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?