I need Jesus infinitely more than I need a title. I need Him more than I need to feel important. I need Him more than another zero in my salary. And if He is with me, perhaps I can stop demanding that everything else prove that I'm okay.
You can be extraordinarily productive while moving further away from the life you actually want. You can hit the deadline and miss dinner. Earn the promotion and lose your peace. Achievement isn't bad. It just isn't qualified to tell you whether your life is good.
Eleven years ago, our marriage blew apart. This weekend, we celebrate. Not the adultery. Not the devastation. We celebrate because those weren't the last days of our marriage—and because sometimes restoration looks like a thousand tiny decisions not to quit.
I'm trying to train myself to interrupt my human tendency to categorize people long enough to actually see a person. No mistake, Vegas isn't the villain that gets redeemed. It's just my vision is changing.
"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." John 3:8
God apparently looked at one strong-willed person and thought: "You know what this situation needs? Another one."
One of the things this story taught me is how little authority our carefully constructed plans actually have. In a matter of months, jobs disappeared, schedules changed, cities mattered, babies arrived, and lives were rewritten. God was never constrained by the things I thought were immovable.
Complacency is the numbing agent blurring the life within our beautiful marriages.
Cult classic movies taught us love should feel effortless. Real life taught us someone still has to buy toilet paper. A dispatch from the household trenches.
Because every workplace eventually becomes a tiny kingdom: territories, alliances, resource guarding, tone analysis, meeting feuds, documentation rituals, and ancient blood wars over spreadsheet ownership.
But beneath the passive aggression and the muttered cabinet slamming, there exists something strangely holy: the ongoing decision to care for one another in exhausting, repetitive, unglamorous ways.
If work is where you run to avoid real life, you will turn balance into another performance metric. You will optimize rest. Schedule healing. Curate peace. Brand your stillness. I am an overachiever addicted to a job well done. I do not just like excellence. I hide in it.