Waking Up to Life

Week 1: Surviving Isn’t the Same as Living

There was a season of my life when success meant making it to the weekend.

That probably sounds strange to say now, but it’s true. I wasn’t chasing promotions, bigger paychecks, or the next accomplishment. My goal every Monday morning was simply to make it to Friday. Looking back, I can see how small my world had become, but at the time it never crossed my mind. I assumed that was just what adulthood looked like.

I was building a career, raising four young children, trying to be a good husband, and doing everything I believed a responsible man was supposed to do. From the outside, life looked good. I had a wonderful wife, healthy kids, a stable career, and more blessings than I probably appreciated in the moment. If someone had asked how I was doing, I probably would have answered the way most people do: “Busy.” Maybe even, “Blessed.”

The truth is that I had no idea what I was doing.

I knew how to work. I knew how to solve problems. I knew how to provide for my family. What I didn’t know was how all of those responsibilities fit together into a meaningful life. No one hands you a blueprint for becoming a husband, a father, a professional, and a follower of Jesus all at the same time. Every role demanded something different from me, and I spent my days believing that if I simply kept doing the next right thing, everything else would eventually fall into place.

One year stands out more than the others. I was working as an IT contractor in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, leaving before sunrise most mornings so I could beat the traffic. By the time I got home, it was late because there was always another project to finish or another problem to solve. Even when I wasn’t at work, work never really left me. My mind was always moving, always planning, always carrying the weight of what tomorrow would bring. The message that quietly ran through my head every day was simple: You have responsibilities. So, I kept pushing forward because that’s what I believed a good man did.

One morning, as I was leaving for work, I looked back toward the house and saw my kids standing on the front porch crying and asking me not to go. I can still picture that moment as clearly as if it happened yesterday. I remember standing there feeling torn between two responsibilities that both mattered deeply to me.

I got in the car anyway.

Not because I loved my job more than I loved my family. I loved my family deeply. That’s exactly why I got in the car. Providing for them felt like the responsibility that couldn’t wait. It was tangible. It was measurable. It was the role I understood best. What I didn’t understand was how to carry that responsibility without allowing it to consume everything else. I didn’t know how to leave work at work. I didn’t know how to walk through the front door fully present. I didn’t know how to care for my own heart and mind without feeling like I was neglecting someone else.

By Friday, I was exhausted. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. My brain never seemed to turn off, and I didn’t know how to slow it down. Most evenings I’d come home and spend some time playing video games. On the weekends I’d often have a few (too many) beers. Looking back, I don’t think I was searching for entertainment nearly as much as I was searching for relief. I wanted something, anything, that would quiet my mind for a little while.

The problem was that relief only lasts until reality comes knocking again.

The game eventually ended. The weekend disappeared faster than I wanted it to. Monday morning came, the alarm went off, and I climbed back into the car to do it all over again. Week after week, month after month, one day simply blended into the next. Somewhere along the way I stopped asking whether this was the life I wanted because I was too busy trying to keep up with the life I already had.

Even Sundays reflected what was happening inside me. Church had become another obligation instead of a place where my soul could rest. My wife and I often found ourselves arguing before we left the house, and although I knew God was present, I wasn’t really present with Him. I showed up physically, but my heart and my attention were somewhere else. Looking back, I realize something was missing there too, even though I couldn’t have explained what it was at the time.

Around that season someone recommended I read The Slumber of Christianity by Ted Dekker. I don’t remember every chapter or every argument the book made, but it did something far more important.

It disrupted the assumptions I was living under.

It forced me to ask a question I had been avoiding:

Was I living… or was I just existing?

That question stayed with me because it exposed something I had never considered. I wasn’t living a bad life. I wasn’t making terrible decisions. I wasn’t intentionally neglecting the people I loved. But somewhere along the way I had quietly settled for less than the life God intended. I had become so consumed with carrying my responsibilities that I had stopped asking who I was becoming while I carried them.

Looking back now, I finally have a name for that season.

I was surviving.

For a long time, I thought survival was the problem. I don’t anymore.

Survival was simply the mechanism.

The real tragedy was that I had quietly settled for less than the life God intended. Not because I rejected it. Not because I didn’t care. But because I had slowly accepted survival as normal. I had become so focused on carrying my responsibilities that I stopped asking whether I was fully living the life I’d been entrusted with.

That’s what survival mode does. It rarely announces itself. It looks responsible. It looks productive. Sometimes it even looks successful. We don’t wake up one morning and decide to settle for a smaller life. We drift there through ordinary days that slowly become ordinary years.

There’s nothing wrong with responsibility, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with routine. We need both. The problem begins when the routine that was meant to support your life slowly becomes your life.

When I think back on those years, I don’t feel shame nearly as much as grief. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and that’s what makes this season so meaningful to me. I genuinely believed I was doing everything a good man was supposed to do. The truth is that I wasn’t failing because I lacked discipline or desire. I was simply living inside assumptions I had never stopped to question.

It would take years for me to realize that surviving wasn’t the life I had been created for.

Looking Back

For a long time, I looked back on those years with disappointment.

I wondered why I hadn’t seen it sooner. Why I spent so many years believing that simply making it through the day was enough. Why did I wait so long to ask questions that now seem so obvious.

But time has a way of replacing judgment with compassion.

I understand that younger version of myself now.

I know why he got in the car that morning, even though his kids begged him to stay. I know why he stayed late at work. I know why he looked forward to the weekend and searched for relief whenever he could find it. He wasn’t running away from his life. He was carrying more than he knew how to carry.

He wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t selfish. He wasn’t weak. He was doing exactly what he believed a good man was supposed to do.

What he lacked wasn’t character…he lacked perspective.

No one had ever shown him that there was a difference between surviving and living. No one had taught him that you can faithfully fulfill every responsibility you’ve been given while quietly neglecting the person God is shaping you to become.

If I could leave him with one thought, it would simply be this:

Don’t settle.

Don’t settle for believing that exhaustion is simply the price of being responsible. Don’t settle for measuring your life by everything you accomplish while neglecting the person you’re becoming. Don’t settle for waiting until life slows down before deciding to truly live it.

The life you’ve been entrusted with isn’t waiting somewhere in the future.

It’s here.

The Steward’s Journey begins the moment you decide to stop settling for survival and start stewarding the life you’ve already been given.

Week 2: The Cost of Living on Autopilot

Last week, I asked a question that had been quietly following me for years.

Am I living, or merely existing?

It’s a difficult question because most of us don’t wake up one morning and decide to settle for merely existing. We don’t abandon purpose in a single moment or consciously choose a smaller life. If anything, we do the opposite. We work harder. We become more responsible. We devote ourselves to the people we’ve been entrusted to love.

That’s what makes this so difficult to recognize.

When I think back on those years, I don’t remember making a decision to stop living intentionally. I remember getting married. Building a career. Buying a home. Raising children. Taking on more responsibility. Trying to provide the best life I could for the people who depended on me.

Those are good things.

Necessary things.

Things I would choose again.

But somewhere in the middle of all those good things, I slowly stopped asking where my life was headed.

Every day had a purpose, but the days no longer seemed connected to a larger purpose. They simply flowed into one another. Monday became Tuesday. Tuesday became Wednesday. The weeks disappeared into months, and before long another year had passed.

Nothing was terribly wrong. I was simply busy.

I suspect that’s why so many of us never notice when we’ve slipped onto autopilot. We imagine it as carelessness, but it often looks remarkably responsible. We show up for work. We pay our bills. We coach our kids’ teams. We mow the lawn. We fix what’s broken. We keep our commitments.

From the outside, it looks like a successful life. From the inside, something quieter is happening.

The questions that once filled me with wonder slowly begin to disappear. The questions about who I might become, where God might lead me, and what kind of life I wanted to build are gradually replaced by responsibility and routine.

The questions become much smaller.

What’s for dinner?

Who needs a ride?

Did I answer that email?

How are we going to pay for this?

What’s on tomorrow’s schedule?

Those questions are real. They deserve our attention. But when they’re the only questions we’re asking, they slowly crowd out the ones that shape a life.

Looking back, I don’t think I consciously chose autopilot.

I simply surrendered to momentum.

Momentum is an interesting thing. Once something is moving in a particular direction, it tends to keep moving in that same direction unless something interrupts it. Life works much the same way.

Autopilot is an unconscious surrender to momentum. We keep doing what we’ve always done because it’s familiar, because it’s expected, because tomorrow looks remarkably like yesterday. Then one day we realize we’ve been carried somewhere we never intentionally chose to go.

The frightening part is that momentum doesn’t care where it’s taking you.

It can carry you toward becoming more present with your family, or further away from them.

It can carry you toward better health, or quietly away from it.

It can deepen your relationship with God or slowly replace it with busyness that feels productive enough to excuse your absence.

Momentum has no moral compass. It simply keeps moving.

For a long time, I thought the answer was to regain control. If I could organize my calendar better, create better habits, or become more disciplined, surely, I could steer my life back where I wanted it to go.

There is wisdom in all of those things. Discipline matters. Habits matter. Planning matters.

But eventually I realized I wasn’t facing an organizational problem.

I was facing a stewardship problem.

Somewhere along the way, I had begun treating my life as something that belonged entirely to me to manage, optimize, and control. I carried responsibilities that were mine to carry, but I also carried burdens that were never mine in the first place.

Scripture offers a quieter vision.

“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” Proverbs 16:9

I’ve always loved that verse because it doesn’t tell us to stop planning. It simply reminds us that planning and control are not the same thing.

That distinction changed everything for me.

A steward plans.

A steward works.

A steward prepares.

But a steward also remembers that his life has been entrusted to him, not surrendered to him as an owner.

That realization didn’t make me passive. It made me attentive.

I began noticing where my days were actually leading me instead of assuming they were taking me somewhere good simply because I stayed busy. I began asking questions again. Not just about what I needed to accomplish, but about who I was becoming while I accomplished it.

Those questions didn’t slow my life down.

They woke me up.

Looking Back

If I could sit down with my younger self, I don’t think I’d tell him to work less or to care less about providing for his family. Those responsibilities mattered then, and they still matter today.

Instead, I’d tell him to pay attention.

Don’t assume that because you’re moving, you’re moving in the right direction. Don’t mistake a full calendar for a full life. Keep asking the questions that feel inconvenient because they’re the questions that keep you awake.

Who am I becoming?

What is shaping me?

Am I still living the life I’ve been called to live, or have I simply become good at maintaining the life I’ve built?

Autopilot rarely feels dangerous because it rarely feels like a choice. It feels like another ordinary Tuesday. Another meeting. Another practice. Another weekend that disappears before Monday arrives again. That’s why awareness is so important. Before we can become faithful stewards of our lives, we have to notice the direction they’re already moving.

The good news is that God rarely asks us to overhaul our lives overnight. More often, He simply invites us to wake up.

Because stewardship begins the moment we stop assuming that motion is the same thing as direction.

Next Week

Next week, we’ll explore why so many of us continue living this way even after we begin to recognize it. The answer isn’t laziness or a lack of discipline. More often, it’s the quiet pressure to keep looking like we have it all together.

We’ll explore the prison of competence and why admitting that something isn’t right is often the first step toward becoming truly free.

Week 3: The Prison of Having It All Together

There are seasons of life that make perfect sense while you’re living them.

It isn’t until years later that you realize you misunderstood almost everything about them.

For almost ten years, I never questioned the life I was building. I questioned myself, but I never questioned the life.

Whenever something felt off, I assumed the answer was somewhere inside me. If I was frustrated, I needed to become more patient. If I complained too much, I needed to become more grateful. If I felt disconnected from the people I loved, I needed to become more present. I never stopped to wonder whether I had misunderstood something deeper. It simply seemed obvious that growth meant becoming a better version of myself, so that’s where I focused my attention.

As I think about it, I don’t remember consciously deciding what it meant to be a good man. I simply absorbed the idea over time. A good man worked hard. He provided for his family. He kept his commitments. He carried his responsibilities without complaint. He stayed steady when life became difficult because that’s what good men did. Those assumptions felt so natural that I never thought to question them. They became the quiet backdrop against which I interpreted my life.

The strange thing is that none of those beliefs were wrong. Work is good. Responsibility is good. Faithfulness is good. Providing for your family is good. That’s what made this season so difficult to understand. The life I was pursuing wasn’t built on bad intentions. It was built on good intentions that slowly became unquestioned assumptions.

Most of my days reflected those assumptions. I spent my week doing work that I believed mattered. I loved my family. I stayed involved in my children’s lives. I coached their teams. I served at church. I genuinely wanted to become a better husband, father, and follower of Jesus. Looking back, I don’t think I was chasing success nearly as much as I was chasing the quiet confidence that I was becoming the man I believed I should be.

There was one part of my life, though, that always felt different.

Coaching never felt like another responsibility. It felt like breathing fresh air after spending all day inside. At the time, I assumed it was because I loved sports or because I enjoyed investing in kids. Looking back, I think there was something else happening that I simply couldn’t see.

My work supporting the American military is meaningful. I believe in it deeply. But most of what I do happens behind the scenes. I trust that it matters because I believe in the mission, not because I regularly witness the results. Coaching was different. Every week I could watch timid kids become confident. I could see teammates learn to trust one another. I could watch a group of individuals slowly become a team. Growth wasn’t something I had to believe was happening. I could actually see it unfolding in front of me.

Those evenings became a reprieve.

Not because they answered the questions I was carrying, although I didn’t know that yet. They simply interrupted them. For a few hours, my attention was completely captured by helping someone else grow. I wasn’t wondering whether my work mattered because I could see that it did. I wasn’t searching for evidence that progress was possible because it was standing right in front of me.

Then practice ended.

Monday morning came.

Life quietly settled back into the same familiar rhythm, and with it came the same quiet restlessness that I had long since accepted as normal.

Whenever that restlessness returned, I responded the only way I knew how. I looked for something else that needed to improve. Another habit. Another discipline. Another book. Another weakness to overcome. Every new solution gave me hope because it promised that perhaps this would finally be the thing that brought the peace I had been searching for. For a little while, it usually felt like it had. Then the feeling faded, and I found myself searching again.

It has taken me years to understand why.

Looking back, I can see that I spent nearly a decade trying to solve problems that were never really the problem. Every diagnosis led me toward another solution, and every solution felt reasonable because it fit the way I understood my life. It never occurred to me that all of those solutions shared the same hidden assumption.

If someone had asked me then what motivated me, I would have talked about responsibility, faith, family, and becoming a better man. Every one of those answers would have been true.

They just weren’t the deepest truth.

Years later, I found myself looking back over that entire season and noticing something I had never seen while I was living it. The frustration. The constant self-improvement. The relief I found while coaching. The disappointment when that relief never lasted. None of those experiences were isolated. They were all connected by something I had never stopped long enough to examine.

For the first time, I recognized the question that had quietly followed me through those years.

Am I good enough?

The moment I saw it, everything else began to make sense. I hadn’t spent ten years searching for the wrong answers. I had spent ten years searching for the right answer to the wrong question.

For years I thought the prison was trying to have it all together. But I realize having it all together wasn’t the prison.

It was the way the prison revealed itself.

The prison was believing that if I could finally become disciplined enough, patient enough, faithful enough, grateful enough, and mature enough, I would finally be able to answer the question that had quietly shaped my life all along.

I couldn’t. Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough. Because it was the wrong question.

I didn’t discover that all at once. It began one weekend at Man Camp at Crossroads Church in Ohio. My marriage was under strain, although I couldn’t yet explain why. Sitting quietly in the prayer tent, I became aware of something I had been unable to admit for years. I didn’t understand what was wrong, but I finally admitted that I didn’t understand myself nearly as well as I thought I did.

That awareness didn’t answer my questions.

It simply opened the door to asking better ones.

Looking Back

If I could sit across from that younger version of myself today, I wouldn’t begin by telling him what he needed to change.

I’d let him tell me about the pressure he felt to become a better man. I’d listen as he described the long days, the responsibilities he carried, the frustration he couldn’t seem to shake, and all the ways he was trying to improve himself. I’d let him tell me about the books he read, the habits he wanted to build, and the discipline he believed would eventually bring him peace.

Then I’d smile, because I know something he doesn’t.

None of those efforts were wasted.

They just weren’t capable of taking him where he longed to go.

Not because he was pursuing the wrong answers. Because he was pursuing answers to the wrong question.

I’d wait until he had nothing left to say and then I’d ask him this…

“What if nothing is wrong with your answers? What if you’ve simply been asking the wrong question?”

This question didn’t change my life because it gave me a new answer.

It changed my life because it freed me from spending another decade searching for an answer that was never capable of bringing me peace.

Next Week

If I spent years searching for the right answer to the wrong question…

What is the right question?

Week 4: Who Gets the Final Word?

Last week ended with a question that I think has followed me for most of my life, although for a long time I didn’t know I was asking it.

Am I good enough?

I spent years trying to answer that question through the life I was building. I worked hard. I provided for my family. I tried to be strong and capable. I wanted to be someone people could depend on, someone who knew what he was doing and could figure things out when things went wrong. None of those are bad things. Most of them are very good things. The problem was that somewhere along the way, I had started asking those things to tell me something they were never capable of telling me. I wasn’t simply trying to accomplish something or become better at something. I was trying to prove something about myself.

I don’t remember ever consciously asking myself, What makes me good enough? Looking back, though, I can see how much of my life had been an attempt to answer that question. Every achievement, every role I took seriously, every problem I solved seemed to provide another piece of evidence that maybe I was enough after all. The trouble was that the evidence never lasted very long. There was always another standard to meet, another problem to solve, another failure capable of calling the whole thing into question.

By the spring of 2019, many of the things I had relied on to keep myself together weren’t working very well anymore.

My marriage was going through one of the hardest seasons we had ever experienced. I was angry and grieving, and my internal dialogue had become increasingly negative. Deep down, I felt less than. There were things happening in my life that seemed to reinforce the very thing I had spent years trying not to believe about myself, and for someone who had always found comfort in being able to fix things, one of the hardest parts was realizing how little control I actually had.

I didn’t know what to do with the pain or where to find answers. How could God let this happen? What had I done wrong? How was I supposed to fix it? I am incredibly grateful for the friends who came alongside me during that season because there were times when I didn’t know how to carry what I was carrying by myself. At the same time, I was beginning to see things about my own life that weren’t particularly comfortable to admit. I hadn’t been present in the ways I should have been. I had spent a lot of time focused on myself. For all the responsibilities I had taken on and all the things I thought I was doing right, I was beginning to realize that in many ways I was still a boy pretending to be a man, building a life around things that were good but not always right.

To top it all off, I was dealing with a pretty severe back injury. I don’t remember exactly how I hurt it. I could still move and function, but almost everything hurt. It felt like one more thing piled onto a season that already seemed heavier than I knew how to handle. My conversations with God weren’t particularly polished or theological during that time. They sounded more like, Can I please just get a break? How much more do You think I can take?

That was the state I was in when I went back to Man Camp that spring. There is designated time during the weekend to get alone with God, to reflect, pray, talk, and listen. Normally I would have appreciated that kind of space. That year, I wasn’t interested. I was struggling with God. I believed in Him, but I wasn’t sure what He was doing, and there were moments when I wondered whether He cared about what was happening at all.

On the last day, during one of the worship sessions, one of the singers shared a story. He was also a dance choreographer and had injured his knee badly enough that it was affecting his livelihood. He had gone to the prayer tent and asked some of the men there to pray for him. As they prayed, he said he felt a snap and a pop in his knee, almost as though something had moved back into place. The pain was gone.

What I remember most about his story wasn’t actually the healing. It was his skepticism afterward. He admitted that he kept waiting for his knee to start hurting again because he couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He was grateful, but there was still this part of him waiting to discover that it hadn’t been real after all.

I understood that. I am naturally skeptical myself. I believe in miracles and I believe in the supernatural, but I also question things. Had I not been sitting there with a back that hurt badly enough to make almost everything uncomfortable, maybe I would have simply listened to his story and moved on.

Instead, I wanted what he had.

So I went to the prayer tent.

The first thing they asked me was whether I had any sin in my life. I’ve always thought that was a funny question because the answer is obviously yes. We talked for a while, and eventually the conversation turned toward forgiveness. There were people I needed to forgive, and I believed I genuinely had. Then one of the men asked me whether I believed God loved me and called me His son.

That question was easy. Of course I did. I had been following Jesus for nearly twenty-five years by then. I believed in God. I believed in Jesus. I believed God loved me. I believed He healed people and that miracles were possible. None of that was particularly difficult for me to say.

Then he asked whether I believed God wanted to heal me.

That was different.

I believed God healed people. I just struggled to believe He would do it for me. There were other people who deserved that kind of attention more than I did. People who were more faithful, who had made fewer mistakes, who were somehow more worthy of receiving something from God. I knew my own history. I knew my failures. I knew how much of a sinner I was. At that point in my life, somewhere underneath all the theology I claimed to believe was the same old conclusion I had carried for years. There was something about me that was less than.

The men asked me to think about my own children. Did I love them? Of course. Would I want good things for them? Would I help them if they were hurting? Would I want them to experience joy and peace? Again, the answer seemed obvious. Then they asked me why I believed my Father looked at me differently. If I really believed I was God’s son, why was it so difficult to believe He wanted good things for me?

They told me I needed to confess my doubt and claim my identity as God’s son. So I did, and they prayed. Nothing happened. We repeated the process several times, with me confessing the same doubt and trying to believe what I was saying, but my back still hurt and nothing seemed to be changing.

Eventually another man came over to pray with us. He got right in my face, close enough that he violated just about every rule I have about personal space and challenged me again about why I doubted that I was God’s son. We prayed several more times, and still nothing happened.

Then, in the middle of one of those prayers, something became clear to me.

I had been calling it doubt, but doubt wasn’t really the problem. It was rebellion.

I stopped the man while he was praying and told him. “It’s not doubt I’m struggling with. It’s rebellion.”

I knew exactly what the word meant because rebellion had been part of my identity for as long as I could remember. My mother had told me from the time I was young that I had a rebellious spirit, and she wasn’t wrong. I did my own thing. I walked to my own drumbeat. I questioned what other people accepted without thinking, and I took pride in being the contrarian in the room. Somewhere along the way, I had started wearing that part of myself like a badge of honor.

Not all of that was bad. I still believe we should question things. Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and “this is the way we’ve always done it” has never been a particularly compelling argument to me. Jesus challenged conventional thinking all the time, but His posture was very different from mine. He approached people with truth, grace, and love. He didn’t avoid difficult truths simply because they might be uncomfortable, but neither was He interested in proving how right He was. He wanted something for the people He encountered. He wanted them to experience a restored relationship with Him, and the truth He offered was always in service of that restoration.

Far too often, I wasn’t operating from that same place. I wanted to be right more than I wanted to understand or love the person standing in front of me. I wanted to prove that I saw something everyone else had missed. Underneath my contrarian nature was an arrogance that said I know better, and a need for control that said I’ll decide for myself.

That was the larger rebellion the moment in the prayer tent exposed. This wasn’t simply about whether I believed God wanted to heal me or whether I could accept what He said about me. It was exposing a posture I had carried for most of my life. I wanted to determine my own way. I wanted to control my own destiny. I had somehow carried that posture with me for nearly twenty-five years after giving my life to Jesus. I believed in God, loved God, served God, and still wanted to reserve the right to be the final authority over large parts of my life.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

I stopped trying to confess a doubt that wasn’t really the problem. I confessed the rebellion underneath it, surrendered the need to have the final say, and again accepted the identity God had been offering me all along. I was His son.

What happened next is still difficult for me to explain. I understand how it sounds, and if someone else were telling me this story, the skeptic in me would probably have questions too. All I can tell you is what I experienced.

As the man prayed, I felt what I can only describe as an invisible hand reaching into my mind and beginning to peel something away. The closest comparison I have is duct tape stuck to your skin. It doesn’t simply slide off. It clings and pulls and fights against being removed. That is what this felt like. I began shaking as I felt something like a film peeling away from my eyes, down through my body, all the way to my feet. It felt like a battle until, eventually, whatever I had been feeling was simply gone.

I don’t know that I have ever found adequate language for what came afterward. I felt renewed and alive, mentally clearer than I can ever remember feeling. There was a lightness to me and a sense of joy I hadn’t experienced much during that season. More than anything, there was peace. For the first time in a way that went far beyond simply knowing the right theological answer, I was completely secure in one truth about myself.

I was God’s son.

I had gone into that tent because I wanted God to heal my back. The strange thing is that when I walked out, my back still hurt. I just didn’t care anymore. It eventually healed, but by then the physical healing I had gone looking for seemed almost secondary. I had asked God to fix something that hurt, and instead I walked away with a healing I hadn’t known to ask for.

In the years since, one of the things that has struck me most about that experience is that none of the language was actually new to me. I had been a Christian for decades. I knew God loved me. I knew the Bible said I was His child. I knew about grace and forgiveness. I had served in church and genuinely tried to follow Jesus. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and allowing that truth to become the foundation upon which you understand yourself.

At that point in my life, my deepest assessment of myself was still that I was less than. The events of that season had only reinforced something that had quietly lived inside me for years. When you believe that about yourself, you find ways to compensate for it. I achieved. I performed. I tried to stay in control. I became the person who could figure things out. I found identity in being a husband, a father, a provider, a strong guy, a problem solver, a contrarian. Those weren’t false identities. They were real parts of my life, and many of them were good. They simply weren’t strong enough to carry the weight of my worth.

Every one of those things can change. Careers end. Bodies weaken. Relationships change. People disappoint us, and we disappoint ourselves. Accomplishments that once seemed enormous eventually become memories. If those things are responsible for answering Am I good enough?, then my worth will always be vulnerable to whatever happens next.

I don’t remember consciously asking myself What makes me good enough? during those years. That is a question I can see more clearly from this side of the experience. I had spent much of my life trying to answer it without knowing I was asking it, and most of my answers depended on something I could accomplish, control, maintain, or prove. What changed in that prayer tent wasn’t that I finally found a better achievement. It was that the authority I had been using to determine my worth began to change.

What Is True?

There was a contradiction in my life that I hadn’t fully recognized before that day. I said I believed God was the source of Truth. I believed He created me, loved me, and called me His son. At the same time, I had spent years allowing my experiences, failures, accomplishments, wounds, and feelings to determine what I believed about myself. When those two assessments disagreed, I often trusted the one I saw in the mirror.

My feelings weren’t imaginary. The pain was real. The experiences that shaped the way I saw myself were real. Feeling less than was real too. But I began to understand that something can feel completely true to me without necessarily being true about me.

That was where the question of truth became much less theoretical. We all experience life from inside our own stories, and those stories matter. They shape what we see and how we interpret what happens to us. But if God is who I claim He is, then there has to be a reality beyond my own interpretation of myself.

I cannot claim He is the source of Truth while reserving the right to overrule Him whenever my own assessment feels more convincing.

That realization was humbling because the first person it confronted wasn’t someone else. It was me. Accepting that God had the authority to tell me who I was meant surrendering my insistence that I always got the final word. In a very real sense, that was what the rebellion had been about all along.

Seven years later, I am still skeptical. I still question things. I still challenge assumptions, and the contrarian streak in me probably isn’t going anywhere. What changed was the posture underneath it. Rebellion began giving way to surrender. The need to be right began giving way to a desire to understand. Arrogance began giving way to love. I didn’t have to stop asking questions. I had to stop assuming I was always the one with the authority to determine the answers.

And in the days following that experience, something else began changing that I hadn’t anticipated. Once I began seeing myself differently, I started seeing other people differently too.

If I really believed my worth came from being created in the image of God, then I had to accept that the same was true of the person standing in front of me. Their worth couldn’t depend on whether they looked like me, believed like me, voted like me, came from the same culture, shared my theology, had the same sexual orientation, made the same choices, or lived a life I completely understood. They carried the image of God before I ever met them. I hadn’t given them their worth, which meant I didn’t have the authority to take it away.

For years I had heard Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself, but I don’t think I really understood the significance of those last two words. It is difficult to see other people clearly when you don’t see yourself clearly. Once I began to understand that my worth wasn’t something I had to establish, I became increasingly free to recognize that same inherent worth in someone else.

That doesn’t mean disagreement disappeared. It doesn’t mean I stopped believing there are things that are true and things that aren’t, or that every decision is equally wise or every belief equally valid. Jesus didn’t abandon truth in order to love people, and I don’t believe He asks me to either. What changed was my understanding of what truth was for. I could disagree with someone without believing they were beneath me. I could question someone’s ideas without questioning their humanity. Truth no longer needed to be something I used to win. It could become something offered with grace and love, with restoration rather than superiority as the goal.

There is an irony in that which I couldn’t have understood before. Accepting that Truth existed outside of me didn’t give me greater authority to judge everyone else. It took authority away from me. If God determines my worth, then He determines theirs too. The person standing in front of me bears His image, and that reality comes before my opinion of them.

Somewhere Solid to Stand

Seven years later, I think one of the simplest ways I can explain what changed that day is that God gave me somewhere solid to stand while everything else moves.

That doesn’t mean life suddenly became easy. It didn’t. I still experience disappointment and loss. I still get things wrong. I still wrestle with questions, and the skeptic in me hasn’t disappeared. My body has changed. My children have grown. Relationships change, careers change, circumstances change, and so much of what we use to describe ourselves is temporary even when those things are deeply meaningful to us. I am a husband, a father, a son, a friend, a coach, a strength nerd, and a collection of other things that matter deeply to me. But none of them can carry the full weight of telling me who I am because every one of them is vulnerable to circumstances I cannot control.

Being God’s son is different. I don’t accomplish something to earn it, and failure doesn’t have the authority to take it away. That truth becomes the ground underneath everything else. My life is no longer about proving my worth; it has already been established. I am free to use my life for something beyond myself.

For me, that purpose has become increasingly simple, even if living it isn’t. I want to love my neighbor as myself. I want to see the person standing in front of me the way I believe God sees them. And whenever I can, I want to help people think more deeply about the life they have been given, the purpose for which they might be here, and the identity they may have spent years trying to build for themselves.

I don’t think I could have understood any of that before that day. I was still too busy trying to figure out who I was supposed to be and whether I was doing enough to prove it. Maybe that’s why, when I think about the man I was then, I don’t find myself wishing I could go back and give him better answers.

I’m not sure I would have much advice for him at all. He had spent enough of his life trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. I think I would simply tell him there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope, even when you cannot yet see what you are hoping for. I would tell him that someday he is going to become a better man than he thought possible, not because he finally figures out how to get everything right, but because he finally accepts whose he is and, from there, begins discovering who he is.

Maybe you already have a relationship with God. Maybe you’ve wondered about Him but never explored those questions very deeply. Maybe you’ve simply never had much reason or opportunity to give Him a thought. And maybe the idea that someone outside of you has authority over your life is something you don’t particularly want anything to do with. I understand that last one more than you might imagine.

Wherever you’re starting from, I’m not asking you to believe what I believe because of something that happened to me in a prayer tent seven years ago. I’m certainly not asking you to go looking for the same experience. But I do think there are questions worth asking, particularly if Am I good enough? has quietly followed you through your own life.

Where does your worth come from? Who gets to decide what is true about you? What if there really is a God who created you in His image? And what might having a relationship with that God bring to the table in your life?

Those aren’t questions I can wrestle with for you. I can only tell you where they eventually led me.

Seven years ago, I walked into a prayer tent because my back hurt. I walked out with my back still hurting, but with something I hadn’t known I was searching for. I knew whose I was. Once that became clear, I could finally begin discovering who I was.

Eventually, that made room for another question that we’ll look at next week.

What is this life I’ve been given actually for?

Week 5: The Paradox of Maturity

I am 53 years old, but there are days when the person inside my head doesn’t feel much older than the boy I remember being. I don’t mean that I haven’t matured. At least I hope I have. I mean that there is something about that younger version of me that never completely went away. He still gets excited about an adventure and restless when life becomes too predictable. He wonders what’s around the next corner, wants to learn how things work, and occasionally wants to do something for no better reason than it sounds fun. He wants to explore, discover, laugh and, perhaps more than anything, feel alive.

He also has qualities I am less enthusiastic about. He likes immediate gratification and doesn’t particularly enjoy being told no. He can be selfish and impulsive, and when life becomes uncomfortable, his first instinct isn’t always to consider what might be required of him. Sometimes he simply wants the discomfort to go away. He can resent responsibility when it interferes with what he wants, rebel against things because they feel restrictive, and convince himself that whatever promises relief in the moment is probably a pretty good idea.

For a long time, I assumed maturity meant eventually leaving that boy behind. Growing up meant becoming responsible, putting away youthful impulses and accepting that adulthood came with obligations that had to be carried whether I felt like carrying them or not. There is truth in that. The Apostle Paul wrote that when he became a man, he put away childish things. I have read those words many times, but somewhere along the way I began confusing childishness with being childlike, and I no longer believe they are the same thing.

Childishness wants the reward without submitting to the process required to produce it. It seeks immediate gratification, resents responsibility and looks for escape when discomfort lasts longer than expected. It can be impulsive, selfish, rebellious and desperate for validation. Those are things maturity asks us to put away. But the childlike parts of us are different. They wonder. They ask questions. They explore without needing to know where the exploration will lead. They play, imagine and become excited by possibility. They notice things adults have learned to walk past without seeing.

As I get older, I don’t want to lose that part of myself. There was a season when I came dangerously close to burying him beneath the responsibilities of adulthood, and his response was to rebel against the life we had built.

The life itself wasn’t bad. I had gone to school, built a career, married, had children and accepted the responsibilities that came with all of it. I coached youth sports. I taught Sunday school. I worked hard and supported my family. Much of what filled my days was good and worthwhile, and much of it had been chosen willingly. Yet somewhere in the accumulation of those choices, the routine meant to support my life had slowly become my life. Work became meaningless and joyless. My marriage entered a difficult season. I dealt with stress by eating and drinking, and the responsibilities that once represented the life I wanted increasingly felt like walls closing around me.

There is one contradiction from that season that is particularly uncomfortable for me to admit. There were Saturday nights when I drank heavily even though I was supposed to teach Sunday school the next morning. Sometimes I showed up hungover and taught anyway. Other times I canceled because I’d had too much to drink the night before. When I did teach, I often relied on what I already knew rather than preparing as I should have. I had enough knowledge and experience to get through a lesson, and at the time I probably viewed that as competence. I see more arrogance in it now.

The uncomfortable part isn’t simply that I had too much to drink. It is that I could be doing something genuinely good while simultaneously doing very poorly myself. Teaching Sunday school was valuable. Coaching kids was valuable. Providing for my family was valuable. Serving other people was valuable. But doing valuable things did not necessarily mean the person doing them was healthy. Sometimes doing good things can help us hide from the fact that we aren’t doing well.

I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t know what it was. There was something inside me insisting that there had to be more to being alive than managing responsibilities, meeting expectations and getting through another week. I wanted adventure and excitement, but underneath those desires was something deeper. I wanted joy. I wanted freedom. I wanted to feel significant and wanted rather than merely needed. There were moments when I experienced those things, especially in milestones with my children, coaching youth sports or watching someone connect with something I was teaching. I loved seeing change happen in front of me because those moments made life feel tangible. Something was growing, something mattered, and I felt alive in the middle of it.

The boy inside me recognized that something was missing before the man understood what it was. His diagnosis wasn’t entirely wrong. His proposed solutions were the problem.

I think this is one of the dangers of the season we casually call a midlife crisis. Something real may actually be trying to get our attention. We sense that something has been lost beneath the responsibilities, routines and expectations we’ve accumulated over decades, and we become desperate to recover it. But because we don’t understand what we’re actually hungry for, we reach for something dramatic enough to shock us out of the mundane. Maybe it’s the stereotypical sports car. Maybe it’s an affair, a dramatic physical transformation, a new career or some other attempt at reinvention. The details vary, but underneath them is often the same desperate hope that if we change something big enough, we might finally feel alive again.

What I couldn’t see then was that I didn’t need to escape the life I had built. I needed to learn how to live differently within it.

That distinction matters because this life wasn’t something that had simply happened to me. I had made choices. Many of them were good, some were bad, and a few were life changing in ways for which I will always be grateful. I had chosen my marriage. I had participated in bringing children into the world. I had pursued a career and accepted responsibilities. Together those choices had become my life, and I couldn’t simply abandon the people connected to them because I no longer felt good inside the existence they had created.

There is a message I see around me that suggests pain is evidence that something needs to be abandoned. If a relationship becomes difficult, leave. If responsibility feels heavy, choose yourself. If the life you’ve built no longer makes you happy, burn it down and start over. There are certainly situations that need to end, and I don’t pretend otherwise. But I also think there are times when leaving is simply another way of avoiding the discomfort through which we are supposed to grow. Sometimes the thing that needs to change isn’t the life around us. Sometimes it is the person living it.

That was much closer to the truth for me, but I couldn’t see it until the experience I wrote about last week changed the foundation I was standing on. Surrendering the control I had fought so hard to maintain and finally understanding my identity as God’s son didn’t give me a new life. It gave me clarity within the one I already had. For the first time in a long time, I could begin seeing through the anger, frustration, pride, fear and constant search for significance that had clouded so much of my thinking.

For much of my life, my faith had been subtly influenced by performance. I didn’t believe I could earn eternity, but I had absorbed something almost as exhausting, the belief that if I did enough, served enough, knew enough and proved myself useful enough, perhaps God and the people around me would value me more. I wanted significance. I wanted respect. I wanted to be strong, independent and wise. None of those desires are necessarily wrong, but I wanted many of the qualities associated with maturity without fully submitting myself to the process through which maturity is formed.

Assuming my true identity helped me understand a distinction I couldn’t see before. My worth did not need to be earned, but respect, trust, wisdom and maturity are different. Those qualities are developed over time. We become trustworthy by repeatedly being worthy of trust. We become wise by learning, failing, listening, correcting and continuing. We mature by accepting responsibility for ourselves, including the parts we would rather excuse.

That required me to develop a different relationship with discomfort. For years, discomfort had largely been something I wanted to relieve. I ate through it. I drank through it. I resented the circumstances I believed were creating it, and sometimes I imagined how much better life might feel if I could escape those circumstances altogether. Eventually I began to understand that discomfort needed to be owned, not worshiped or pursued for its own sake, but accepted as part of the process of growth. Nothing worthwhile in my life has ever been easy. A marriage doesn’t deepen without difficult conversations and forgiveness. Wisdom doesn’t develop without mistakes. Character doesn’t grow if every uncomfortable truth is avoided.

As the fog began to clear, I started noticing something I had rarely considered. I had spent much of my life thinking about what I needed to do, what I needed to accomplish and what other people needed from me, but far less time considering the condition of the person responsible for doing all of it. For the first time, I began to recognize that tending that person was also my responsibility.

I eventually found a word that helped me understand what had been missing. Stewardship.

I had always associated stewardship primarily with money, possessions, resources or time. I now understand it more broadly as recognizing what has been entrusted to my care and accepting responsibility for tending it. My faith gives that responsibility its foundation. Scripture tells me that I have been bought with a price and describes my body as a temple of the Lord. I am responsible for myself and the choices I make, while also believing that the life I am responsible for is ultimately something I received rather than something I created for myself.

That belief is important to the way I understand stewardship, but the question it has forced me to ask reaches beyond whether someone shares my faith. Each of us is living a life shaped by what we repeatedly choose, tolerate, cultivate and neglect. Whatever you believe about where that life came from, there is value in asking what responsibility you have for the person you are becoming.

For me, that question goes far beyond exercise and nutrition. My body needs to be tended, but so does my mind. So does my emotional life, my spiritual life, my marriage, my relationships, my abilities, my time and the experiences that have shaped me. Stewardship also requires me to look honestly at what I allow into my life and what I allow to remain there, including lust, unforgiveness, pride, arrogance, selfishness and resentment. These aren’t abstract categories to me. They are real struggles that can shape the person I become when I allow them to go unexamined.

I use the word lust intentionally because I think we often make it smaller than it is. Lust isn’t only sexual. I have come to think of it as an unhealthy desire to satisfy a real need. We can lust for food and call it hunger, lust for money and call it security, lust for power and call it leadership, or lust for sex while what we are really desperate for is love, intimacy or the feeling of being wanted. Escape can take many forms too. Food, alcohol, sex, entertainment, work or even constant busyness can temporarily take us somewhere other than where we are, while the real need underneath remains untouched. The surface desire can become so consuming that we never stop long enough to ask what legitimate hunger is actually trying to be fed.

This is one of the places where I have changed as I’ve gotten older. I have always tended to see the world in black and white. Something was right or wrong, good or bad, obedient or disobedient. I still believe there are absolutes, and maturity hasn’t required me to abandon them. What has changed is my willingness to recognize the gray and the nuance surrounding why people, including me, continue doing things we already know aren’t good for us.

Younger Steve could identify the behavior and put it into a box. Older Steve has learned to become more curious about what is underneath it.

Understanding why I continue choosing something that is wrong doesn’t suddenly make it right. But understanding the hunger beneath the behavior may be necessary if anything is actually going to change. If I only condemn the lust without understanding the legitimate need buried underneath it, I may spend the rest of my life trying to suppress the symptom while never addressing the reason I keep returning to it. The question becomes more difficult than simply asking whether something is right or wrong. I also have to ask what I am seeking from it, why I need it so badly, and what it is producing in me.

That kind of honesty is part of stewardship because stewardship begins with paying attention. I cannot tend something I refuse to see, and I cannot properly care for something if I am unwilling to understand what is actually happening to it.

A craftsman understands this instinctively when working with his tools. He doesn’t maintain a blade because sharpening is the purpose of the craft. The work is the purpose. But doing good work repeatedly changes the condition of the tool doing it. Edges dull, parts wear, rust develops and things move out of alignment. A craftsman can compensate for a while by pushing harder, applying more force or accepting poorer results, but eventually effort cannot compensate for neglect.

I think many of us live this way without realizing it. We continually use what we’ve been given because there is always something worthwhile demanding it. We use our bodies to work and provide. We use our minds to solve problems. We draw on our emotional reserves for our families. We give our time to employers, children, churches, friends and communities. We use our abilities in service of people who need them, and because so much of that work is good, we rarely stop to consider the condition of what is doing the work.

I would sum it up this way. Neglect doesn’t always look like doing nothing with what we’ve been given. Sometimes it looks like continually using it without ever tending to it.

We can compensate for that neglect for a surprisingly long time. We push harder, find another reserve and keep going because people are depending on us. As long as the work gets done, the family is provided for and everyone else’s needs are met, we can convince ourselves that everything is fine. Burnout may eventually expose what has been happening, but the failure didn’t begin when we burned out. It began much earlier, when we continually asked something to serve without also taking responsibility for tending it.

Serving others faithfully requires stewarding the person who is doing the serving.

Not because that person is more important than everyone else, but because our condition inevitably affects what we are able to give. Taking responsibility for ourselves isn’t a retreat from serving others. It is part of what allows that service to remain faithful and sustainable.

Yet stewardship cannot only be about repairing what is broken, eliminating bad habits or disciplining the parts of ourselves that create problems. If that were true, maturity would eventually become another grim exercise in responsibility, and I have already lived enough of that life to know where it leads. Stewardship must also include recognizing what is good within us, cultivating it and refusing to let the demands of adulthood bury it.

Which brings me back to that little boy.

They say youth is wasted on the young. I wonder if we simply bury it as we grow older. Not intentionally, perhaps, but beneath the accumulating weight of responsibility. We learn to be productive, dependable and serious. There are bills to pay, people to provide for, careers to build and problems that need solving. Somewhere along the way, curiosity can begin to feel impractical, play can feel irresponsible, and wonder can seem like something we no longer have time for.

We don’t necessarily choose to leave the childlike parts of ourselves behind. We simply build a life in which there seems to be less and less room for them.

That boy still has some growing up to do, and I suspect he always will. Sometimes he still wants immediate gratification. Sometimes he rebels simply because responsibility feels heavy. Sometimes he gets his way, and I remain acutely aware of the foolish decisions I can make when I allow him to take control. Becoming aware of him didn’t end the struggle between us, but I no longer believe my job is to silence him.

The man I have become has things that boy needs. I have experience he doesn’t have and a better understanding of consequences. I have learned that discomfort isn’t always an enemy, that freedom doesn’t mean release from every responsibility I no longer feel like carrying, and that the things worth having usually ask something of me in return. I can bring wisdom, discipline, patience and discernment into decisions he would happily make based on whatever feels most exciting in the moment.

What I understand better now is that he has things I need just as much.

He carries my sense of wonder.

A beautiful sunrise or sunset still gets me every time. There are moments in nature when I become aware of how much beauty exists around me and how easily I can miss it when I’m preoccupied with everything I have to do. Learning something new still excites me. Sometimes even discovering that I have been wrong brings a strange sense of satisfaction because it means I understand something today that I didn’t understand yesterday. There is still more to discover, and knowing that makes me feel young.

That sense of wonder fuels my curiosity, and curiosity has become more valuable to me as I’ve grown older. It keeps me from assuming that because I can identify a problem, I understand it. It reminds me that there may be something underneath what I can immediately see, whether I’m trying to understand another person, my faith, the world around me or myself.

One of the greatest gifts this boy still gives this aged man is his willingness to keep asking why.

Why am I reaching for this? Why does this make me angry? Why do I need their approval? Why am I trying to escape? Why does this make me feel alive? What am I actually hungry for?

Those questions take me places that simply labeling something right or wrong never could. They don’t erase truth. They help me understand my relationship to it.

The tension between the boy and the man isn’t something I need to resolve. It is something I need to learn how to steward. There are times when the boy recognizes something the man has become too busy or too responsible to notice, and there are other times when the man understands that what the boy calls freedom is really just another attempt to escape discomfort. Neither voice should always win. Stewardship means learning to pay enough attention to know which one you need.

Sometimes the boy says,

We’re just going through the motions again. There’s more to life than this.

And the man should listen.

Sometimes the boy says,

This is hard. I don’t want to deal with it.

And the man needs to answer,

I know. We’re doing it anyway.

That simple exchange captures something I’ve spent much of my life learning. The boy reminds me when I’ve become so consumed with maintaining my life that I’ve stopped experiencing it. The man reminds me that discomfort isn’t permission to abandon what I’ve been entrusted with. One protects wonder from being buried beneath responsibility. The other keeps responsibility from being sacrificed in the pursuit of whatever makes me feel alive.

I used to think maturity meant the man eventually had to win. Now I think maturity means they have learned how to walk together. The man keeps me grounded. The boy keeps me alive. Learning when to listen to each of them has become part of how I steward the life already in my hands.

Maybe that is what I’ve been trying to understand all along. Stewardship isn’t simply maintaining what I’ve been given or correcting the things I’ve allowed to fall into disrepair. It is learning how to faithfully inhabit this life, putting away what needs to be put away, developing what needs to grow and protecting what was always worth keeping.

I am still learning how to do that.

Looking Back

If I could sit down with that younger version of myself now, I would tell him that the restlessness he’s feeling is trying to tell him something. He knows something isn’t right, even if he can’t explain what it is. He feels trapped by the routine his life has become, and somewhere inside him is a desire for adventure, freedom, significance and the feeling of being alive again. He doesn’t understand yet where those desires are coming from or what to do with them. He just knows they’re there.

I’d tell him I understand why he wants something more. I understand why responsibility sometimes feels suffocating. Why he wants to feel wanted instead of merely needed. Why some part of him keeps insisting that life is supposed to feel more alive than this.

And then I’d tell him something I couldn’t have understood then.

You’re not wrong for wanting those things. But you can’t destroy what matters in order to find them.

The life you’re frustrated with isn’t the enemy. The people depending on you aren’t keeping you from living. And freedom isn’t waiting somewhere outside your responsibilities. You’re going to have to learn how to find it within the life you’ve already chosen.

There are parts of you that need to grow up. There are things you’re going to have to put away. You’re going to have to learn to sit in discomfort instead of always looking for a way out of it. But there’s something else I wish you could understand.

You don’t have to bury the boy to become the man.

I know you probably don’t even think about him that way yet. You’ve spent most of your life believing that growing up means leaving those parts of yourself behind. But one day you’re going to realize that some of the things you’re trying so hard to outgrow were never the problem.

I’m going to need that boy later.

I’m going to need his curiosity. His sense of adventure. His willingness to ask why. His excitement when he discovers something new. I’m going to need the part of him that can still stand in front of something beautiful and forget, for a moment, about everything that needs to get done.

So grow up. Put away the things that need to be put away. Become the man your life requires you to become.

But don’t bury the boy in the process.

We’re going to need each other.

Week 6: What Deserves Your Yes?

For most of my adult life, I believed there was supposed to be more.

If I was tired, I needed to dig deeper. If something needed to be done, I needed to figure it out. If someone was counting on me, I showed up. If I gave my word, I kept it. There were certainly times when I didn’t live up to those standards, but I believed in them. I still do.

That’s important because I don’t look back at the man I was and think the problem was that he cared too much, worked too hard, or took his responsibilities too seriously. I don’t think the answer to a demanding life is to avoid anything that asks something of us. Marriage asks something of us. Raising children asks something of us. Friendship does too. Faith, work, service, strength, and nearly everything else worth having require us to give something in return.

I still believe there are times when you are tired and need to keep going. There are things that need to be done whether you feel like doing them or not. There are people in my life who deserve my attention even when I would rather be left alone. Maturity doesn’t mean arranging my life so that I am never inconvenienced.

What has changed is my understanding of where that “something more” comes from. I used to believe that when life required more of me, I simply needed to find more somewhere inside myself. I don’t believe that anymore. I still believe in digging deeper when the moment requires it, but I’ve learned that the ability to do so isn’t created by the demand itself. The capacity to carry more has to come from somewhere.

Earlier in this series, I wrote about a season when success meant making it to the weekend. I was exhausted, frustrated, angry, and slowly withdrawing from the life around me. I didn’t recognize it that way at the time. I thought I was doing what responsible adults do. Life was demanding, so I kept meeting the demand. When there wasn’t enough left, I tried to find more.

Eventually, there wasn’t any more to find.

What I didn’t understand then was something I had understood in the gym for years.

If I want to get stronger, I have to ask my body to do something it isn’t currently prepared to do easily. I put weight on the bar. I create resistance. I deliberately make myself uncomfortable. If I never place that demand on my body, it has very little reason to adapt.

But I also know I can’t walk into the gym every day, squat as heavy as possible, continually add weight, ignore recovery, and expect to keep getting stronger. At some point, the very thing intended to make me stronger starts working against me. Performance suffers. Technique breaks down. Instead of adapting to the training and becoming stronger, my body becomes less capable of meeting the demands I’m placing on it. Keep doing that long enough and eventually I will get hurt.

The answer isn’t to stop training. The answer is to understand how growth actually happens.

There is demand, but there also has to be restoration. Given both, the body adapts and its capacity grows. Over time, something that once required nearly everything I had becomes something I can carry with far less effort.

I’ve understood that physically for decades. It took me much longer to understand it about my life.

Maybe that was because I thought of restoration as something that happened after the work was finished. Rest came at the end of the day. Vacation came after months of work. The weekend came after the week. You handled your responsibilities first, and then, if there was anything left, you could take care of yourself.

The problem is that life is rarely finished.

There is always another responsibility. Another person who needs something. Another problem at work. Another project. Another bill. Another conversation. Another opportunity to serve. Another thing around the house that somehow managed to break even though I swear I just fixed something else.

If restoration only begins when life stops asking something from me, I’m going to be waiting a long time.

I think this is part of what I misunderstood during those years when I was living for the weekend. I wasn’t simply tired. I had spent so much time responding to the demands of life that I had very little capacity left when life asked for anything unexpected. I could still function. I could still work, provide, parent, serve, and do many of the things people expected from me. From the outside, I probably looked capable.

But capability can hide depletion for a long time.

I know what that looked like in me. My patience disappeared. My answers got shorter. My attitude got worse. I withdrew. Things that should have been relatively small began to feel enormous because I didn’t have much left with which to meet them. I would tell myself to dig deeper, but digging deeper doesn’t restore what has already been depleted.

Sometimes it just makes the hole deeper.

That has made me reconsider what growth actually means.

For years I probably would have described growth in terms of improvement. Become stronger. Learn more. Get better at something. Become more mature. Take on greater responsibility.

I don’t think any of that is wrong. I just think there is something underneath it.

Growth is building capacity for more.

More strength, certainly. But also more understanding, wisdom, resilience, patience, presence, and the ability to remain engaged when life becomes difficult.

That has become important to me.

I’ve spent much of my life as one of the 20% in that old saying that 80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people. I know how easy it would be for someone like me to hear “build more capacity” and turn it into another reason to carry more, as though the purpose of becoming more capable is simply to become better at doing more of the work.

But that’s not what I’m after anymore.

Greater capacity doesn’t obligate me to do more. It gives me more choices about what I’m available to do.

That has required learning to say no, something I wasn’t always particularly good at. There was a time when being needed made me feel valuable, so another request could become another opportunity to prove my usefulness. As I’ve become more settled in who I am, I don’t need every request to tell me that I matter.

There is a freedom in that, but there is also a danger if I take it too far, because sometimes saying no is stewardship and sometimes saying no is just easier.

I can dress selfishness up in some pretty mature-sounding language if I want to. I can call it a boundary. I can say I don’t have the bandwidth. I can say I need to protect my energy. Sometimes those things may even be true. And sometimes I just don’t want to be bothered.

There are moments when “I don’t have anything left” is a warning I need to take seriously. There are other moments when it is an excuse because the thing in front of me is inconvenient. I’m still learning to tell the difference.

Maybe that’s why I don’t think the goal is simply learning to say no. The more important question is learning what deserves my yes.

My wife deserves my yes in ways that most people don’t. My children do too. Keeping my word matters. Sometimes a friend needs help on the day I wanted to do absolutely nothing. Sometimes service means doing something because it needs to be done, not because I happen to be passionate about doing it. Sometimes the trash needs to go out even though apparently nobody consulted me about the timing.

There are things that deserve my yes whether I’m feeling it or not. So I give them the yes, and I try not to be a jerk about it.

I say that as someone who has absolutely given the yes while making sure everyone around me knew how unhappy I was about it. Being tired, frustrated, or overwhelmed is one thing. I can be honest about where I am without pretending everything is fine. But if I have decided that someone or something deserves my yes, I am also responsible for how I show up. My bad day doesn’t give me permission to answer every question with an attitude, withdraw emotionally, or make the people around me wish I had just said no in the first place.

That distinction has helped me see capacity differently too. Capacity isn’t merely something I need to protect. If I protect myself from every inconvenience, every difficult conversation, every sacrifice, and every demand, I don’t grow.

As I said earlier, resistance is part of what creates the opportunity for growth. The same principle that applies in the gym applies here. Discomfort can build capacity. Depletion can destroy it. Maturity is learning to recognize the difference.

I still get that wrong.

Sometimes I push when I should restore because an old part of me still wants to prove that I can handle it. Other times I tell myself I need restoration when what I really want is escape.

I’m beginning to understand that those aren’t the same thing either.

doesn’t always look like sitting still. Some days my mind is exhausted, and going to the gym gives something back to me. My body works while my mind gets quiet. I move weight. I breathe. I stop thinking about whatever has occupied my attention all day. If I’m training with someone, the conversation and relationship can restore something too.

Sometimes restoration is Scripture and prayer. Sometimes it’s a conversation with a friend. Sometimes it’s intimacy with my wife. Sometimes it’s writing.

Writing has become one of the strangest examples because it asks quite a bit from me. These essays require time, reflection, honesty, and sometimes more emotional energy than I expected to give them. Yet somehow the process also gives something back. Thoughts that have been circling around inside my head become clearer when I put words around them. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I see it on the page.

Conversation can work the same way. There have been times when simply saying something out loud has changed how much of me it occupies. Getting it out makes it real, and somehow it can also help me let it go.

Maybe I’ve been thinking about restoration too much in terms of rest. What matters isn’t always whether I feel rested afterward, but whether I am better able to return to what life is asking of me.

I can be tired and still be restored enough to engage well. I can have a demanding week and still have something meaningful to give. The body, mind, and spirit affect one another in ways I didn’t pay enough attention to when I was younger. When my body is worn down, my mind feels it. When my spirit is neglected, my mind feels that too. And when my mind isn’t right, everything seems to get louder. Problems seem bigger, patience gets smaller, and discernment becomes harder.

Scripture speaks about the importance of renewing the mind, and I understand more now why that matters. For me, prayer and Scripture are central to that renewal. But I have also experienced it through honest conversation, reflection, training, relationships, and simply becoming present enough to notice the life happening around me.

Renewal brings me back toward center.

Escape does something different.

I’ve written before that exhausted people don’t pursue purpose. They pursue relief. I still think that’s true. What I hadn’t considered as deeply was what kind of relief I was pursuing.

When I get depleted enough, there are times when I don’t want restoration. I want to be unavailable. I want a few hours when nobody needs anything from me. I don’t want to think about work, the business, something that needs fixing, something I need to write, or whatever responsibility is waiting for me next.

Beer has been an easy way for me to create that space. It shuts things down for a while and can incapacitate me from responsibility. I can’t effectively work on anything complicated, and eventually I don’t particularly care to. For a little while, I’m unavailable.

The problem is that the escape is short and the cost lasts longer. A cloudy mind. Achy joints. Poor training. Less energy. Instead of waking up better prepared to engage with the things I wanted a break from, I can wake up with even less capacity to deal with them than I had the day before.

That realization has changed the way I think about relief.

Escape asks something from tomorrow to make today easier. Renewal asks something from today to make tomorrow more capable.

Both can require me to stop what I’m doing for a while, but they aren’t taking me to the same place. Escape is about becoming unavailable to what is asking something from me. Renewal is about restoring enough of myself that I can return to it differently. One gives me temporary distance from the responsibility. The other increases my ability to engage with it again.

That makes renewal the harder choice sometimes. Escape can feel good immediately. Renewal may ask me to train when I don’t feel like training, have a conversation I would rather avoid, sit quietly with something I would rather numb, open Scripture when my mind wants distraction, or simply go to bed instead of trying to squeeze a little more relief out of the night.

That’s part of what makes renewal difficult when I’m already depleted. It often asks me to give something when I already feel like I don’t have much left to give. Training requires effort. A real conversation requires presence. Prayer requires me to become still enough to pay attention. Even going to bed can require giving up the hour I wanted for myself at the end of a long day.

But unlike escape, what renewal asks from me isn’t simply spent. It has the potential to return something. The effort I give to training can return strength and clarity. The attention I give to a conversation can return connection. The time I give to prayer can return perspective. The sleep I choose instead of another hour of distraction can return some of the energy I’ll need tomorrow.

Maybe that’s another way to understand stewardship. Sometimes I have to spend a little of the capacity I have left on something that can help restore the capacity I’ve lost.

That doesn’t mean every difficult thing is restorative simply because it asks something from me. I can spend what I have left on plenty of things that leave me with even less. The question is what the demand produces. Does it leave me more capable of returning to my life, or does it simply consume another piece of me?

I think that’s part of the discernment I’m still learning.

I wish I could say recognizing the difference means I always choose correctly. I don’t. But I notice it now, and maybe noticing is part of learning to steward it.

And that word…stewardship. It keeps bringing me back to the question underneath this essay.

Am I prepared to carry what I’ve been entrusted with?

I think capacity and capability are both part of the answer, but I no longer see them as the same thing. Capacity is something that develops as I grow. It is the strength, patience, wisdom, resilience, and presence I have available to bring to the life in front of me. Capability is what becomes possible because that capacity exists. The more capacity I develop, the more capable I become of responding when something worth doing asks something of me.

That’s why the relationship between the two matters to me. Capacity gives capability somewhere to come from, and capability gives capacity somewhere to go. Building capacity without ever putting it to use doesn’t accomplish much, but constantly demanding capability without restoring and developing the capacity beneath it eventually leaves me trying to give something I no longer have.

And maybe that’s why I don’t want to spend all of my capacity merely carrying responsibility.

Last week I wrote about the little boy I spent years trying to outgrow and the parts of him I now realize were worth preserving. One of those is his capacity for wonder. I’ve noticed that wonder doesn’t take something from me in the way another obligation does. It often gives something back because it interrupts the mundane long enough for me to see beyond whatever is demanding my attention.

That boy still notices things the man sometimes walks past. He sees something interesting and wants to stop. He asks questions that may not have practical answers. He imagines possibilities without first calculating whether they are realistic or useful. Somewhere along the way, adulthood teaches many of us to dismiss those things because there is work to do, people depending on us, and a life that needs to be carried.

I understand why. The man does have responsibilities the boy never had.

But I don’t think maturity requires the man to stop listening to him.

Maybe the healthier relationship is that the boy gets to point and the man gets to decide whether they follow. Wonder can interrupt the constant calculation of what needs to happen next without becoming an excuse to abandon responsibility. It reminds me that the life I am trying so hard to steward is also a life I am supposed to notice.

I don’t want carrying life to become the only thing I know how to do.

So when I ask myself whether I’m prepared to carry what I’ve been entrusted with, my answer is different than it would have been years ago. Back then I probably would have answered by trying harder. Today my answer is simpler.

I’m getting there.

I don’t think capacity is something we finish building. Life keeps changing what it asks from us, and growth keeps changing what we’re able to give. I’m still learning when to push and when to restore, when a no protects what matters and when it’s just protecting my comfort, when I need rest and when I really need renewal, and when relief is restoring me rather than borrowing against tomorrow so I can escape today.

Maybe that’s part of what makes me think about the younger version of myself. I don’t look back at him and wish he had cared less or carried less. In many ways, I admire what he was trying to become. He was already learning that being dependable mattered. He wanted to be someone people could count on, and he probably believed that the more he could carry, the better he was doing.

If I could sit down with him now, I’d tell him this.

You’re going to spend a lot of years being proud of how much you can carry.

And honestly, some of that pride will be earned. You’re going to work hard. You’re going to keep your word. You’re going to take care of people. When something needs to be figured out, you’ll usually figure it out. When people need someone they can count on, you’ll want to be that person.

I don’t want to take that away from you.

But somewhere along the way, you’re going to confuse being able to carry something with being responsible for carrying it.

Those aren’t the same thing.

You’re going to think that if you have something left to give, you should give it. If you can solve the problem, you should solve it. If someone asks and you’re capable of helping, saying yes will feel like the right thing to do.

Sometimes it will be.

Sometimes it won’t.

I wish I could give you a simple rule for knowing the difference, but I’m still learning it myself. What I can tell you is that becoming capable of carrying more doesn’t mean everything becomes yours to carry. Strength gives you choices. Maturity teaches you what to do with them.

You’re also going to discover that some things deserve your yes even when you don’t feel like giving it. Your wife will. Your children will. Your word will matter. Friends will need you at inconvenient times. There will be responsibilities you won’t particularly enjoy that are still yours.

Give those things your yes.

And when you do, don’t make everyone around you pay for it.

You’ll understand that one eventually.

But learn to say no too. Not because your comfort should become the most important thing in your life, but because a thoughtful no can make your yes mean more. You only have so much of yourself to give, and part of becoming a good steward is learning where that gift belongs.

You’re going to become very good at carrying things.

Just don’t become so good at it that carrying things becomes the measure of the man.

Build your capacity. Become capable. Be someone people can count on.

Then learn what deserves your yes.

Maybe that’s the conversation I wish I could have had with him. I couldn’t have given him all the answers because I’m still figuring some of them out myself. But I could have helped him ask a better question. Not simply, How much more can I carry? but What is actually mine to carry?

I think younger me would have understood the first question easily. More was something he knew how to do. Work harder. Figure it out. Dig deeper. Become strong enough to handle whatever came next. The second question would have been harder because it requires something more than strength. It requires knowing what matters, what belongs to me, what I need to let go, and what kind of man I want to be when something worthy asks something of me.

I’m still learning how to answer that question. But I understand something now that I didn’t when this journey began.

Capacity isn’t something to hoard. It’s something to steward.

I don’t want greater capacity so I can become better at doing everybody else’s work. And I don’t want to guard it so carefully that nobody can ask anything from me. I want to grow because growth gives me choices. It allows me to decide what deserves my time, attention, strength, and presence instead of waiting until depletion makes those decisions for me.

Maybe that’s the difference I’m beginning to see. Building capacity isn’t about seeing how much life I can carry before I finally reach my limit. It’s about becoming capable enough to remain available for the things that matter when they ask something of me.

That means there will still be times when I dig deeper. There will still be inconvenient yeses. There will still be responsibilities I would rather not deal with and days when restoration needs to take priority over another demand. I’m not looking for a life that asks less of me.

I want to become better prepared for the life I’ve been entrusted with.

So when something worth having, something worth doing, or someone I love asks something of me, I want to be capable of recognizing that it deserves my yes and have the capacity available to give it.

And when it does, give it my yes.

Preferably without being a jerk about it.

Week 7: The Way Back Here

There was a brief season when I worked from home and my wife and I started almost every morning the same way. We would take our coffee outside and sit together before the day really got moving. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we didn’t. We watched the birds move around the yard and the sun come up. I noticed the sounds, the smells, the changing light, all the little things that had probably been happening around me every morning whether I was paying attention to them or not.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about those mornings. No great conversation I can remember. No breakthrough. Nothing accomplished. Just coffee with my wife and a few quiet minutes before the rest of life began asking things from us.

As I look back, what stands out to me is how alive I was in those moments. Not simply alive in the obvious sense, but present enough to experience it. I noticed my wife sitting beside me, the world waking up around us, and the simple goodness of being there.

Eventually I stopped working from home. I took another job because I wasn’t enjoying the one I had, and because this new opportunity pursued me at a time when being wanted mattered. The morning routine changed. Coffee on the porch became less frequent. Life moved on, as life does.

I still sit outside with coffee when I can. Some mornings I could make more room for it than I do. I just have a lot to get done.

Or at least I think I do.

Looking back over the years I’ve been writing about in this series, I can see long stretches when that was simply how I lived. There was always somewhere to go, something to accomplish, something to fix, something to get through, or something to escape. I spent years surviving, running on autopilot, trying to prove I was good enough, looking for relief when the weight of it became too much. Life kept happening, and I was certainly participating in it, but I don’t know that I was always fully there for it.

I’m beginning to think there is a difference between being alive and actually inhabiting your life.

For a while, I assumed what made those mornings different was the quiet. There was nowhere to be for those few minutes, nothing demanding my attention, no reason to hurry. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less convinced I am that quiet was really the point.

Some of the moments when I feel most present now aren’t quiet at all. They’re when I’m working, coaching, writing, or building Eastwood Strength. I’m learning, struggling, creating, failing, adjusting and growing. I’m in the crucible, and even when it doesn’t feel particularly good, I love the process. I’m fully engaged in what I’m doing.

So whatever I experienced on those mornings with my wife, it wasn’t simply the result of sitting still. It had more to do with the fact that, for those few minutes, I wasn’t trying to be anywhere else.

I spend a lot of my life doing things, and there is nothing wrong with that. I genuinely enjoy being busy. But there is a difference between activity I choose because I want to engage in it and activity I reach for because I don’t want to engage with something else.

The same is true of rest. Television, video games, sitting outside, doing absolutely nothing. Any of them can be something I simply enjoy. They can give me a needed break and allow me to return to what matters with more to give. But I also know what it’s like to use those same things because I want to turn my thoughts off for a while.

The activity itself doesn’t tell me much. My relationship to it does.

And I think this is where stillness begins to matter.

I’m not talking about simply sitting quietly or doing nothing. I’m beginning to think of stillness as the willingness to stop escaping long enough to be present with what is actually there. Sometimes that happens sitting outside with a cup of coffee. Sometimes it happens in the midst of my busy schedule. The activity isn’t what determines the stillness. It’s whether I’m fully there or using something to take me somewhere else.

That kind of stillness creates space. When I stop reaching for something to occupy every open moment, I have a better chance of noticing what is already there.

That can be uncomfortable. Noise gives me somewhere else to direct my attention. Without it, some things become harder to ignore.

Stillness removes the cover of distraction and reveals what has been there all along.

Sometimes it is fear or regret. Sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes it’s a question I’ve been avoiding, a lie I’ve believed, or a truth I’d rather not acknowledge. Other times it’s something I haven’t been avoiding at all. Gratitude. Love. Beauty. Contentment. The realization that I’m tired. The recognition that something needs to change. Or perhaps the equally important realization that nothing needs to change at all.

Stillness doesn’t necessarily tell me what to do with any of it. It simply creates enough space for me to see it.

And that requires courage because it creates the conditions for honesty.

And honesty has forced me to confront more than what I might be feeling or avoiding. It has also made me look at the way I move through my life. How much I try to carry. How many things compete for my attention. How quickly I fill whatever space becomes available. How often I feel like there simply isn’t enough time for everything I want to do.

My instinct has usually been to solve that problem by becoming more capable. Work harder. Get more efficient. Manage my time better. Increase my capacity so I can fit a little more in.

There is value in all of those things. Last week I wrote an entire essay about building capacity and capability. I believe in it.

But there is a limit that greater capacity will never overcome.

I am finite.

That probably shouldn’t be much of a revelation for a man in his fifties, but knowing something intellectually and living as though it is true are different things.

Capacity can grow while finiteness remains.

There will always be limits to what I can give. I still get twenty-four hours. My attention can only be directed toward so many things. My body needs recovery. I can only be in one conversation at a time. And no amount of growth will ever make me capable of controlling every outcome or fixing everything that matters to me.

For much of my life, I think I treated those limitations like problems I could somehow overcome if I just became capable enough.

But recognizing my limits has changed the way I’m beginning to think about presence. Being fully present in my life requires accepting that I cannot be fully available to everything in it.

Presence begins, in part, with accepting that I am finite.

That doesn’t mean giving up. It doesn’t mean settling for less or using limitation as an excuse. It means accepting that no matter how much my capacity grows, there will always be more I could do than I have the time, energy, or attention to give.

I’m feeling that tension pretty clearly in the season of life I’m in now. My life is full. I have a career. I’m building Eastwood Strength. I coach clients. I write. I train. There are a lot of things that matter to me, and they all draw from the same finite supply of time and attention.

The challenge isn’t that I don’t know what matters. Most of the time, I do. The challenge is that several things can matter at the same time.

I know where I want Eastwood Strength to go, and I’d like to get there faster. I’m impatient. That’s hardly a new revelation. But the urgency I feel about building it isn’t because I’m waiting for some future version of my life to finally enjoy what I’m doing. I already enjoy the work. What I’m building toward is greater freedom to choose the work I do.

I don’t really dream about retiring from work. Work is satisfying to me. But much of my working life has necessarily been spent doing work I needed to do. As I get older, I’d like more of it to be spent doing work I choose to do.

Building that future asks something from the present. It asks for time, and time I give to one thing isn’t available to give to something else. That’s not necessarily a problem. It’s simply the reality of being finite.

So I make choices.

Sometimes I write because writing matters to me and I genuinely enjoy it. I coach because I love coaching. Social media matters to the business, but it doesn’t pull me in quite the same way. Bookkeeping certainly needs to happen, although anyone reviewing the frequency with which I do it might question whether I understand that.

Then there is my marriage.

My wife and I are approaching a different season of life together. After years of raising children, we’re nearly empty nesters. We’re both building businesses. There is plenty for each of us to do.

But important doesn’t automatically become intentional.

Work has a way of announcing itself. Deadlines announce themselves. Clients, emails, tasks and unfinished projects all know how to ask for attention. Coffee with my wife doesn’t. Neither does dinner together, watching wrestling, going somewhere for the afternoon, or sitting outside and talking, or not talking at all.

Those things rarely present themselves as urgent.

But they matter.

And if everything that matters cannot receive my attention at the same time, then choosing becomes unavoidable.

And every yes leaves something else unchosen.

For years we’ve talked about work-life balance as though work sits on one side of a scale and life sits on the other, and maturity means figuring out how to keep them perfectly level.

I don’t think that’s how life works.

Work is part of my life. So is my marriage. So is training. So is rest. So is building Eastwood Strength. So is watching wrestling. So is sitting outside with coffee. So are the difficult seasons I would rather not experience at all.

It’s all life.

Sometimes work needs more of me. Sometimes my wife does. Sometimes the business does. Sometimes my body needs recovery. Sometimes circumstances rearrange the priorities without asking my permission.

I can have several plates spinning, but I can only be fully present with one of them at a time.

And maybe that’s the part I’ve missed when I’ve thought about balance. The goal isn’t to somehow give everything equal amounts of me. I can’t. The question is whether I can give myself to what I’ve chosen while I’m there.

I’m learning that part of presence is being willing to inhabit the choice I’ve made without constantly mourning the choice I didn’t make.

If I’ve chosen to work, then I want to work. If I’ve chosen dinner with my wife, I want to be at dinner with my wife. If I’ve chosen to rest, I don’t want to spend the entire time mentally working while pretending to rest.

That doesn’t mean the other things stop mattering. It means accepting that, for this moment, this is where I’ve chosen to spend some portion of my finite life.

And I want to actually be there for it.

Of course, that way of talking about presence assumes I have some choice about the moment I’m inhabiting. Sometimes I don’t. There have been seasons when life handed me something I never would have chosen, and there was no decision I could make that would change the circumstance itself. All I could choose was how I would meet what was already happening.

When my wife had cancer, I remember telling a friend, “I’m thirty-five years old and have four young kids. I shouldn’t be thinking about my wife dying.”

There were doctor’s appointments and chemotherapy, and I still had to work. We had a good support system, and people stepped in when I couldn’t be there. The client I was working for was incredibly understanding, so I worked whatever hours fit around what was happening. Short days, long days, strange hours. We did what needed to be done.

What made that season so difficult for me was the helplessness. I’m wired to do something. Most problems in my life could be met with effort. Figure out what needs to happen and do the work. But there was no amount of effort I could give that would guarantee the outcome I wanted. I couldn’t make my wife better. I couldn’t control what was happening, and I couldn’t understand why it was happening.

I wondered why God would allow this. I was afraid. I prayed. I thought about death. Sometimes when I was alone, I was grateful simply to have a moment away from all of it.

None of that removed what the moment required from me. There were still appointments to get to, children to care for, work that needed to happen, and a wife I loved who needed me. Most of the time being present wasn’t something I consciously thought about. I simply did what needed to be done.

There were also moments when I needed to step away. Sometimes I needed to be alone and have a little relief from the weight of everything that was happening. Then I returned. Not because I had figured anything out or because the fear had disappeared, but because I loved my wife and my family. I had made commitments to them, and those commitments mattered.

I can see the difference between the relief I needed then and the relief I reached for during other seasons of my life. I’ve used relief to escape things I didn’t want to feel or face, only to discover they were still waiting when I came back. This was different. Stepping away gave me enough room to return and continue giving what I could.

I wasn’t returning because I suddenly had more control over what was happening. I was returning to what was mine to give. I couldn’t give my wife the one thing I desperately wanted to give her. I couldn’t give her healing. But I could give her my presence, my commitment and my love.

And in a circumstance I didn’t understand and couldn’t control, God gave me something the circumstance itself could never have produced.

Peace.

I knew it then. It wasn’t something I discovered years later looking back. The fear was still real. The questions were still there. Cancer was still cancer. None of those things disappeared because I had peace. Somehow they existed alongside it. I knew God was holding us and carrying us through that season.

Years later, I still don’t have better language for what I experienced than the words Scripture gives us, a peace that surpasses understanding.

That season taught me something I wouldn’t fully understand until a little over a decade later. Peace can exist before understanding does.

If I could sit down with that thirty-five-year-old version of myself now, I don’t think I would try to explain what was happening to him. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t tell him not to be afraid or that he needed to have more faith. I don’t think either would have been true.

I think I would tell him that he doesn’t have to understand what is happening in order to be present for it. He doesn’t have to find the right answer, make sense of why this is happening, or figure out what God is doing. There are things in this life he won’t be able to fix, no matter how desperately he wants to.

But he can be there.

God is there with him.

And that’s enough for now.

I don’t think I would have understood why that was enough. At the time, I still thought peace should look different than what I was experiencing. I thought it should mean the fear subsided, the questions were answered, or the circumstances somehow changed.

For a long time, I understood peace mostly in those terms. The problem goes away. The noise stops. The pressure lifts. Whatever is wrong becomes right again. There is certainly a kind of peace that comes with those things, but it depends on the storm stopping.

What I experienced during my wife’s cancer didn’t.

I’ve realized that presence doesn’t require me to like the moment I’m living. It doesn’t ask me to pretend pain isn’t painful, fear isn’t real, or something terrible is somehow good. It allows me to remain in the life I’m actually living without requiring that life to become something else first.

And that matters because life isn’t only made up of mornings I would choose to sit outside with coffee. It’s also made up of moments I would never choose at all.

Week 8: More Than What We See

Throughout our marriage, my wife has told me some version of the same thing.

I didn’t have joy.

I never particularly enjoyed hearing it. Usually I got defensive, although my defensiveness wasn’t because I thought she was wrong. Somewhere underneath it, I knew she was right. I could be serious, dissatisfied, restless, negative and angry. Anger came particularly easily, usually when something seemed stupid or inefficient, two things that still test the limits of my patience more than I would like to admit. There was always something that could be better, something that needed fixing, somewhere else to get to.

For a long time, though, I didn’t think of myself as particularly negative. I thought of myself as a realist. There was a difference, at least in my mind. Being positive often seemed to require ignoring things that were plainly wrong, and I had no interest in pretending something was good when it wasn’t. If something was inefficient, it was inefficient. If someone made a poor decision, calling it a poor decision didn’t make me negative. It meant I was paying attention. So when my wife told me I didn’t have joy, I think part of what I heard was that she wanted me to see the world differently than it actually was.

The problem wasn’t that I was always wrong about what I saw. It was believing that what I saw was all there was to see.

My wife and I spent about ten years in a mastermind group called Lifeonaire. Early on, our coach, Peter, introduced us to the idea of neural pathways. The science wasn’t particularly difficult for me to accept. Our experiences shape the way our brains process what happens around us, and thoughts repeated often enough become familiar pathways. Eventually the mind becomes very efficient at traveling them, and we stop approaching every new experience as a blank slate. We bring our upbringing, previous experiences, assumptions, expectations and biases with us, often without realizing how much they are influencing what we believe we’re seeing.

That fascinated me because it challenged something I had taken for granted. When I said I was being a realist, I believed I was simply observing what was there. The negative things I saw were often real, but I hadn’t considered how practiced my mind had become at noticing them or how much that shaped what I called reality.

Peter’s conversations about the brain also gave me a different way to think about something I had read many times in Scripture. In Romans 12, Paul writes about being transformed by the renewing of the mind. Science and faith weren’t telling me competing stories. The science helped me understand something about how the mind can form and change; Scripture gave that change a direction. I began to see renewal as something different from learning to think positively. If my mind could become practiced at seeing only part of what was true, then replacing a negative interpretation with a pleasant one wasn’t necessarily renewal. I could just be trading one incomplete story for another.

The goal wasn’t to become more positive. It was to become more truthful.

That distinction still matters to me because I don’t want a faith or philosophy that requires me to pretend. Pain still hurts. Anger still needs to be acknowledged. Poor decisions still have consequences, and inefficient systems remain inefficient regardless of how grateful I am. I also live and work around the Baltimore-Washington corridor, where traffic provides almost daily opportunities to discover how much renewing of the mind I still have left to do. After twenty-five years of watching people discover creative new uses for the left lane, I have not yet learned to experience all of it as a gift from God.

But I have gotten better at taking another route.

That may sound like a joke, and partly it is, but there is something in it that reflects what has changed. I can choose the scenic route, listen to music or a podcast, and enjoy the drive instead of spending the entire trip angry about time I believe someone else is taking from me. The traffic hasn’t become good. I’m simply becoming better at recognizing that the traffic isn’t the only thing happening in that moment.

I’m learning to make a more complete accounting of reality.

I wish I could say that after ten years of thinking about all of this, my mind now naturally does that. It doesn’t. I’ve spent decades thinking certain ways. Understanding how those patterns work didn’t make them disappear.

I got a reminder of that in June.

I work in a twenty-four-hour operational environment where mistakes can have significant consequences. One day I made one. It wasn’t because I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew better; I simply wasn’t paying enough attention, and I accidentally took down a system. What followed was a thirty-eight-hour workday as my team and I worked to get everything restored.

There wasn’t much complexity in the story I told myself while it was happening. I had screwed up. I felt like an idiot, and I apologized to my team for ruining everyone’s evening. Nobody complained. They gave me a hard time, because that’s what we do to one another, but mostly everyone just got to work. At some point they reminded me that I wasn’t the only person who had ever caused a problem. I had stayed and helped when one of them made a mistake, even when it wasn’t my responsibility, because that was what our team did. We had each other’s backs.

I appreciated what they were saying, but this one was on me. Later, my boss came over and thanked me for staying and helping get the system back online. I laughed and asked him if he realized I was the one who had caused the problem. Of course he did. His answer was simple. I had stayed and fixed the situation.

At the time I mostly thought the exchange was funny. It has stayed with me, though, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that everyone involved was looking at the same thirty-eight hours and seeing something slightly different.

Nothing my coworkers or my boss said changed the fact that I had made the mistake. I had. I should have been paying closer attention, and taking responsibility for that mattered to me. But they weren’t trying to convince me otherwise. They were adding something to the story that I wasn’t giving much weight to. My coworkers remembered all the times I had stayed when one of them needed help. My boss saw someone who could have spent thirty-eight hours defending himself or blaming circumstances but instead stayed until the problem was fixed. I was looking almost exclusively at the mistake because, in that moment, it was the part of the story my mind knew how to see first.

The negative wasn’t false. It was incomplete.

I think this is part of what my wife had been seeing in me all those years. Whatever she meant when she told me I didn’t have joy, I know what I heard. It was criticism of something in my character, and because I associated joy with being more positive, I thought the alternative was to become someone who ignored the negative parts of life. I couldn’t do that honestly, so I defended the way I saw things instead.

There wasn’t a single moment when I suddenly understood that differently. It has happened gradually through the things I’ve learned and the man I’ve become over the last decade, and I have definitely not arrived. My first response can still be negative. When I make a mistake, “I’m an idiot” can appear almost automatically, even though I know I’m not an idiot. When my wife tells me I’m being cynical, defensiveness can still get there before reflection does. What has changed is that I’m more willing to listen after it arrives, knowing that the first story my mind tells me may not be the whole story.

That matters because negative self-talk and cynicism seem to me now like two versions of the same habit. Cynicism looks outward and quickly identifies what is wrong with the situation. Negative self-talk turns inward and does the same thing to me.

That makes negative self-talk a thief of joy. Not necessarily because it lies to us, but because it can narrow our field of vision until we can no longer see everything else that is also true.

Looking back, those thirty-eight hours contained more than my mistake. What I had done was real, and so was how I felt about it. But neither was the whole story. There were other things present that mattered more and would last longer than the failure itself.

And that has changed the way I understand joy.

Joy doesn’t ask me to feel differently about what is painful. It asks whether I have something more enduring to rest in while the pain is still real.

For years I assumed joy was primarily a feeling, which made it difficult to separate from happiness. If circumstances weren’t good, telling myself to have more joy sounded suspiciously like telling myself to feel something I didn’t actually feel. I had no interest in doing that then, and I still don’t.

But if joy can rest in something deeper than the immediate feeling, then happiness and joy don’t have to compete. I can be disappointed in myself and still know that one mistake doesn’t define my character. I can be frustrated with someone and still value the relationship. I can grieve something I’ve lost and remain grateful for what that person or season gave me. None of those things require the pain or disappointment to disappear. They simply leave room for something else to be true alongside it.

I think this is where renewing my mind has begun to make me more available to joy.

I can’t simply choose joy any more than I can command myself to be happy. But I can learn to question the first story my mind tells me. I can listen when someone sees something I don’t. I can ask what else is true without denying what I already know to be true.

I’m broadening my perspective, not changing the truth.

Maybe that is why joy has become easier for me to recognize as I’ve gotten older. Cynicism, frustration and disappointment haven’t disappeared, but I’m getting better at recognizing that those feelings can be real without being sovereign. They don’t get to decide what else is true.

That same perspective has changed the way I look back on my own story.

I can recognize places where something in me has changed. Things that once controlled my reactions don’t control them quite as often. Questions that frustrated me have led to better questions. Experiences I wouldn’t have chosen have changed the way I understand myself, other people and God. I don’t have to look back and pretend every part of the journey was good in order to be grateful for what has grown along the way.

There is joy for me in being able to look back and recognize that growth.

One of the things I love most now is being able to share something I’ve learned through my own experience. Sometimes that happens while I’m coaching someone. Sometimes it’s in a conversation. Sometimes it’s here, when I write about a mistake I’ve made, something I misunderstood for years, or a question that changed the way I think. I don’t share those things because I believe I’ve figured life out. Most of the time I’m writing from somewhere inside the process myself. But there are places I’ve already walked, and occasionally something I learned there becomes useful to someone walking through a similar place.

Some experiences I would gladly repeat. Others came through mistakes, disappointment, struggle and seasons I wouldn’t choose again. I don’t need to call those things good. But I can look back and recognize that they weren’t necessarily wasted. Even the experiences I wouldn’t choose again have become part of what I carry forward and, at times, part of what allows me to meet someone else with greater understanding.

There is something deeply joyful to me about knowing that something life taught me can become something I steward for someone else’s good.

And that brings me back to what sits underneath all of this.

A little over a decade ago, my understanding of my relationship with God fundamentally changed. I’ve written about that moment before, and I don’t need to retell it here. What I had spent years trying to understand about who I was became remarkably simple.

I am God’s son.

That didn’t suddenly make me joyful. It didn’t erase old ways of thinking or make me less capable of anger, cynicism or impatience. If anything, the last ten years have shown me how slowly some parts of us change. But knowing who I am and whose I am gave me something more enduring than any of those things.

I believe God is the author of joy, and I don’t believe He has hidden it from people who don’t know Him. We experience it throughout this life, sometimes without giving much thought to where it comes from. We find it in people we love, work that matters, beauty, laughter, growth, service, and moments that remind us it is good to be alive. I believe being made in the image of God means we were made with the capacity to experience those things.

You don’t have to believe what I believe about God to recognize any of that. You can examine the stories your mind tells you. You can question whether the thing you’ve noticed is everything that is true. You can learn to see the good without pretending the bad isn’t there. You can recognize how you’ve grown and discover the joy of using what you’ve learned in service to someone else. None of that belongs exclusively to people who follow Jesus.

But following Jesus does change something for me.

I spent a lot of years asking things that could change to give me something that needed to remain. Achievement, approval, money, circumstances, even my own perception of myself could all move beneath my feet. They still can. My faith hasn’t made those things unimportant, and it hasn’t made me immune to what happens when I lose them. It has simply given them less authority to tell me what is ultimately true.

What I believe about God doesn’t depend on whether today goes well.

I believe I am loved and forgiven. I believe I was bought with a price and that God is still at work sanctifying me. I believe this life is not the end of the story, and that He has promised a future with Him where sorrow, pain, death and sin will no longer have the last say. That promise doesn’t make sorrow hurt less, but it reminds me that what hurts now isn’t the whole story.

I think back now to all those years when my wife told me I didn’t have joy. I’m still not sure I could give her a definition that would satisfy either one of us, and I don’t know whether she would say I’ve found it. I’m not sure I would say that either.

What I can say is that I’m learning to see differently.

I’m learning that the thing that is wrong isn’t necessarily everything that is true. I’m learning that joy can remain available even when what I’m feeling isn’t pleasant, because there can be realities more enduring than the feeling itself. And I’m learning that sometimes those realities were there all along. I simply wasn’t able to see them.

For me, the deepest of those realities are what God has promised me.

They don’t depend on whether I have a good day, whether I succeed at what I’m trying to do, whether someone approves of me, or even whether I can see clearly in the moment. My circumstances change. My emotions change. My perception can be incomplete.

What God has promised me remains true, and I understand now that joy has less to do with changing how I feel than learning to rest in that truth despite those feelings.

My own struggle has led me back to God, but it isn’t an answer I can simply give you and expect it to carry the same meaning. Some answers only become ours when we’ve wrestled with the questions for ourselves. If you’ve been reading since the beginning, you’re probably wondering if I’m ever going to stop asking uncomfortable questions.

I’m not.

I believe that’s part of how we’re formed. The uncomfortable questions have a way of exposing what we believe, challenging what we’ve taken for granted and, if we’re willing to stay with them, moving us toward something truer.

So I’ll leave you with a question worth wrestling with for yourself.

When life changes around you, what truths can you rest in?

Week 9: All We Have To Decide

My friend Ryan tells the same story about me whenever he introduces me to people. And every time, it makes me a little uncomfortable.

I met him when he was in high school. His dad was the youth pastor at our church, and I was one of the adults serving with the youth group. Somewhere along the way, we apparently had a conversation about who he could go to when life got difficult besides his parents. The other kids had the youth pastor. He didn’t.

According to Ryan, I told him that if he ever needed someone else to talk to, I’d be that guy for him.

I don’t remember having this conversation.

He does.

That’s part of what makes hearing him tell the story uncomfortable for me. I don’t particularly like being recognized for things like that. When I serve, I’m there to serve, not to make sure anyone sees me doing it. If someone starts taking pictures, I’m usually the guy trying to stay out of them. I’ve never wanted serving someone else to become a photo op.

I don’t remember having some great insight into what Ryan needed that day. I wasn’t trying to mentor him or make an impact on his life. Building relationships with the youth I served was important to me, and I wanted them to know they had an advocate. By then, I had already done quite a bit of “living” myself. I had made choices, experienced consequences, walked away from God and eventually come back. I had learned some things the hard way, including why some of the boundaries I once resisted existed in the first place. If something I had learned could help someone else navigate some of that mess, I wanted to share it.

So apparently, on one otherwise forgettable day, I made myself available.

Every time Ryan tells that story, I’m reminded of the difference between what a moment looks like while we’re living it and what it might mean to someone else. There was nothing remarkable about that conversation from my perspective. It was one conversation among countless others during the years I spent with those kids. I had no reason to think this one would be remembered decades later.

And most of the time, we don’t get Ryan’s side of the story. We don’t get to know which conversation someone carried with them, whether an encouragement came at exactly the right time, or whether simply being there mattered more than we realized.

That doesn’t make the moment less meaningful.

If Ryan had never told me this story, nothing about what happened that day would be different. I still would have noticed something. I still would have offered what I had. I still would have made myself available. His remembering it didn’t make the response worthwhile, and his telling me about it years later didn’t make it faithful.

It only allowed me to see something I usually don’t get to see.

Maybe we don’t get to decide which moments are little.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been writing about what it means to wake up to the life we’re actually living. We began with presence, learning to stop escaping long enough to notice what is happening around us. Then we looked at perspective and the possibility that what we first see may be true without being the whole truth.

Responsiveness feels like the next question.

Presence helps me notice the person in front of me. Perspective helps me see them more completely instead of assuming that my first interpretation is the whole story. Responsiveness asks what I’m going to do with what I’ve seen.

That question has also brought me back to another one I’ve spent much of my life asking: What am I supposed to do with my life?

For much of my life as a Christian, I thought there was an answer I was supposed to find.

Find your purpose.

What is God’s will for your life?

What are you called to do?

Maybe that was what I was being taught. Maybe it was simply what I heard. I’m still not entirely sure. But I know how I interpreted it. Somewhere there was a particular answer for my life, and part of being faithful was figuring out what it was.

I spent a lot of time asking those kinds of questions, and I was asking them the wrong way. I was treating purpose like a destination or a set of directions. If I could identify the right thing, then I could know I was where I was supposed to be.

But life rarely gives us that kind of certainty.

There are decisions where right and wrong are clear. There are boundaries I believe matter, choices that harm people, and decisions that carry consequences. But many of the choices that shape a life aren’t like that. They’re choices between two legitimate possibilities. Which job do I take? Which opportunity do I pursue? Do I stay or go? Do I build this or build that?

There may be a wiser choice. One may prove more fruitful than another. Prayer, counsel, experience, and careful thought all matter. But sometimes, after all of that, there still isn’t a sign pointing to the one correct road.

At some point, I have to choose.

That used to bother me more than it does now.

Part of what I’ve had to learn is trust. Trust what I’ve learned. Trust the wisdom I’ve sought from people I respect. Trust that I’ve considered what I reasonably can. Trust that if something unexpected happens, I can respond to it.

Trust doesn’t remove uncertainty. It allows me to move without requiring uncertainty to disappear first.

My faith adds another layer to that trust.

I believe God has given me a mind to use, people to learn from, wisdom to seek, and the freedom to make real decisions. When I pray about a choice now, I’m less interested in asking God to reveal a hidden correct answer and more interested in asking for the clarity and wisdom to choose faithfully.

And when I choose, I trust something deeper than the choice itself.

I trust that God’s promises will hold up despite the decision I make.

That doesn’t mean every decision I make is good. I’ve made enough bad ones to know better than that. Some choices create consequences that can’t simply be prayed away. Sometimes faithfulness means admitting I chose poorly, apologizing, repairing what I can, accepting what I can’t undo, and changing direction.

I am responsible for my choices, but God’s faithfulness isn’t dependent on my ability to always make the right one. His promises remain His promises. If His presence depended on my ability to identify the correct path every time, then my security would ultimately rest on my discernment rather than His faithfulness.

That trust doesn’t turn a wrong choice into a right one, but it changes what a wrong choice means. A wrong turn doesn’t make the rest of the journey unusable. Whatever road I choose, there will be something there for me to steward. Faithfulness isn’t about never taking a wrong turn. It’s about what I do with what is in front of me now.

That realization changed the way I think about purpose too.

I’ve come to believe the answer is remarkably simple.

Love God.

Love my neighbor.

And I don’t mean simple as in easy. I mean simple as in clear.

Those two things have become the foundation underneath the different roads my life can take. My work can change. My circumstances can change. The people walking beside me can change. What I’m capable of offering can change.

But the purpose remains.

Understanding that has also helped me see something I hadn’t really considered before. For a long time, purpose and calling were simply two ways of asking that same question.

But I’m beginning to see them differently.

Although purpose may be shared, calling is personal. It is shaped by my own experiences, knowledge, abilities, relationships, dreams, and desires. All of those things are particular to the life I’m actually living.

That doesn’t mean my calling has to become my career. It was never my dream to become an IT professional. But I did have a desire to provide for my family in the best way I knew how, and IT became part of how I did that.

I didn’t think of IT as a calling then, and I still don’t. But I can see now how I’ve been able to live my calling within it.

I build relationships that sometimes lead to personal and difficult conversations. I mentor younger engineers and help them get better at what they do. I even get to write. Most of it is technical documentation, but I love writing, so apparently I’ll take what I can get.

For me, the thread running through all of it is a desire to take what I’ve learned along the way and use it to help other people. I hope I can offer honesty, truth, and a different way of looking at things so they can move forward.

But knowing my purpose and understanding my calling only matter if they eventually meet the life that’s actually in front of me.

That’s where responsiveness comes in.

Sometimes that may be a conversation I don’t remember having with a high school kid. Sometimes it’s teaching someone at work who genuinely wants to learn. Sometimes it’s encouraging a friend, helping someone carry something they can’t carry alone, or simply being present when there isn’t anything to fix.

Sometimes the answer will be to step in. And sometimes I won’t have what the situation needs. There are still limits to my time, energy, attention, and ability. Becoming available was never supposed to mean becoming available to everyone for everything.

But responding faithfully doesn’t guarantee the outcome I hope for.

There is another part of responsiveness that I think is harder to accept. When we give something of ourselves, we naturally want to know that it mattered. We want to see some fruit from the time, energy, wisdom, encouragement, or care we offered. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. If I teach someone, of course I hope what I teach them helps. If I encourage someone, I hope the words reach them. If I invest in a relationship, I hope something good grows from it.

The difficulty comes when I begin using the outcome to decide whether the response itself was worthwhile. I am responsible for what I offer, but there are parts of the story that belong to someone else. I don’t get to decide what they do with what I’ve given them, and I may never know what came of it.

Ryan’s story is unusual only because I eventually got to hear his side of it. Most of the time, our part in someone else’s story ends without us knowing what came next.

But his story didn’t end with that conversation.

Ryan grew up.

He’s a husband and a father now, raising three young kids while I’m approaching an empty nest. The high school student I once offered to be there for became a friend who is there for me too. We talk about purpose, choices, God, truth, and the things we’re trying to understand about our lives. Sometimes I have something to offer him. Sometimes he has something to offer me.

There’s something about that change in our relationship that has made me think differently about the roles we play in one another’s lives.

Years ago, I was introduced to a way of thinking about relationships that has stayed with me. We need people ahead of us, people beside us, and people behind us. Someone we can learn from, someone we can walk alongside, and someone we can pour into.

I’ve found a lot of truth in that, although I understand it a little differently now. Ahead, beside, and behind aren’t rankings of people, and they aren’t permanent positions. They’re simply descriptions of how we might relate to one another at a particular point in the journey.

My dad was one of the first men ahead of me, although I wouldn’t always have described our relationship that way. We are very different men. We think differently about a lot of things, have different opinions, and when I was growing up, we butted heads plenty.

At the time, I often experienced that friction as resistance to me becoming my own man. Part of me believed he wanted me to become a man in his image. I was trying to figure out who I was, and sometimes I saw him less as someone helping me along that journey and more as an adversary to it.

Then, after I got married, we had a conversation that changed the way I saw him.

He told me that he would always be my father, but our relationship was different now. We were equals, two men walking the same path together.

That mattered more than I knew how to articulate at the time. In that conversation, he wasn’t asking me to become the man he was. He was acknowledging the man I had become.

We hadn’t suddenly become the same. We still thought differently. We would still disagree. But I no longer needed our differences to mean that one of us was standing in the other’s way. He could still be my father while also walking beside me. We could be different men and still be on the journey together.

Years later, I intentionally had that same conversation with both of my sons. I knew what my dad’s words had given me, and I wanted them to have that too.

I still have things I can offer them, but I don’t expect them to become versions of me. They are their own men, with their own experiences, abilities, opinions, and decisions to make. And as they’ve become those men, our relationships have continued to change.

Maybe that’s what I’ve come to appreciate about the idea of having people ahead of us, beside us, and behind us. Those descriptions can be useful, but they aren’t fixed positions. My dad spent much of my life ahead of me before inviting me to walk beside him. My sons spent years looking to me for direction before becoming men who now walk beside me. Ryan was once a young man I could offer something to and is now a friend who has plenty to offer me.

The relationships remained. What we had available to give each other changed.

Relationships are one example of how much can change as a life unfolds. People grow. Roles change. Paths come together and separate. Some of that happens because of choices we make, and some of it simply becomes part of the life we’ve been given.

A life isn’t something I get to design from beginning to end. Some things I choose. Some things I inherit. Some things happen to me. All of it eventually becomes part of the life I’m responsible for living.

I’ve carried a reminder of that on my body for years.

Of the tattoos I have, one has always been my favorite. Written in Elvish is a line from The Lord of the Rings:

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that’s been given to us.”

The context matters to me as much as the words. Frodo doesn’t want the circumstances he has been given. He wishes none of it had happened. Gandalf doesn’t tell him that what is happening is good or explain why it had to happen. He brings him back to the part that is still his to decide: what he will do with the time he has been given.

I’ve always loved that because it doesn’t promise control. It doesn’t answer all the questions or explain why life takes the turns it does. It leaves room for grief, disappointment, mistakes, consequences, and circumstances we never would have chosen.

And still, there is a choice.

What am I going to do with the time I’ve been given?

Maybe that’s the distinction I was missing all those years when I was searching for God’s purpose for my life. I wanted the answer to tell me what my life was supposed to look like.

Instead, now I believe it tells me what my life is for.

The rest is lived in the particulars.

These people. These responsibilities. This body. These abilities. This season. This moment.

I won’t always know what the next one will ask of me. I won’t always respond well. But I can pay attention to what is here, take care of what I’ve been given, and make what I have available when the moment asks for it.

Writing these essays has brought something into focus for me. The ideas weren’t new. They had been taking shape in the way I thought about identity, stewardship, capacity, purpose, and how I wanted to live. But I hadn’t understood as clearly how they belonged together.

Somewhere in the writing, I found the words for it: Faithful Availability.

It isn’t another destination I’m trying to reach. It’s a way of living within the life I’ve already been given.

Do I live that way all the time?

No.

I still get distracted. I still choose comfort when I know I should engage. I still miss things that are right in front of me. I make decisions I regret and sometimes recognize that I’ve drifted farther than I realized.

But I’m getting better at noticing.

And maybe that’s what waking up to life has really meant for me. Not arriving at some point where everything is finally aligned, but becoming aware enough to recognize when the life I’m living is moving toward or away from what I say matters.

Which brings me back to the question underneath everything I’ve been wrestling with here.

What do I believe my life is for?

I know my answer.

The harder question is whether I’m living as though I believe it.

I’m working on that.

I expect I will be for the rest of my life. There will be more choices I can’t see clearly, more wrong turns, more people whose paths cross mine, more seasons that change what I have available to give. I will drift again.

And when I notice, I can return.

Maybe that’s what faithfulness looks like over a lifetime. Not never drifting. Not never choosing poorly. Not always seeing the moment or responding perfectly.

Waking up.

Returning.

And doing what I can with the time I’ve been given.

Waking Up to Life

Table of Contents

Week 1: Surviving Isn’t the Same as Living

Week 2: The Cost of Living on Autopilot

Week 3: The Prison of Having It All Together

Week 4: Who Gets the Final Word?

Week 5: The Paradox of Maturity

Week 6: What Deserves Your Yes?

Week 7: The Way Back Here

Week 8: More Than We Can See

Week 9: All We Have To Decide

Week 1: Surviving Isn’t the Same as Living

Week 2: The Cost of Living on Autopilot

Week 3: The Prison of Having It All Together

Week 4: Who Gets the Final Word?

Last week ended with a question that I think has followed me for most of my life, although for a long time I didn’t know I was asking it.

Week 5: The Paradox of Maturity

Looking Back

Week 6: What Deserves Your Yes?

Week 7: The Way Back Here

Week 8: More Than What We See

Week 9: All We Have To Decide