it look like to live from that dignity instead of for it?
That practice has been my quiet teacher these past few months; and might help you.
And because lines keep finding me, I keep following them: the chow line in basic training where I first learned kindness can get you smoked (that’s a fun story for another time); the lines I stepped over when truth and leaders asked me to; the dotted lines in a journal where I don’t have to color inside boxes; the pencil lines my wife draws to name her pain and mine; the boundary lines I hold now; not to punish, but to keep me true; the thin line between faith and doubt where I stand with both feet, and somehow, God meets me anyway.
When I talk about moral injury and leadership, I return to Lewis Smedes in A Pretty Good Person: What it takes to live with Courage, Gratitude, and Integrity. He warns that we all drift into a kind of sinful discrimination unless we learn to love past the labels we stick to one another. What you measure ends up being what you value. I’ve said that in leadership circles, but it lands differently when you apply it to a soul. Smedes points out the reflex: value intelligence, and kids become “fast” or “slow” learners; we obsess over their grades, not their growth. Value money, and people become “successful” or “poor”; we track their net worth instead of their worth. Value beauty, and we swipe left, or right. Value marriage, and a person who divorces becomes “the divorced one.” In uniform, we do it; either too fit or unfit, promotable or not; a bullet statement on a performance report hardens into an identity.
But what happens when there is a conflict that contradicts someone’s conscience; where “integrity” is defined one way on paper and another way in the heart. That’s the breeding ground for moral injury. When we measure people by the wrong metrics, we go blind to the infinite treasure of who they actually are. We stop seeing people as people; their pain, their gifts, their needs.
I’m a new convert to Catholicism, stumbling through the language like a child learning to read. Saints spend lifetimes studying the Word and still call themselves beginners; I find that comforting.
Words I have learned from one of the letters in the New Testament warns, that they can be a restless evil, full of deadly poison. One careless sentence can echo for years in someone’s mind. I’ve lived that on both ends. It’s part of why I became Catholic: the reverence, the councils, the centuries of care given to interpreting the Word. It feels like the opposite of how we fling words around today. You can spend years unpacking a single verse; tracing its meaning through time, language, and context.
Words mean things (a phrase I have used a lot and will be a future essay here). Words need context; human interaction to know their meaning. Meaning lives in conversation. Think about the last time you misread a text or an email; it happens all the time.
At Mass today, my priest spoke about how often people dismiss “thoughts and prayers” as hollow or performative. I understood that cynicism once. Before connection, before discipline, before building a relationship with God, I too wanted proof, movement, something tangible to match the pain. But I’ve learned that prayer is an action. It’s not passive; it’s posture. It’s alignment. Just because I crave motion doesn’t mean the answer comes from forcing it. I’ve seen prayer lead to action in ways I never could have engineered. From someone who has spent years reacting instead of responding, I can say honestly: I’d rather be found in prayer than demanding outcomes I can’t control and missing the quiet work God is already doing. I believe in the power of prayer now. And for those who still shrug it off, truly, you’ll still be in mine.
This, all of it, is why we are building, line by line, Wayward Purpose: to help people move from moral injury to moral leadership through faith, discipline, and direction.
My wife’s water, my fire. Her art, my words. Faith, discipline, direction. A small lantern for anyone behind us on the trail. If you’re in the dark, take the spark. Your values still matter, even if they’ve been buried or betrayed. Your life may look like a scribble, but in a better Hand, even scribbles become design.
That’s what Wayward Purpose is becoming. A small act of defiance against despair, a way to turn pain into participation.
The coaching will help rebuild meaning and direction. The writing keeps the light alive. And now the Etsy shop lets people carry that light into their own homes. Every bookmark, print, design and candle says your story isn’t over. And every purchase helps fund what we are building here to care for veterans, service members, leaders, and all wayward minds who have experienced moral injury find their way back to purpose.
I’ve witness so many of us give everything to a mission, idea, organization, or you name it; and lost ourselves along the way, or when it ended. The structure disappeared. The silence got loud.
What we’re building isn’t just a newsletter or a digital store; it’s a beginning. A reminder that faith and discipline can still rebuild what burnout tried to erase.
The greatest compliment you can give us, is if you find something here that speaks to you; gift it forward. You’re not just buying a product; or subscribing to a journal. You’re funding a mission and helping someone else draw their next line.
I’ve learned that leadership doesn’t begin when you’re winning; it begins when you’re wounded and still choose to build. Wayward Purpose isn’t a brand or a business, it’s a blueprint for rebuilding meaning when life has stripped it away. Every product and program we offer, whether a piece of art, a coaching session, or a candle on your shelf is designed to remind you that your pain has purpose, your story still matters, and your next chapter is already waiting for your “yes.” (Just reopen to where you left your bookmark and continue.)
And before I end, I want to say this clearly: I am proud of my service. I still wear this uniform with honor. My oath wasn’t just a moment; it’s a promise I live by. For some, service might start as a paycheck, a path to stability, or a way to pay for school. But over time, you learn there’s no amount of money that could ever equal what you give, or what it gives back. Service changes you. It costs you. And it calls you again, even after it breaks you open.
Turning moral injury into moral leadership isn’t about forgetting the pain; it’s about learning to lead from it.
If you have experienced moral injury, or this finally puts a name to what you have been feeling, feel free to leave a comment.
We’ve come to see moral injury not as something that destroys, but as something that demands tending; like any wound. We have hospitals for the body; we need places for the soul too. For me, that place has become the Church and Mass.
I’m building a relationship daily with a higher power of my choosing because I need to connect to something bigger than myself. Faith doesn’t make me perfect; it just helps me keep showing up.
We know what it feels like to lose your sense of direction, because we’ve lived it. But we’re still exploring the way back with you. We’re not tourists here; we’re explorers. For me, it starts here. In the quiet act of creating something true again: one line, one word, one drawing, one prayer, one disciplined step at a time.
From fracture to formation.
From pain to purpose.
From moral injury to moral leadership.
Faith. Discipline. Direction.
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Note: The views expressed here are solely those of the author, and those of Wayward Purpose. They do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the Department of War, or any military branch.