Clive Staples Lewis has been my patron theologian since I was 11 years old. That was the year I read the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time. Dragons, dwarves, and magical wardrobes were the formative parts of my formative years.

The greater CS Lewis catalogue became a foundational part of my library in my pastor/teacher days. It was a rare sermon which failed to contain a quote from Jack Lewis. He was so much more than mere influence.

As a younger man, my penchant for idol worship was much stronger than it is today. Not golden calf level idolatry.
Much worse.

I created idols of human beings.
Some living. Some dead. Emulation and followership felt important in my early days, so I fabricated pedestals. There have been periods in my life when I thought various people (specifically the likes of John MacArthur, Ravi Zacharias, John Piper, Hudson Taylor, and, of course, CS Lewis) could say or do no wrong. Perfect preachers. Perfect theologians. I couldn’t disagree with folks so much smarter and more experienced than me.

As a young pastor and later a missionary, this hagiography felt almost compulsory, albeit foolish in hindsight. I can’t really explain why I did this. As much as I would love to position myself as some sort of visionary leader, I’m fairly sure this has never really been true. I’ve been more of a pirate and a rip-off artist. And not a very good one, at that. Austin Kleon says every creative person should “Steal like an Artist” and I agree with him. I problematically stole less like an artist, and more like a counterfeiter. Counterfeiting is a dangerous game when the original is also imperfect. The fake is always worse.

And no human has perfect theology. Not even the brightest and the best.

At the end of the day, we each come to conclusions based on the cacophony of saints and sinners who came before us. We are standing on their shoulders and their graves, whether we like it or not.

The issue of women in ministry in the church has become an important shift in my practice of faith.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago.

My position on the subject has changed radically from what it used to be. It’s now no secret. The other day, while walking and contemplating this issue of hagiographic idolatry and pedestal-crafting, it occurred to me — every pedestal I crafted was for someone who confirmed the bias I’d carried throughout my Christian career: men are the ones qualified to lead anything of significance in the church. Maybe in society.

As previously stated, I was wrong.

In response to this issue, someone had thrown CS Lewis at me to challenge my current view. Which I appreciate. Lewis is an Anglican theologian I still hold in high regard.

In his paper, Priestesses in the Church?, Lewis makes a careful case. He is careful to never say women lack the gifts. He grants piety, learning, and zeal to all. He even speculates women may shepherd a flock better than most men can. He has a different point of contention.

According to Lewis, a priest is a symbol representing God to the people. God has shown us how to speak of Himself. Father. Son. Bridegroom. Reverse the pronouns — pray to Our Mother, make Christ the Bride — and (at least according to Lewis) you have wandered into a different religion. A woman at the altar breaks this iconography. Lewis’ case against women in the pulpit has nothing to do with competence. It rests on a masculine language of God, and so not ours to edit. (Won’t get into how God is also revealed in the feminine. Maybe for another post.) He makes a serious argument from his serious mind. I respect it. For most of my life, this would have settled the question.

Along comes Tom Wright. Another Anglican. Another scholar. Someone I also admire. (But, trust me, I have built no pedestals for him. He came along after I’d torn the others down. I know better now.)

N.T. Wright does not argue symbols. He argues text. In his paper Women’s Service in the Church, he goes from Genesis, to Galatians, to the sixteenth chapter of Romans. Phoebe, a deacon, carried Paul’s greatest letter and would have been the first person to read it aloud and explain it. Junia, an apostle. At the tomb, the resurrected Christ handed the first Easter sermon to Mary Magdalene. If an apostle is a witness to the resurrection, he argues women held the office before any man did.

Two Anglicans. One communion. One begins at the altar. The other begins at the empty tomb. In many ways, neither quite answers the other.

I find Tom more convincing than Jack on this issue.
You may find Jack more convincing than Tom. That’s fine, too.
We can still be friends.

Today, I have sharp disagreements with every one of my former idols. Some theological. Some moral and ethical. Saints are sinners. Sinners are saints.

There is no room for pedestals in my life. Certainly not idols. Not any more. Biography and memoir continue to be an important part of my reading and study routine. But books should never be used to feed our own confirmation biases. Reading should “have the salutary effect of sowing a little doubt in our own certainties, reminding us that we’re also historically circumscribed.” (Wording from Roosevelt Montás’ lovely academic memoir called Rescuing Socrates.)

I still love Jack Lewis. I read Weight of Glory every year. I still check the back of wardrobes.

There’s no pretense in which I would think myself able to hold my own in a rhetorical battle with Lewis, Wright, or any of my previous pedestal dwellers.

I don’t believe writers, thinkers, philosophers, or theologians want or need us to all agree with their ideas. It’s better we engage, think critically, and develop our own interpretations and mental models. This is, frankly, hard work.

It also makes the future a brighter and better place.

The older I get and the more I read, study, and explore — the more I realize how little of this work I’ve actually done over my short lifetime.

Today I set down another book, pick up my favorite pen, and labor at doing better.

You, also, are doing better than you think.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

Or just Buy Me A Coffee (or two?) this week!

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?

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Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Prayer is confusing and hard and a primary source of guilt for most practicing Christians.

Am I praying as much and as often as I should?
As I must?
There is no good way to answer these questions. “Yes” feels arrogant. “No” — which seems like the right answer — begs the additional question, “Well why the heck not?” Then there are the guilt-inducing passages of Scripture which often get used against us.
Pray without ceasing.
Can you not even pray with me for one hour?

I was attending prayer meetings soon after I became a Christian, and learned to extemporaneously pray faster than most. After all, I had experience in the theatre. This sort of prayer isn’t much different than improv class.

To be fair, it wasn’t quite so crass. There were moments of genuine faith, trust, hope, joy, and other emotions during those times in the early days.

But there were also a number of times when I fell asleep.
So there’s that.

In most Christian circles, the ability to pray is dependent on ability to sound great on the spot. Who can put together the best string of words, phrases, and pleas which fit the emotion and grammar of the moment. This wasn’t work for me.

Praying without an audience with their Christian encouragements and consistent “amens”? Now that was hard.

It’s easier to sleep or ponder what might be for breakfast.

The clang of bells split the dark, hours before dawn. The abrupt Middle-Ages style alarm awakens the monks. They file into a cold oratory and begin to pray.

Vigils — this is the night office. Seven more will follow before the day closes: Lauds at first light, then Prime, Terce, Sext, None (strung through the working hours), Vespers at dusk, Compline before sleep. The hour of waking bent with the seasons. Benedict of Nursia (that’s Saint Benedict to you) reckoned it by the length of the night itself. The brothers rose deeper into the dark through the long winters and let the night office run short in summer, as the darkness ran short as well. He built daily prayers from a single psalm. Seven times a day I praise you; at midnight I rise to give thanks. Benedict took this literally. He called the series of prayers the Work of God — opus Dei — and ruled that nothing come before it. Prayer here was an office — from the Latin officium, a duty owed — something rendered on schedule, not summoned by mood. The signal sounds, the monastic sets down whatever their hands are holding and goes. The field can wait. The half-kneaded loaf can wait. Sleep can wait.

In my early Christian days, extemporaneous prayer was all the rage. Written prayers and set times for prayer were weird, or something for practitioners of Islam. We’re free in Christ, right? We can pray whenever we want, which is precisely the problem. If we don’t want to pray, we don’t have to. The only consequence being the guilt of a non-prayerful Christian.

In the heady early days of Internet message boards, I stumbled across a community of people based in Northern England who were thinking about the issues around prayer in some of the same ways I was. The Northumbria Community introduced me to The Daily Office.

A thousand-ish years after Benedict, an English archbishop took a knife to the hours. Thomas Cranmer, in 1549, assembled the first Book of Common Prayer. Eight offices became two. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer — Mattins and Evensong — the dawn and dusk stations kept, the six between them gone. The old system had buckled under its own machinery. Rules stacked on rules, a whole book of directions the clergy called the Pie, until finding the day’s prayers took longer than praying them. Cranmer wanted the office out of the cloister and into the parish. With English in place of Latin, a carpenter or a baker could follow the words. The whole Psalter across a month. Most of the Bible read straight through in a year, aloud, in the hearing of people who had never been let near it. Cranmer rebuilt prayer to survive a working life — fields to plow, shops to open, households to keep — morning and evening, the two hinges of an ordinary day.

Celtic Daily Prayer was one of the first books I ordered from this upstart online book company named after a river in South America. I had been using the morning, noon, and evening office for a few months when I discovered compline. This is a night prayer said just before sleep, asking God’s protection through the dark hours until morning.

Instead of extemporaneous prayers over my children before they went to sleep at night, I started praying compline with them. Oddly enough, they genuinely seemed to enjoy it. They participated. There was something kind of beautiful when my six-year-old prayed:

The peace of all peace
be mine this night
in the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit
Amen.

My children began praying for care into the dark of night.
I have since prayed this daily office through many dark nights of my own soul.

The Northumbria Community drinks from an older well. Celtic Daily Prayer reaches past Cranmer and Benedict, to the monks of Lindisfarne — Aidan, who carried the gospel from Iona, and Cuthbert after him, keeping his vigils through the North Sea nights. Celtic Daily Prayer keeps their company. The reading cycles bear the names of the abbots who followed. The saints walk beside you. And it prays the way they prayed — God woven through weather and stone and the working day. The Caim runs through it, the encircling prayer: a circle traced by hand, Christ before and behind and on every side. St. Patrick’s Breastplate armors the same lineage, clothing our mornings in the name of God.

Three streams meet here. Benedict’s fullness. Cranmer’s reach. Celtic warmth. Depth without a cloister. Daily prayer for the realities of daily life.
It’s the best of all worlds.
At least for me.

wrote a fantastic little book about prayer called Help, Thanks, Wow. Those are really good prayer words. I still practice extemporaneous prayer. A lot of times I start with one of those words when I pray on my daily prayer walk. But usually, I pray the morning office from Celtic Daily Prayer. I’ve been using it for almost 30 years now, and I have it memorized. On emotionless, feelingless, coffeeless mornings — it’s the best way I know to begin.

One thing I have asked of the Lord,
That is what I will seek …

Organizations don’t run on inspiration. They run on rhythm. Show up to the rhythm and the rhythm does the work. Our souls are no different. Pray when the mood hits and I might pray twice a month. I might not pray at all. I’m that bad at it.

So, I keep the hours and pray in the dark, in the dry seasons, on the days when I’ve got nothing in my tank — which are the days I need it most. I don’t have to ask the question, “have I prayed enough?” anymore. There’s no need. When it’s all “help,” no “wow,” and not near enough “thanks” — I don’t have to make anything up at all.
No improv necessary.

This day be within and without me, lowly and meek, yet all-powerful.

You are doing better than you think.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?



Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Hey friend!

There are quite a few more of you around this week than last week. This essay apparently struck a chord with some.
I’m honored you’ve subscribed and grateful you’re here.

By way of brief introduction (or reintroduction):

My name is Bernie. I’ve been married for 36 years and have two adult kids. I was an evangelical pastor for 13 years. Our family spent the better part of 10 years living and working in Central Asia, settling back in the States 12 years ago, in Greenville, SC.

This Substack channel is simple.

A weekly essay, typically at the intersection of leadership, spirituality, and creativity, with a dash of whatever I’m currently reading or listening to. My brain is something of a compost bin. I throw a lot of stuff in there, and this weekly essay is some of the humus I try to extract. Some ideas are not completely formed, still in a place of decomposition and rot. Some are pretty good peat for growing something fresh. I invite you to think out loud with me.

I’m writing a book.
I’m also building Growability.org — the nonprofit side of Growability, a boutique business consulting and coaching company.
I also cohost a podcast at Global Trellis, an organization for people who work cross-culturally or support those who do.

First Sunday of the month I usually share the books I’ve either finished or am processing right now, as well as anything interesting I’m currently listening to. There’s an occasional Filmography section, as well.

I hope you find this fun, sometimes a little helpful, interesting, or informative.

Definitely unsubscribe if you don’t. I will not be offended. 😌

July 2026 Bibliography

The Practice of Poetry (ed. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell) — My daughter majored in poetry, and she assigns me homework now. Writing craft is a topic I could very much nerd out on. I limit my writing craft reading to no more than one book per month. After last month’s Verb Your Enthusiasm, I wondered about implementing what I’ve learned with a practice of poetry, even though I’ve not written a poem since Ms. Figlia’s 8th-grade lit class. I asked the poetry-major daughter (who’s actually an excellent poet in her own right), and she recommended a book called The Practice of Poetryto learn the practice of poetry. Makes sense. Now those verbs have no place left to hide.

Wired for Wonder (Aaron Cline Hanbury) — Aaron is a senior editor at Common Good Magazine, a wonderful monthly journal that has published my writing multiple times. Wired for Wonder is a series of essays on technology and faith. Aaron is an excellent writer, and this topic is timely. This is a fast read that makes you think.

Culture Care, Second Edition (Makoto Fujimura) — Fujimura shaped my thinking with this book almost a decade ago. I’ve re-read this book several times — and did so once again with the new edition. He is an artist and a thinker — on my list of people I’d like to have a meal with someday. Reading this again, I caught how much of my own vocabulary is lifted from these pages. This is a formative book.

Regime Change (Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan) — Not gonna lie. I wanted some of this tea. It was a more substantive book than I expected. Haberman and Swan ran more than a thousand interviews and triple-checked every line. The result reads like history written in real time: a documentary record of a consequential presidency, sourced to the teeth, free of speculation. If nothing else, read it as a masterclass in excellent journalism.

Life After Power (Jared Cohen) — This book chronicles how seven presidents walk out of the most powerful office on earth and meet the question waiting for the rest of us: who are you once the title is gone? Thomas Jefferson built a university and carved just that onto his tombstone, leaving his presidency unmentioned. John Quincy Adams left the presidency to become a junior congressman and fought against the institution of slavery until it killed him. Alexander Hamilton feared former presidents would “wander among the people like ghosts.” Cohen builds a whole book against that fear. For those of us making late-life career shifts, this book is a real help.

July 2026 Discography

One of my top albums of last year was Songs of a Lost World by The Cure. It’s the perfect album for men of a certain age in the mid-2020s. We were in high school in the ‘80s as bands like The Cure came into their own. Prime post-punk, goth rock. I loved it then. Still do now.

As does my good friend and colleague who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland (also a man of a certain age). The Cure is doing a summer tour of the UK, including a show in Belfast, which happened just last week. Back in January we purchased tickets and started making plans to attend the sad-dad rock show. (I say it’s the cooler, gothier elder cousin of regular dad-rock.) Then summer overbooked me. I was not able to go.
A legitimate sad dad.

I sold my ticket, my friend went alone, and I rebuilt the night from the show’s actual setlist.

Two and a half hours of 40+ years of The Cure. Here is exactly what they played in Belfast, in order. Impressive for a bunch old guys → I should Have Been there: The Cure, Belfast Setlist.

Want less rain in your forecast? Last month’s Ordinary Time playlist still holds → The Skinboat Hours: A Playlist for Ordinary Time.

I would genuinely love to know:
What are you reading or listening to right now?

Leave your favorites in the comments!

Oh — and remember: You are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?

Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Last Sunday I attended my local church (a congregation in the Anglican Church, located in Greenville, SC). A woman named Hannah led us in the word and in sacrament. Hannah is a priest in the Anglican Church along with her husband. She used to be a priest at our church. They now serve another congregation on the opposite side of the mountains in North Carolina. She’s also a writer. (Her book, Feasting on Hope, is both memoir and theology of communion. I highly recommend reading it. Her story is moving and important. You can also follow her here on Substack!) The message was rich, beautiful, and profound. I came away both grateful for Hannah’s message and calling to ministry and a bit sad about the years I spent believing this kind of beauty in ministry wasn’t possible for a woman with a calling from God.

* * *

On June 10, 2026, the largest Protestant body in America took its clearest step yet toward writing the exclusion of women into its founding document. By a margin of roughly three-to-one (about 75% of nearly 8,100 voting delegates), the Southern Baptist Convention approved the “Truth and Unity Amendment.” The amendment writes this into the SBC’s constitution: the executive committee may expel any church that lets a woman preach to the congregation.

Of course, the decision isn’t without nuance. This vote isn’t the final answer for the denomination. Southern Baptist parliamentary rules require a second vote at next year’s meeting in Indianapolis before any change to the founding document takes effect.

A delegate asked from the floor whether the new language will reach women serving as teachers, ministry directors, or missionaries. The president answered only with ambiguity. “The amendment says what it says.”

A refusal to define edges is precisely what should concern anyone who cares about where lines get drawn next. The people most affected by undefined boundaries are the ones standing closest to the margins.

There was a day I would have voted with most Southern Baptists.

I was a pastor in an evangelical church and believed what I was taught about the roles of men and women in the church. I was no conservative hard-liner—but when push came to shove, you could have dubbed me a mildly patriarchal, light-complementarian. I do know I voted against women in ministry in my own denominational meetings.

And I was wrong.

Rev. Hannah was not the first to prove me wrong.
Rev. Nicola was.

* * *

For the better part of ten years, my family lived and served in Outer Mongolia. This was after my patriarchal-leaning pastor days. Crossing cultures can change your mind about a lot of things. What works in an American context can be quite a different story in a place like Central Asia. We served alongside a national church that had started from nothing less than 20 years before we arrived. There were a lot of women serving as pastors and leaders there. For most, it was women or nothing. This was when the edges of my long-held beliefs started fraying.

Then we started the first fully functioning international church in the capital city, and my light patriarchal, ill-defined complementarianism unraveled some more.

It wasn’t difficult to bring together a preaching team in our international context. People trained in ministry from all over the world were in one place. I question whether it is healthy for one person to have their very own weekly pulpit. This seems unhealthy on many fronts, not the least being of the over-inflated ego of so many preachers. Plus, the same person every week feels a little like one of those grapefruit diets. Sure, there might be some initial health benefits, but this will not keep you healthy long-term. Besides, I didn’t want to take on the preaching role every week. This was a part-time gig, after all.

So, we invited anyone interested in being a part of the preaching team to an informational meeting.

To my surprise, Nicola showed up.

I didn’t know her well and naively wasn’t expecting a woman to show up to a preaching team meeting. Silly me. I learned she was an ordained priest in the Anglican Church and loved to teach the Bible. Internally, I was hesitant, but externally, compliant — mainly because I am not a fan of conflict and wave-making. Nicola was on the preaching schedule.

The Sunday before she spoke, another older guy was up to preach. It was a genuinely terrible Sunday morning. He wasn’t just bad, in that he wasn’t a great speaker. He was borderline heretical. And he yelled a lot. It just wasn’t good. I told my wife I would not schedule him again.

The next Sunday, Nicola spoke.

It was beautiful. It was Biblical. Spiritual grace and power accompanied her message. Her preaching was better than that of most men I’ve heard — including mine.

She stayed on the preaching rotation.

I changed my mind about women and pulpits.

My position has solidified over the years with the litany of headlines about “Christian leaders” behaving badly. The prevalence of abuse, harassment, and misuse of power in the church made me think about leaving the church altogether. Watching faux leaders cover up and minimize the abuse of women and children both infuriated and crushed me. It wasn’t just the Southern Baptists and the Catholics. The call was coming from within my own house. Ravi Zacharias died and people inside the Evangelical denomination I called home (one to which he was also affiliated) knew about his abusive behavior and said nothing. This stream of evil, disappointment, and heartache from church leadership is not drying up. It is widening and eroding the landscape. It’s disheartening.

Then there was the ESV Bible.

* * *

Bible translations have never been a sticking point for me. When a pastor in Tennessee, I made it a practice to read as many translations as possible. As an early adopter, I swapped my New American Standard teaching Bible for the ESV when released in 2001. After all, bible translators are just trying their best with ancient languages, right?

I stuck with my ESV Bible for a couple of decades.
Until I read the why behind the translation.

There’s not room here to get into ESV nuance. In a sentence: the ESV translation was a direct response to the gender-inclusive language debate of the mid-1990s. The ESV translation team (on which a grand total of zero women took part) went too far. The champions of the translation celebrate it as “unapologetically complementarian” calling this the “biblical view.”

It spite of claims to the contrary, no translation is neutral. It is ludicrous for any translation to claim neutrality when its first loyalty is a theological outcome.
Yet the ESV does just that.

I now use the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) by default.

* * *

Lest there be any confusion, I am not a complementarian. Not anymore.
I guess, if you must stick a label on me, I am an egalitarian. But I’m not much of a believer in labels at all these days. Theology and general life are far too complex for tidy labeled boxes in cabinet drawers. Labels are for those uncomfortable with the ambiguity of interesting.

I’ve discovered I’m not alone in my position. Not at all. Respected and brilliant biblical scholars like Gordon Fee, F. F. Bruce, and N.T. Wright reject the trappings of complementarianism and embrace various forms of an egalitarian perspective.

Here’s what I know.

I was wrong.

I’m not even saying I now know I’m right.

But I was most definitely wrong before.
The position I once held is dangerous and harmful to the people on the edges; to women in particular.

To anyone, man or woman, I’ve directed down the path of patriarchy, male headship, and complementarianism—I am sorry.
I’ll say it again.
I was wrong.

To any woman who felt disempowered or unable to thrive in her God-given gifts and calling because of something I taught, I am especially sorry and ask your forgiveness.

If you experienced any kind of harm or abuse because of this teaching?
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

As I yet bask in the afterglow of Rev. Hannah King’s beautiful, challenging, biblical, and powerful words to our congregation, I do know this:

I will never be a part of a fellowship who refuses to empower all members, especially women, ever again.

That’s the best way I know to repent.

You’re doing better than you think.

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A Short Bibliography

If you want to wrestle with this—and I hope you do—here’s where I’d send you. Read books, not threads. Read beyond people with whom you already agree.

Start here

• Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press, 2021). A historian and Baptist pastor’s wife tells the ESV story, and a lot more, better than I can.

• McKnight, Scot, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Zondervan). Less about gender than about how we read—which is the real argument underneath all of this.

• Richards, E. Randolph, Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes (IVP). This is the flip side of the same coin as the McKnight book. This one discusses how other cultures read the same words we do—and can come to completely different conclusions.

• Lucy Peppiatt, Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women (IVP Academic, 2019). Short and clear-eyed about the hard passages.

• Lambert, Zach, Better Ways to Read the Bible (Brazos Press). Covers the various lenses we all use to read scripture; some life-giving, some harmful.

Go deeper

• Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy, eds. Ronald Pierce, Cynthia Westfall, et al. (IVP Academic; get the latest edition). Gordon Fee—one of the finest New Testament scholars of his generation—is all over this volume.

• Philip Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ (Zondervan Academic, 2009). The most rigorous verse-by-verse treatment of Paul I know of.

• N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture (HarperOne, 2014). The chapter on women’s ministry is a good entry point; his essay “Women’s Service in the Church” is free here.

On the ESV specifically

• Vern Poythress & Wayne Grudem, The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (2000). The architects defending their own project, in their own words. Read it and decide for yourself whether “accuracy” or “outcome” came first.

• Marg Mowczko (margmowczko.com). Free, careful work on the Greek behind the disputed verses.

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?

Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Happy Sunday evening, happy full-moon, and a very happy start to Ordinary Time.

Here’s my monthly run-down of what I’m reading, watching, and listening to.

I’d love to hear the same from you!

What I’m Reading

Here are the five books I read (completed) in the month of May 2026.

Quantum Physics and Theology by John Polkinghorne sits at the intersection of two disciplines most people assume are enemies. They’re not. Polkinghorne — physicist and Anglican priest — demonstrates how science and faith ask the same questions in different languages. I enjoyed this one a lot.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley still lands harder than most contemporary fiction. I don’t think I’d read this previously, but I’m so glad I did. The real monster is never the creature. I highly recommend reading (or re-reading) this one. It hits hard in 2026.

Verb Your Enthusiasm by Sarah Kauffman is a love letter to verbs — and a strong argument for precise language in a world of AI slop. Energizing and practical writer-craft.

Big Time by Laura Vanderkam reframes the way we view our calendars: rather than thinking about 24-hour days, we all have 8,736 hours in a year. From this vantage, time is not scarce — it’s far more abundant than we’re conditioned to believe. That shift in perspective is worth the read — and it’s a fast one (I finished the book in two days).

And then there’s Liturgies of the Wild by Martin Shaw.

My Book of the Month: Liturgies of the Wild by Martin Shaw

Most books inform. Few form. This does both well with breathtaking prose.

Martin Shaw is a mythologist and storyteller of the Celtic tradition, and Liturgies of the Wild reads like an artifact retrieved from a peat bog — ancient, saturated, and alive. His central argument is myth is not metaphor. Myth is soil. “If the soil isn’t rich enough,” Shaw writes, “the kid grows wonky.” Strip away the stories that orient us to the earth, to each other, and to the sacred — and we grow disoriented, anxious, and unrooted.

This matters for those of us trying to do meaningful work in the world.

This book mattered to me.

Shaw draws from Celtic tradition and belief that without “the cloak of story and the cloak of place,” we become vulnerable to the kind of existential angst that no amount of productivity or career achievement or doom-scrolling can touch. Sound familiar?

The key idea for me had to do with our own formation ad humans and spiritual beings. Our initiation — real formation — almost always arrives as crisis. “An initiation is something that instructs us, and often in the form of a crisis.” Rarely the crisis we planned for. Always the one which finds us. The crisis always comes. The question is whether we have enough story in us to survive it well.

I’ve thought about that sentence for two weeks.

Shaw’s vision of Christ is also worth noting — he calls Jesus “the Galilee Druid,” a wild teacher who “seems to push against two particular enchantments: passivity and disconnection.” That framing won’t land the same for everyone. But underneath it is something true and worth sitting with.

Read slowly. Read outside. But definitely read.

What I’m Listening to

Music for Ordinary Time

Inspired by Martin Shaw’s book, I’ve put together a playlist for these days of Ordinary Time. The bulk of the liturgical year lives here, as do we — the long, green stretch of regular days. The ordinary is where most of our lives happen. The ordinary is much more important than we think.

Here’s my playlist for these months. See if this is anything you resonate with:

The Skinboat Hours: A Playlist for Ordinary Time.

Put it on. Take a walk. Let the season settle.

My album of the month is Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs — his fourth studio record, produced alongside Aaron Dessner. Kahan describes it as the reckoning that follows success. He stares across the distance that fame opened between him and his people — his family, his Vermont roots, the younger self he left behind — and tries to find words for what he sees. He wrote it, he says, the way you rehearse conversations you never get to have. It’s folk-rock with real emotional weight. Dealing with friendship, loss, regret, grief, and trauma. If Stick Season was the breakthrough, The Great Divide is the harder, quieter, more honest work that follows. Musically and lyrically it hits home for me right now.

What I’m Watching

Project Hail Mary is the best book-to-film I’ve ever seen. Read the book. Watch the movie. Do both, in that order. You’ll understand.

But then — I did not expect The Sheep Detectives.

On paper, this film has no business working. A flock of sheep, raised on detective novels read aloud by their shepherd (Hugh Jackman), investigate his murder. It sounds like an absurdist children’s movie. It is, partly. Children should absolutely watch this film.

But something about the moment in which it released — May 2026, the particular flavor of chaos we’re all navigating — it landed differently. Beneath the wool and the whodunit is a serious meditation on grief, community, and what it means to honor someone you’ve lost. It’s Babe meets Agatha Christie, and it earns every tear it draws. I don’t know if it’s one of the best films of the year, but it’s certainly worth watching. Kids and adults. In spite of the title.

Also — the Cubs had a spectacular winning streak (12 games!) followed by an almost equally spectacular losing streak (11 games!) — some things never change. I’m about to watch the rare nationally televised game on Sunday Night Baseball.
Let’s Fly the W.

What are you reading, watching, and listening to right now?

Drop it in the comments. I’d genuinely love to know!

Oh — and you are doing better than you think.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?



Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted an essay here.

• I’ve been traveling. That’s real.

• I’ve been in the process of launching Growability.org — the non-profit arm of the consulting company I work with. A tremendous amount of energy is needed to get any object in motion from a standstill. We’re doing it. More soon.

• I’ve been processing a lot regarding our approach to leadership and how utterly wrong we’ve been at this. Also — more soon.

I’ve also been thinking about 19th century British novelist Anthony Trollope, as one does.

Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels.

His era handed the literati elite label to Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Trollope held the title of: postal clerk.

Trollope held capability in his pen, as many do. But how does one compete with Dickens and Eliot? His competitive advantage was unrelenting consistency.

Every morning at 5:30, before the world stirred, he sat at his desk and produced 250 words every fifteen minutes for two and a half hours. He kept a watch on the desktop. If he happened to finish a novel before a session ended, he pulled out a fresh sheet and started another one. No celebration. No break. Just the next page.

He didn’t outwrite his contemporaries in talent. He outworked them in consistency.

This distinction matters more than we admit. Talent arrives — or it doesn’t. Consistency is a choice we make every morning, before the excuses find us. That one difference reshapes everything about how you approach the work — and whether you actually do it.

We’ve built a mythology around talent. We treat giftedness like fixed inheritance and celebrate the prodigy. The natural. The bloke who makes it look effortless.

This is mythology.

Greatness belongs to the regulars.

Writer and thinker Anne-Laure Le Cunff frames consistency in terms of economics: … persistence — showing up long enough to see the compound interest accumulate in your work. (from Tiny Experiments)

This separates the ones who last from the ones who flame out early. Compound interest. That’s the correct metaphor. Small deposits, made without fail, grow into something the first investment never predicted. The trouble is compound interest is invisible at first. Nothing’s moving. You write, nobody reads. You practice, skill stays stubborn. You show up, the work is still embarrassing. Talent looks like the only winner in this phase. It’s not. Winning early battles certainly doesn’t win wars.

This is the invisible stretch. So what carries you through the uncertainty? In one of my favorite books, Deep Work, Cal Newport argues you need to move past good intentions and build routines and rituals which remove the friction of starting — structures that hold your concentration without burning through willpower to get there.

This is because willpower depletes. Intentions dissolve. Routines hold the line.

Jocelyn Glei strips it down further: the strategy is a practice. And a practice means you do the work — habitually, without negotiation. (from Manage Your Day-to-Day) Not so much a plan, or even a goal. A practice.
Goals point somewhere, which is great.
Practices get you up on Tuesday when nothing in you wants to move.

But here’s what the talent mythology misses entirely. Consistent practice doesn’t just develop skill. It builds judgment. Sönke Ahrens wrote a brilliant book on the unglamorous topic of note-taking and said this: the ability to separate what matters from what doesn’t demands doing — deliberate practice, repeated until the distinction sharpens into instinct.

Discernment. The capacity to find signal inside noise. To recognize what holds weight and what wastes space.

Books don’t teach this. No course installs it. You earn it by doing the thing — again and again — until your eye learns to cut. That’s wisdom. And wisdom doesn’t flow from talent. It accrues through repetition.

Amy Suto (a great writer and thinker here on Substack) lands this argument in four words: Consistency beats complexity.(from Write for Money and Power) No better system required. No more sophisticated method.

Talent is overrated.
Butt in the chair.
Do the work.
Then do it again.
The work compounds.

Trollope didn’t keep his watch on the desk as a timer. It was an anchor. The watch enforced the ritual. Ritual builds the practice. The practice produces the work. The work, done daily, without drama, before the rest of the world opened its eyes, becomes a body of work.

Whether that’s 47 novels or a single novel or a research dissertation.

Anthony Trollope did not outtalent his era.
He did out-consistency them.
Every morning he made a choice.
The same choice sits in front of you too. Tomorrow at 5:30.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?

Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

One block south of 627 North 10th Street in Rochelle, Illinois, there is an empty lot. Checked it this morning on satellite — still there. We called it The Prairie when I was a kid. It’s apparently now called Central Park. On long, northern Illinois, summer afternoons, that scruffy patch of ground became (among other things) a baseball field. We were the Cubs. My mitt was a Wilson. I had a purple bat. My coordination was, to put it charitably, a work in progress. Being tall early in life is a mixed blessing. My height came years before the motor skills catch up.

Baseball was a backdrop of my childhood, less because we were a sports family and more because of geography, and likely the 70’s culture of the mid to late 1970’s. Growing up on the outskirts of Chicago made you a Cubs fan by default. On many lazy summer afternoons, I had a small turquoise-colored AM radio. I’d tune it to WGN and stretch out with a book somewhere while Jack Brickhouse called the game with his iconic voice. The Cubs lost a lot. Didn’t much matter. It was more or less expected.

My grandpa was a White Sox fan — something to do with Chicago politics, as I now understand it — and he regarded the Cubs with some contempt. For me, the rivalry felt like fun. For him, I think now, it was principle. Some things I never probed too deeply.

A couple of times a year, usually in early spring or late fall when the tickets were affordable (and always, somehow, freezing cold), we’d drive partway into the city and take the El to Wrigley. Even as a kid, there was something about that ballpark. The ivy felt ancient and alive. This is when all the games were in the daytime. Wrigley Field was the last MLB stadium to install lights. The Cubs played their first home night game in 1988.

We moved to Atlanta when I was in middle school. The Braves were supposed to be my team now, I guess. But the Atlanta Braves of the early 1980s weren’t much of an upgrade — chronic disappointment with better weather. The Cubs were still and always will be my first baseball love.

Renée and I married in 1989, and baseball slowly receded from my attention. Work. Life. The decade turned, then turned again. I do remember coming home on multiple afternoons, soon after our son was born, to find Renée on the couch feeding an infant with the Cubs game on. Tender memory, that one. But baseball and I had mostly parted ways.

Fast forward to 2026. I’m returning to baseball.

Here’s why.

Baseball is slow, and I crave slow these days. Our culture has confused speed with significance. Every platform, every app, every notification is engineered to spike our nervous systems and hold attention hostage. Baseball refuses all of that. A nine-inning game takes roughly three hours. Nothing explodes. Nothing is optimized. A pitcher stands on a mound and thinks. A batter steps out of the box and thinks. The crowd waits. This is not a bug — it’s the architecture of the game. The pace of baseball isn’t a failure of entertainment; it’s a feature of attention. Baseball teaches us to stay present when nothing is happening, which turns out to be essential preparation for when everything suddenly does.

I’m mostly listening on streaming radio, which has made this even better. No screen or graphics. Simply a voice and the ambient sound of the crowd; imagination filling in the rest. Somewhere in the neurological literature there’s probably research on this — the way long-form audio, unhurried and visually undemanding, does something restorative to the overstimulated brain. Gardeners describe a version of this: the particular quality of attention you give to something slow-growing that you cannot rush. Baseball on the radio is something like that. Baseball is a bath for the mind.

And then there’s the strategy — which most casual observers miss entirely because they’re looking for contact and highlight-reel moments. Baseball’s drama is almost entirely architectural. The count builds. The bases load. Two outs, man on second, full count, a left-handed pitcher against a pull hitter who’s been chasing breaking balls all day. Every person in that ballpark knows exactly what’s at stake, and the tension compounds, pitch by pitch, until something breaks. The crowd ceases to be mere spectators and become part of the drama. A baseball stadium’s collective held breath — and subsequent release — is one of the more honest emotional experiences available in public life.

This turns out to be a good year to start paying attention to the Cubs again.

The franchise turns 150 this year. They won the World Series in 2016 — ending a 108-year drought in a Game 7 that remains one of the best baseball games ever played. Ten years later, the roster is young, the division is competitive, and the Cubs are sitting at the bottom of the standings as I write this.

Which, if you know anything about baseball, means exactly nothing in April.

It’s a long way to October. The game rewards patience, sustained attention, and a willingness to watch something develop across a full season rather than demand resolution by the second inning. Those are not the skills our current moment is cultivating. They might be the skills we most need.

The Prairie is still there. (Yeah!) I’m sure the turquoise radio is long gone. But the Cubs are playing a day game this afternoon, and they just tied it up in the bottom of the ninth. We’re going to extra innings today.

Do you follow baseball? Who’s your team?

Oh — and remember you are doing better than you think.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Liturgy has been part of my private spiritual practice for over twenty years — written prayers, fixed hours, the rhythms of a structured devotional life. What Renée and I found three years ago, when we started attending an Anglican church, was a community doing the same thing out loud. That convergence has been life-giving in ways I didn’t fully anticipate. Holy Week, in particular, has a way of standing out.

This is our third Holy Week in this community and each year the story lands differently. This year, reading through the passion narrative in the Gospel of John, what struck me wasn’t the theological weight of it — though there is plenty — it was the political architecture. The machinery behind the crucifixion of Jesus carries an uncanny familiarity.

The text is explicit: the religious leaders go to Pilate. They pressure him. They manipulate him. When Pilate offers to release Jesus, they deliver one of the more remarkable lines in the New Testament. In the Good Friday liturgy, the entire congregation reads it together:

“We have no king but Caesar.”

It’s a jarring thing to say out loud.

These were the guardians of Israel’s covenant tradition. The people entrusted with the sacred story of a God who had liberated slaves from empire, who had declared repeatedly no earthly king held ultimate authority. Yet, here they are, pledging allegiance to Caesar — not out of conviction, but because Jesus threatened their position and power.

They’re now collaborators; bootlickers to the corruption of Rome.

Religious leaders don’t fear heresy. They fear irrelevance. Jesus drew crowds, disrupted temple commerce, and undermined their authority. They did what institutions do when survival is at stake.

They made a deal.

A crucifixion was the result. A political execution dressed in the language of spirituality.

The times we live in are not so different.

We don’t need to stretch very far to see the same alignment operating today — religious voices lending cover to corrupt power, sanctifying what should be condemned, performing outrage at the wrong targets. The collusion of temple and empire didn’t end in Jerusalem. It’s a recurring feature of history, and it is playing out again with uncomfortable clarity.

None of this makes Holy Week less sacred. If anything, it sharpens it. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, surrounded by people waving palms and shouting hosanna, fully aware of what the city would do to him. He came anyway. He was not naive about power. He simply refused to be controlled by it.

That’s what I’m sitting with this week.

Book Update

On a related topic, the first full draft of my book — currently traveling under the code name Project Generative Leadership — is complete. I’m now doing line-by-line hand edits, working sentence by sentence, using the principles in Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott as a guide. Practical, honest, highly recommended.

You are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

I'm about halfway through writing a book I am calling Project Generative Leadership — and honestly, writing it is taking a lot of my available words these days. I’m excited to finally have some momentum on this thing, and am on track to have an editable/useable first draft by the end of April. So periodically, I'm going to share some of it with you here. You get a first look!

This chapter is from Part Two, which is about candor — the kind of honest, specific feedback most of us avoid giving and most organizations are terrible at receiving (and vice-versa). This is a short chapter on the need for specificity. I think you'll recognize the pattern. Most of us have been Brooksley Born at least once in or lives.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

You are doing better than you think.

In 1998, Brooksley Born had a very specific problem. A problem documented and named — worth $29 trillion and growing with zero regulatory oversight.

Born ran the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Her job was to watch for systemic risk. And the unregulated over-the-counter derivatives market was exactly the kind of thing her agency existed to examine.

So she did what you do with a real concern. She put it in writing.

On May 7, 1998, Born’s agency issued a formal Concept Release — a document asking specific questions about whether the derivatives market needed regulatory oversight. She named the mechanisms. Named the risks. Named the gap.

And the room exploded.

Within hours, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt issued a rare joint press release expressing “grave concerns.” Larry Summers reportedly called her office with thirteen bankers on the line, warning the release would trigger the worst financial crisis since World War II.

Let that settle for a moment.

These “leaders” weren’t fighting Born’s concern. They were fighting her specificity.

A vague worry is easy to manage. You nod, form a committee, and wait it out. But Born didn’t float a general unease into the air. She named the thing. She documented it. She asked precise questions in a formal regulatory instrument.

Specificity threatened the status quo in ways ambiguity never could.

Congress passed legislation prohibiting the CFTC from regulating derivatives. Born resigned June 1, 1999.

On September 15, 2008 — nine years later — Lehman Brothers collapsed. The financial crisis driven substantially by the unregulated derivatives market she had specifically warned about cost millions of Americans their homes, savings, and retirement security. Born later said the market had grown with so little oversight it made the crisis “much deeper and more pervasive than it otherwise would have been.”

She reportedly woke in a cold sweat during those years, convinced a catastrophe was coming.

She was right. She was specific. She was ignored.

Here’s the leadership principle hiding in plain sight.

Vague feedback feels safe. It protects you from discomfort. You hint and hedge. You say things like “I just wonder if maybe...” You let the concern dissolve rather than name it.

But vague feedback protects the speaker, not the relationship. It buys you momentary comfort at the cost of the actual problem.

Candor names the impact, not just the intent. It says: here is the mechanism, here is the risk, here is what happens if we don’t address it. It’s not cruelty. It’s clarity wrapped in care — and specificity is what gives it teeth.

Born wasn’t trying to blow up the system. She was trying to protect it. The specificity of her concern was a warning, not a weapon. People felt threatened and chose to fight the warning rather than reckon with the risk.

Roger Boisjoly knew the same dynamic from a different industry. In July 1985, he wrote a memo to Morton Thiokol’s VP of Engineering predicting “a catastrophe of the highest order — loss of human life” if the O-ring problem on the Space Shuttle solid rocket booster wasn’t addressed. He was specific. The night before the Challenger launch, under pressure, the engineers’ objections were softened — reframed as inconclusive data.

The shuttle launched January 28, 1986. Seventy-three seconds later, seven crew members were dead.

Specificity existed. It never left the meeting.

This principle plays out in something as ordinary as a weekly team meeting. Most organizations have them. Most meetings are vague. Show up (maybe), report out, disperse. The meeting exists, but nothing specific is asked and nothing specific is expected — so nothing specific changes. One of the first things I do with my organizational clients is introduce a structured weekly meeting with a named agenda — specific categories, specific questions, specific commitments before everyone walks out the door. The difference isn’t the meeting itself. It’s the specificity. Vague gatherings produce vague results. You get what you ask for — and most leaders never ask for anything specific.

Candor needs clarity and courage.

Specific feedback sometimes makes everyone uncomfortable. Candor costs. Boisjoly’s specificity cost him twice: once when nobody listened, and once again when everybody did. Born was legislated into irrelevance. Specificity has a price.

Evasion has a price too. The invoice can be deferred— sometimes for years, sometimes for a decade. The bill always comes due, often in ways nobody anticipates.

Maybe the question isn’t even whether you’re willing to get specific.

Maybe the question is whether you’re willing to live with what happens when you don’t.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

My parents did what most young parents do — make it work.

My dad was in the military and worked at night. My mom worked days at a department store. This meant mornings were a kind of changing of the guard: one parent heading to bed as the other headed out the door. In between was me, a bowl of cereal, and whatever PBS had going on that morning. Those were the OG years of Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

That’s how Fred Rogers became my babysitter.

For a stretch of time in my earliest childhood, he was the most consistent adult presence in my mornings, which is not a criticism of my parents at all. (It was the 70s and life was hard. Be nice. They do read this sometimes.)

I did just love that guy. Calm, unhurried, looking directly at the camera — directly at me — like he had nowhere else to be and nobody else he’d rather talk to. He took off his jacket. He put on his sweater. He talked about feelings like they were something worth discussing. I didn’t realize it then, but looking back, he made it feel safe to be small.

What Fred Rogers was doing, I had no category for at the time.

Neither, it turns out, did NBC.

In the mid-1950s, Rogers pitched an early version of his program to NBC. They passed. The network was in the business of entertainment — bright lights, big personalities, performers who could hold a room. Rogers was doing something much quieter than they were used to. They didn’t have language or a category for him. He wasn’t really entertaining children. He was with them. And the people evaluating his show had no framework to recognize the value he was creating.

He never became a performer. He simply found a context where the way he created value was finally recognized as valuable. Fred Rogers knew his value. It was eventually recognized by millions. With a cereal bowl in front of the little black and white TV in Fort Monmouth, NJ, I was one of them.

Fred Rogers said he “went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there’s some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen.”

Most of us don’t have that kind of clarity. We move through careers being evaluated on output — what we produce, how much we close, what our KPIs look like — without anyone ever asking us the more fundamental question: how do you actually create value?

That gap is expensive. It produces very competent, quietly miserable people.

After coaching professionals through vocational transitions, I’ve noticed four distinct ways people create value. Not better or worse — just different. Working against your natural mode is one of the most reliable sources of exhaustion I’ve ever encountered.

Makers create value by building ideas. They see patterns before others do, simplify complexity into frameworks, and chart the path forward when everyone else is still staring at the fog. A Maker’s fingerprints are on the thinking — the strategy, the architecture, the innovation. They’re energized by blank pages and unsolved problems. They frame the questions. Put a Maker in a repetitive maintenance role, and watch the light go out.

Mentors create value through people. They develop, encourage, and guide. Meetings that drain others energize them. Their best work shows up in other people’s growth — which means it’s often invisible on a spreadsheet. Fred Rogers was a Mentor. The problem with Mentors in organizational life is that their contribution is the hardest to quantify and the easiest to undervalue, yet mentors lead leaders.

Movers create value by driving momentum. They mobilize people and resources, launch initiatives, and keep things from stagnating. A Mover in a stable, low-urgency role will manufacture urgency just to feel alive. They’re often mistaken for being impatient jerks. Often, they’re not impatient jerks — they’re misplaced.

Mechanics create value by sustaining systems. They finish what others start, maintain what others overlook, and build the kind of reliability that organizations quietly depend on. Mechanics rarely get celebrated in the launch moment. They’re the reason the launch still matters six months later.

Here’s something to sit with:
Which of those descriptions made you lean forward a little?

That instinct is data. A lot of times we feel it but don’t trust it — we’ve been trained to admire modes which aren’t ours and feel vaguely deficient for not naturally working the way celebrated people around us work.

The problem isn’t production. It’s placement.

Rogers didn’t need to become the kind of host NBC actually wanted. He needed to find a context where his mode of creating value was actually recognized as valuable. The difference between those two paths is the difference between a career spent performing and a career spent contributing.

For what it’s worth: my own profile lands in Maker and Mentor — the Architect and Connector zones in the framework we use at Growability®. Years of career coaching trial and error eventually gave us language for something few have been able to name. I’m wired to build frameworks and develop people. Put me in pure execution mode — spreadsheets, logistics, automated systems — and, sure, I’ll get it done, but I’ll come home empty. Put me in a room with someone trying to figure out their next chapter, and I’m energized before the conversation begins.

That’s not a complaint about spreadsheets. It’s information. It’s the kind of information that, when you finally have it, reshapes how you think about every role you’ve held and every transition you’re considering.

In the Career Sweet Spot assessment, we use slightly different language — Strength Zones, drawn from both personality and strengths data. But the underlying truth is the same: knowing how you naturally create value isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation of every good vocational decision you’ll ever make.

Reply to this email if you want to know more.

Fred Rogers didn’t change the world by becoming something he wasn’t.
Neither will you.

Oh — and you are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Weirdly, chalk art in San Francisco made headlines this week.

Activists — made up primarily of employees of the two most powerful tech companies on earth right now — used chalk and a sidewalk to challenge their leaders with this question:

Where are your redlines?

Here’s the story, if you missed it.

Anthropic — an AI company — had been negotiating a contract with the Pentagon. They wanted two hard limits written into the language: no mass surveillance of American citizens. No autonomous weapons capable of making a kill decision without a human being in the loop. The Pentagon said no. Anthropic walked away. The US government responded by blacklisting them, labeling them a “supply chain risk to national security,” and directed every federal agency to immediately cease using their technology.

Hours later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — who had publicly stated just days before that he shared Anthropic’s redlines — signed a deal. Without them.

His employees erupted. Open letters. Public posts. Chalk on the sidewalk. A digital boycott movement surging past 2.5 million people. Altman eventually renegotiated the contract language — partially. The surveillance clause got tightened. The autonomous weapons clause never appeared. The full contract was never released. Legal analysts called the revised language “weasel words.” When employees pressed him at an all-hands meeting, Altman told them plainly: the Pentagon made clear OpenAI doesn’t get to make operational decisions about how its AI is used. You don’t get to weigh in on whether specific military actions are good or bad.

The followers pushed back. Made noise. Got a press release. The line stayed crossed.

Now let me tell you the other story.

Same week. Same industry. Different company.

Dario Amodei knew his redlines before he walked into the room. His team knew them too. They’d been built into the DNA of the company — not as marketing language, not as a values statement framed on a lobby wall, but as actual, non-negotiable limits written into the contract they were trying to sign. Mass surveillance: no. Autonomous lethal weapons: no. These were the lines.

When the Pentagon said those terms were unacceptable, Anthropic didn’t scramble for a workaround. They didn’t renegotiate the principle while preserving the optics. They left. The government blacklisted them for it. The short-term cost was real and significant.

And then the market responded. Claude shot to number one on the Apple App Store. Users switched. Trust — a strange, slow-building, easy-to-destroy currency — moved toward the company that held its line.

Don’t misunderstand. I have my own reservations about generative AI from any company. There is no ethical purity with any of these corporations. That said, this week’s headlines provide a fantastic object lesson in leadership.

Two companies. Two completely different answers to the same pressure.

The difference wasn’t intelligence or resources or market position. The difference was whether the leadership had drawn a line — with the team — before the moment of pressure arrived.

Today’s global leadership landscape looks a lot like what happens when you leave the Jenga tower unattended at a toddler’s birthday party. And we’re looking at the collapse arguing about which block to put back on top first. Few are asking about the people who were in the room when it fell.

Followership rarely gets a mention. What does it mean to be the kind of person who knows where the lines are and holds them — even when holding them costs something?

Great leaders don’t find their red lines under pressure.

Bring them to the room ahead of time.

The OpenAI employees who signed the letter, posted publicly, and wrote on sidewalks — they were doing something important. It was just too little, too late. Chalk on a sidewalk is a response to crisis. Anthropic built something before the crisis: a shared set of commitments between a leader and a team, forged before the pressure hit. When the storm arrived, nobody had to scramble. The answer was clear.

Redlines never work if you draw them after they’ve been crossed.

Think about your own organization.

You may or may not be a tech company in the middle of a geopolitical standoff. But the question is just as important:

What are the redlines?

Not in theory. Not fluffy sentiment you’d talk about in a job interview. The actual lines. The ones you’d walk away from a contract over. The ones you’d write on a sidewalk for. The ones you’d lose something real to hold.

Have you named them? Clearly. Out loud. In a way the team could point to and say — that’s what we stand for, and these are the actions that cross it.

Because when the moment of pressure comes — and it always comes — too many of us are making it up on the spot. Renegotiating in real time. Hoping the weasel words are close enough.

They never are.

Leaders who hold the redlines build teams who trust them. Teams who hold the redlines build leaders worth following. When neither one does — you get a sidewalk full of chalk and a press release nobody quite believes.

Draw the line.
Say it out loud.
Mean it.
Then hold it.

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This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

If you’ve never read a biography of Václav Havel, David Gilbreath Barton’s is the one to start with.

If you don’t know who Václav Havel was — he was a Czech playwright who became the accidental leader of the “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 and the first president of post-Soviet Czechoslovakia — you are probably not alone.

The 20th century was a wild, complicated ride.
Turn of the century Industrial Age optimism was followed by a pandemic, a global economic crisis, two world wars, and a half-century long Cold War. (Not to even mention the dizzying velocity of technological advancement in just one lifetime, for some.) Barton’s biography of Havel is also an insight into the historic time period into which I — and many of you — were born.

Renée and I are heading to Prague this week (we’ll be on our way when you receive this) for our work with New International. I always like arriving with more than a tourist’s understanding of a place. This being our second time in Prague, Barton’s book deepened my appreciation for the history of the city, the complicated man whose fingerprints are still all over it, and the world we live in today.

What I didn’t expect was the insight Havel’s story brings to midlife career transitions, but here we are.

Havel was a bohemian in every sense — born in the heart of Bohemia, a playwright, thinker, smoker, drinker, and intellectual who deftly wielded absurdity to rage against a state machine built on lies. The authoritarian regime tried to silence him but managed only to clarify him. Clarity tends to be one of the results of suffering. History eventually made him president, almost against his will.

But here’s what’s interesting: the presidency of Czechoslovakia was history’s call — but not Havel’s calling. Before he was president, he was a writer who was a dissident. During his presidency he fulfilled a duty to the people, the final portion of which he was stressed and drained. But in his final years he made his way back to a cottage outside Prague. Back to writing. Back to his people.
Back to himself.

Václav Havel helped liberate a nation. It took him a lifetime to come home.

Obviously, his story is more complex than this. (Definitely read the book if your interest is piqued!)

As I think of people I’ve worked with and even the pattern of my own life, most folks discover where they thrive the same way Havel did — reactively.
Wait for the crisis, the layoff, the burnout finally forcing the question: Is this who I am? Pain becomes the career coach we never planned on hiring.

Havel had the currents of 20th century history making decisions for him. Most of us do not. So we drift, accumulating experience, some being the wrong kind. We climb the wrong corporate ladder, and arrive somewhere along the way, wondering how we ended up living someone else’s life.

Job dissatisfaction? Sure, it’s something we all experience at some point. I’m more concerned about the absence of intention. The difference between Havel and most midlife professionals isn’t talent or courage — it’s circumstances. He was forced to clarity. Many of us are never forced to anything at all.

What if you could know ahead of time where you will actually thrive?

I’ve ‘found there are three ways people relate to their career — and which one you’re living in right now answers this question.

Running From. Something is wrong — the job, the boss, the company, the culture — and you need out. So you leave. Sometimes this is necessary. Sometimes it’s even heroic, as Havel demonstrated. But running from is an incomplete strategy because your destination gets defined entirely by your starting point. You end up anywhere that isn’t here. And anywhere that isn’t here has a way of eventually becoming its own version of here.

Running Toward. Better, maybe. You have a vision, a goal, something pulling you forward. But here’s the trap most people don’t see coming: you can run toward the wrong thing with tremendous energy and discipline and still end up lost. Most professionals run toward a title, a salary, an abstract sense of calling, and, often, someone else’s definition of success. Havel ran toward truth and artistic freedom. The destination matters as much as the direction.

Running Home. This is finding your “sweet spot” which is different from the other two in a fundamental way. You’re not fleeing pain. You’re not chasing an external prize. You’re moving toward the intersection of what you’re actually built for, what you’re wired to contribute, and what the world genuinely needs from you. Not the version of you shaped by expectations or circumstances or a resume full of accidents — or even history. You know it when you find it because work stops feeling like performance. It feels like return. The real you.

Havel was a populist president for a while. Like most leaders, his popularity eventually waned — especially inside his own country. He found his way home in his final years, almost by accident.

You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to reinvent yourself. Figure out who you are and step into it.

Most of us won’t have the stakes of history riding on our career — which is actually a good thing. It doesn’t have to take a revolution to get honest about who we are and where we belong.

Perhaps the cottage outside Prague was always where Havel belonged. No one asked me, but if I had been his career coach, I might have suggested he finish running the country and go back to that cottage much sooner than he did.
I suppose he had to survive the 20th century to get there.

You don’t have to survive anything.
You do have to begin.

You are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Regular readers of Good Dirt know my interests are wide.

Typically, I’m writing to explore the intersections of literature, culture, leadership, and spirituality.

Today I’m writing about something which has been my entire 33 year career.

I have a Master’s Degree in Theology (with a focus on spirituality).
I taught the Bible every week for 13 years.
My family spent eight years living in Central Asia. I’ve visited or worked in over forty countries. Through one of my previous employers, I worked directly with displaced people.

I’ve met and even made friends with refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants.

There’s an essay floating around social media to which I would like to respond.

Like the author of said essay, I am also friends with people who might read this and assume I’ve gone soft — “liberal,” or even “woke” (words I don’t consider to be the pejorative many seem to think they are these days).

I also don’t think I’ve “gone soft.”
I do have the privilege of being close. Probably closer than most.
Closer to the actual people this debate is about.
Closer to the Scriptures often twisted to justify what’s happening in America right now.
Closer to my own convictions about what it means to follow Jesus in a cultural moment like the one we’re at today.

This essay titled “What Does the Bible Actually Say About Immigration“ is getting shared around social media by Christians (some of whom are friends) as a way to justify acts by the current administration in the US.

It’s well-written and confident. In all fairness, the author and I agree about the need for truth, compassion, justice, and the need for comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform. I see people sharing this because they are thinking he builds what seems to be a strong Biblical case for strict immigration enforcement, border walls, and compliance with federal law as a Christian duty.

It’s also profoundly wrong.

Wrong in its use of Scripture. Also wrong in its timing — as an apparent defense of “law and order” written while the U.S. government is actively stripping due process from human beings made in the image of God.

Not knowing this author/creator, I do wish to be careful. And kind. I genuinely share the author’s stated passion for truth, justice, and compassion. I share their frustration with people who proof-text the Bible for political purposes.

This frustration runs both directions.

So, with kindness, I’ll be direct.

Building Modern Walls with Ancient Texts

The most fundamental problem with this essay is it treats ancient Israel as though it had an immigration system comparable to the modern United States. In fact, their entire argument is built on this.

There were no borders in the modern sense in the ancient Near East. There were no passports. No visas. No customs enforcement. No immigration courts. Biblical scholars across the spectrum acknowledge this. The concept of “illegal immigration” as we understand it simply did not exist in ancient Israel. A recent article from The Christian Century notes, the biblical laws about foreigners “do not distinguish among poor and non-poor migrants, much less legal and illegal migrants, since those categories did not exist in ancient Israel.”

Throughout all human history, humans have moved. It’s always been a thing for us. Much like today, ancient peoples migrated because of famine, war, economics, and family. The Hebrew word ger — sojourner, stranger, resident alien — describes someone who showed up in your community. Not someone who applied for a visa and was processed at a port of entry.

To take the Bible’s commands about the ger and retrofit them into a modern argument about enforcing U.S. immigration code is building a theological straw man. And to invoke Nehemiah’s wall as justification for a border wall between the United States and Mexico (as this author implies)? That’s the most breathtaking misuse of Scripture in the entire essay.

Nehemiah rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem — a single city — to protect a tiny, vulnerable remnant of returned exiles from military attack and political sabotage. This was not a national immigration enforcement project. It was a construction project for a city that had been destroyed by an invading empire. To compare that to a 2,000-mile border wall designed to keep out desperate families fleeing violence is exegetical malpractice.

If we are going to use Nehemiah, let’s use all of him. Nehemiah also confronted the wealthy among his own people who were exploiting the poor and the foreigner (Nehemiah 5). That part seems to get left out of these arguments.

What the Bible Undeniably Commands

Here is where I will agree with the original author: the Bible’s commands about the treatment of foreigners are not in dispute. They are among the clearest, most repeated commands in all of Scripture — and directly connect with the Great Commandment of “Love God and neighbor.”

“You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)

“Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:19)

“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Rabbinic scholars historically emphasize the fact biblical law prohibits acts which offend or shame foreigners — by some counts, thirty-six times. By other counts, forty-six. The sheer repetition should tell us something about God’s priorities.

Yes, the sojourner was expected to live under Israel’s law. Yes, assimilation mattered. Ruth is a beautiful example. But Ruth was also welcomed. She was not detained. She was not separated from her family. She was not shipped to a third country she’d never set foot in.

The original essay uses Ruth to argue for assimilation. Fine. It neglects what made Ruth’s assimilation possible: a community who received her. Boaz didn’t call for her deportation. He told his workers to leave extra grain in the fields for her. On purpose.

I don’t believe the bible is where we find actual immigration policy, but if there is an argument to made from “biblical pattern” at all — this would be it: Radical, costly, inconvenient hospitality.

The Oft-Ignored Legal Reality

The essay treats undocumented immigration as though it were a straightforward criminal act. The author never says it explicitly, but the rhetorical framing — lawbreaking, fraud, defiance — is unmistakable.

Here is what the law actually says.

Under U.S. federal law, being present in the United States without authorization is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. The penalty is deportation, not imprisonment. This distinction matters enormously. It is the legal equivalent of a traffic violation — not a felony, not a violent crime, not an act of moral depravity.

Improper entry — physically crossing the border outside a port of entry — is a federal misdemeanor. First offense: a fine and up to six months. But here’s the reality: most undocumented people in the United States didn’t cross a border illegally. They entered legally and overstayed a visa. That is a civil infraction.

The essay also never mentions asylum seekers or refugees. Presenting yourself at a U.S. border and requesting asylum is completely legal under both U.S. and international law. People fleeing violence, persecution, and death are following the law when they seek protection. Treating them as criminals is not just morally wrong — it is legally illiterate.

Refugees are here legally and have been through a stronger vetting process than any other path of immigration into the country. Historically, the US along with many other developed countries have taken in refugees fleeing war and violence.

And the data on immigrant criminality? It demolishes the narrative.

A study funded by the National Institute of Justice found that undocumented immigrants in Texas were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent crimes and a quarter the rate for property crimes. A 150-year analysis published through the National Bureau of Economic Research found that immigrants have never been incarcerated at higher rates than the U.S.-born population — and today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated.

The Migration Policy Institute reports that U.S.-born citizens are ten times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for weapons offenses, five times more likely for violent offenses, and more than twice as likely for property crimes.

Painting undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals is both racist and the opposite of what every major dataset shows.

Unconstitutional and UnChristian

Here is the heart of why the above essay is dangerous and why I am taking the time to respond to it. It’s eloquent, spiritual-sounding, Bible-words are being used to justify something insidious — and very un-Christian.

As of late 2025 and into 2026, the current administration has pursued what can only be described as a campaign to dismantle due process in the immigration system. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, more than 290,000 people have been detained since January 2025 — a 19% increase over the prior year. The number of people in ICE detention rose nearly 75% in 2025, reaching over 66,000, the highest level ever recorded.

ICE is arresting people at routine immigration check-ins. People who are complying with the law — showing up for their hearings, following the process — are being detained and deported. They are rounding up people who are legally seeking asylum and families who are legally here as refugees. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined.

Internal ICE data reported by CNN shows that fewer than 10% of immigrants in custody had criminal offenses. The Cato Institute found that 65% of those detained had no criminal convictions at all, and 93% had no violent convictions. As of November 2025, 73.6% of detainees had no criminal conviction whatsoever.

People are being deported to countries they’ve never lived in. The administration has used the Alien Enemies Act — a wartime statute — to expedite deportations with limited or no due process. U.S. citizens have been mistakenly detained and deported. Perhaps most alarming, thousands of people detained by ICE have disappeared from tracking records.

The author of the essay invokes the Constitution when it’s convenient. Fine. Let’s go there. Due process is a constitutionally protected right. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person — not citizen, person — shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment extends equal protection. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that these protections apply to all persons on U.S. soil, regardless of immigration status.

What is happening right now is unconstitutional. And it is being done in the name of “law and order” by people who cite Romans 13 when it suits them.

Romans 13? Really?

I will give the original author this: they are correct that Romans 13 has been misused. They are simply too narrow about who is misusing it.

Romans 13 is not a comprehensive theology of church and state. Biblical scholars across traditions have made this clear for decades. In a nutshell, Paul was writing a pastoral letter to a specific church navigating a specific political crisis. Jewish believers were returning to Rome after Claudius’s expulsion. There were tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians. The threat of persecution was inevitable if the church should appear rebellious.

Paul’s point was practical: keep your heads down, pay your taxes, don’t give the authorities a reason to crack down on the church. He was protecting the gospel’s witness, certainly not endorsing every action of the Roman government.

This is important: the same Paul who wrote Romans 13 was repeatedly imprisoned by Roman authorities. He was beaten. He was shipwrecked in the course of defying local magistrates who told him to stop preaching. He was ultimately executed by the Roman state — as a criminal.

Paul did not believe in unquestioning compliance with government authority.
Neither should we.

The original essay tries to thread a needle: Romans 13 means obey lawful authority, but also the “doctrine of lesser magistrates” permits resistance when government commands what God forbids. Then the author implies that federal immigration law does not command sin, so resistance is rebellion.

But here is what the author refuses to reckon with: a government that strips due process from human beings, that deports people to countries where they face further persecution, that detains mothers and children at routine check-ins, that allows people to die in custody at unprecedented rates — that government is not faithfully executing Romans 13:3, which says rulers are “not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.”

When the government becomes a terror to the vulnerable, the faithful response is not compliance. It is prophetic resistance. That is the actual tradition of the lesser magistrates. It’s the tradition of the Hebrew midwives who refused Pharaoh’s order to kill Hebrew babies. It’s the tradition of Esther. Of Daniel. Of the apostles who told the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

And critically — Romans 13:3 doesn’t stand alone. It sits between Romans 12 and Romans 14. Paul has just finished telling the church to “bless those who persecute you,” to “live peaceably with all,” to “overcome evil with good.” And he immediately follows Romans 13:3 with the command that love is the fulfillment of the entire law.

“Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:10)

The essay conveniently ignores context.

COVID Comparison Is a Distraction

The essay makes a deal about COVID restrictions and the alleged hypocrisy of people who supported compliance during the pandemic but resist immigration enforcement now.

This comparison doesn’t hold up for one simple reason: there was never a national mask mandate in the United States. The federal government did not issue one. Eleven states never had a statewide mask mandate at any point during the pandemic. Most others were very short-lived. COVID restrictions were overwhelmingly local and state-level decisions, implemented by businesses and school districts, with enormous variation across the country. In South Carolina, where I live, the governor actively resisted and then banned local mask mandates.

The narrative that Americans were subjected to tyrannical, nationwide lockdowns is a myth. It’s a grievance looking for a comparison, and it has nothing to do with immigration policy.

The bigger issue for Christians and masks wasn’t what the government told us to do or not do. The bigger issue was protecting our vulnerable neighbors.

Nobody Has Ever Called for Open Borders

This essay (and so many) argue against “open borders” as if this is a real policy position held by real people in American politics.

It isn’t.

No major politician — Democrat, Republican, or independent — has ever called for open borders. Bernie Sanders explicitly said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.” The Biden administration told migrants not to come and continued many Trump-era border restrictions. Democrats have repeatedly supported border security funding — including a bipartisan bill in 2024 that Republicans killed at Trump’s request.

The “open borders” narrative is a lame rhetorical device. It exists to make any compassion toward immigrants sound like national suicide. It is fearmongering designed to justify cruelty.

Our southern border is more fortified than at any point in American history. The U.S. has quadrupled the number of Border Patrol agents since 1992. There are walls, fences, surveillance systems, and military deployments along the border.

This is not about whether borders matter. Everyone agrees they do. The question is whether the people crossing those borders — fleeing violence, seeking work, hoping for a future — deserve to be treated as human beings or as an invading army. We don’t need more border security; actual immigration policy solutions are what will ultimately fix this.

The Racial Reality

There is a dimension to this debate that the original essay never touches, and it must be named.

The current enforcement regime is not targeting all undocumented immigrants equally. It is overwhelmingly targeting Latino and brown communities. ICE is conducting operations in neighborhoods, at courthouses, at check-ins. The administration has expanded deportations to third countries in Africa for people with no connection to those countries. Reports document racial profiling as a basis for stops and arrests.

When the rhetoric is about “invasion” and “criminals” and the enforcement falls almost exclusively on people of color, that is not race-neutral policy. It’s plain and simple racism.

And for Christians who take Scripture seriously, the prophets had a lot to say about systems which target the vulnerable and call it justice.

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.” (Isaiah 10:1-2)

Where We Need to Go

I believe in law. I believe in borders. I believe in national security. I also believe in the Constitution and in the imago Dei stamped on every human being regardless of where they’re from or what documents they carry. I think we all do, at the end of the day.

What I cannot accept — and what no Christian should accept — is using the Bible as a cudgel to justify a system that is manifestly broken and is currently being weaponized against some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Here is what I believe we actually need:

A bipartisan, comprehensive overhaul of our entire immigration system.

One that includes real vetting for criminality. One that creates clear, accessible paths to legal work and eventual citizenship. One that treats asylum seekers refugees with the dignity the law already requires. One that is equal and fair — not racially targeted, not politically weaponized, not designed to score points in a culture war.

This is not radical. This is what the majority of Americans want. It is what every serious policy expert recommends. It is what both parties have agreed on in principle and then failed to deliver because fear is more politically useful than solutions.

Until the people in this country stop demonizing each other — stop treating immigrants as invaders and their advocates as traitors — and come together for the common good of all, demanding that our politicians do the same, I fear it will never happen.

The Christian response to immigration is not “obey the law.”

The Christian response is “love and advocate for your vulnerable neighbor who is created in the image of God.”

It’s more than sentiment. It’s Scripture.

And it should be the foundation of everything we’re building.

For further consideration:

If you are a Christian and would like more on how we should respond to these things, I highly commend this short sermon to you. It was preached by The Rev. Seth Cain, rector at Village Anglican in Greenville, SC on Sunday, February 8, 2026. He lays further balanced theological groundwork for the Christian response to moment from Jesus’ teaching in the beatitudes.

You are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

My first “grown up” job was working at a supply company for a chemical manufacturer in Memphis, TN. Not gonna lie—I pretty much hated it and was ready to move on after the first week or two.

I stayed for four years.

My boss, Jim, was twice my age and could conjugate curses in combinations I’d never conceived. He also hated his job. Worse than I did.

Here’s the thing—that job did teach my young and impressionable brain some things. I learned to pay attention to details. My role was in shipping and receiving, and my swearing supervisor taught me to check and double-check numbers and prices and addresses. My youthful and naturally careless brain learned to slow down and scrutinize. To this day I double-check locks on doors with a distinct double-twist, a trick I learned from Jim.

We can learn something from every job. But learning isn’t the same as alignment.

The Career Capital Question

Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, calls these accumulated skills and habits “career capital.” It’s the collection of competencies and connections you build over time—the stuff that makes you valuable in the marketplace.

I built real career capital in that Memphis warehouse. Attention to detail. Systems thinking. The ability to work alongside people who saw the world differently than I did. Those deposits have paid dividends across every role I’ve held since.

But here’s the question most people never pause to ask:

What’s the return on that capital over ten years?

Career capital compounds.

Like any investment, small gains stack over time into something substantial. The skills you sharpen today shape the opportunities you’ll see tomorrow. The reputation you build in one season opens doors in the next.

The catch?
Career capital only compounds when it’s invested in the right direction.

Four years of learning to double-check shipping labels served me well. But if I’d stayed another decade? I would have become exceptionally proficient at something I was never wired for. My career capital would have accumulated in a cul-de-sac—impressive credentials leading nowhere I actually wanted to go.

The 20% Threshold

Here’s where the research gets interesting.

Marcus Buckingham, in his book Love + Work, cites a study from the Mayo Clinic on burnout among doctors and nurses. The finding? Twenty percent is the threshold. Spend at least 20% of your work time doing specific activities you love, and you are far less likely to experience burnout.

Not 80%. Not even 50%. Just one-fifth of your day needs to involve work that genuinely energizes you.

The problem? According to Buckingham’s research with the ADP Research Institute, only 18% of workers actually hit that threshold. The vast majority of us are running on fumes, powering through days that offer little in the way of real replenishment.

The gap between “tolerable” and “aligned” may seem small on paper. In practice, it’s the gap where your life actually happens.

What Alignment Returns

So what does it look like when career capital compounds in the right direction?

Energy accumulates instead of depletes. Misaligned work is metabolically expensive. You can muscle through it, but the effort extracts a tax—on your health, your patience, your presence at home. Aligned work still requires effort, but the effort feels different. Sustainable. Sometimes even invigorating.

Mastery builds on itself. Newport makes the case that passion often follows mastery rather than preceding it. When you get genuinely good at something, you start to love it. But this only works if you’re building skill in a direction that fits your wiring. Misaligned mastery leads to a peculiar purgatory: you’re excellent at something that slowly hollows you out.

Reputation resonates. When your work aligns with your wiring, people notice. There’s a congruence—a coherence—to how you show up. You become known for something real, something that reflects who you actually are. This kind of reputation compounds in ways a résumé full of competent-but-misaligned roles never can.

Relationships deepen. Buckingham puts it like this: “Ten years of loveless work, and yet somehow you think your family is not going to be on the receiving end of the damage.” Alignment isn’t selfish. The energy you bring home, the patience you have left at the end of the day, the capacity you have for the people you love—all of it flows from whether your work is draining you or filling you.

The Investment Decision

Here’s the reframe I want to offer:

This isn’t about regret. Every job teaches you something. Every season deposits some career capital, even the difficult ones. Jim’s profanity-laced perfectionism gave me skills I still use three decades later.

The question isn’t “Did I waste those years?” The question is “What’s the best use of my next ten?”

You’ve already accumulated more than you realize. Skills, instincts, hard-won wisdom about what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes the most circuitous paths produce the most capable travelers.

The capital is there.

Now you get to decide where to invest it.

What career capital have you gained from the jobs you hated the most?

How are you investing that capital today?

Oh — and you are doing better than you think.

Share

Career Sweet Spot Coaching (limited offer)

I’m offering Career Sweet Spot coaching for half off for the first five people who sign up for 3+ coaching sessions(and you’ll get the Career Sweet Spot Profile, too).

Reply to this email if you’re interested in finding out your Career Sweet Spot.

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

Here’s what I wrapped up this month. There are actually 6 books this month. Call me an overachiever.

The January Stack

The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism — ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (All of the Stars)
Every American who works, travels, or interacts cross-culturally — and every American Christian — needs to read this. It will challenge your norms in every good way.
And if you’re an MK: this book validates so much of what you feel… and what you already know.

Everything Is Tuberculosis — ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
John Green is a fantastic writer and storyteller, and this book is genuinely important. I came away with a deepened conviction that health care is a human right, and that for-profit systems keep billions sick and dying unnecessarily. The closing line sticks:

We are the cause — we must also be the cure.

Alchemised — ⭐️1.75 (DNF, but I’m counting it)
This one is a brick: 1,040 pages. I made it to about 70% before I quit — roughly 700+ pages in.

I wanted to like this. Part one grabbed me — especially the gothic imagery (The key antagonist, Morrough, sat on a living-dead throne, and it was wild). But after that, it turned into a slog: pacing drag, repetitive stretches, and a romance-forward center that wasn’t what I expected going in. I later learned it’s rooted in adult Harry Potter fanfiction, and suddenly some of the world-building choices made more sense — along with why it wasn’t landing for me. I read a summary of the ending and felt good about walking away.

Jade City — ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Immaculate world-building, interesting characters, and a very satisfying start to a trilogy. Imagine The Godfather dropped into an Asian-inspired world of martial arts and clan politics. I’m in.

I’ve already started the second in the series, Jade War.

Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church — ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️¼
The author does an excellent job exposing the realities of abuse, and her psychology background adds real weight. My tension is with the solutions: the spiritual practices she points toward matter, but I’m not convinced they reach far enough on their own. The problems are systemic. Structural and theological shifts are required. Still, I’d love for this book to be a meaningful step in that direction — and it left me with a question I’m still chewing on: can power truly be redeemed?

Write for Money and Power — ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Each month I try to read at least one book on the craft and/or business of writing. This one has genuinely useful material: good information, well gathered, clearly written by someone with experience. The voice didn’t always work for me (a bit generic in places), and I had a hunch there was AI involvement — which the author is transparent about. The substance still held up (in spite of the title, which I also didn’t care for), and I walked away with a solid blueprint for building a writing business. Plus, as of this writing, the ebook is available for .99 cents. Value was worth the price of admission.

I’m using Fable to track what I read in 2026. If you’re on there too, come find me and let’s follow each other.

WIPs (My Works in Progress)

1) Published: I had another article published with Common Good Magazine — “What Culture Eats for Breakfast.” (Common Good | Magazine)

2) Main WIP: I’m drafting the leadership/teamwork book again (third attempt), and we’re about 10,000 words in. This time the structure feels like it’s finally working. The heartbeat is simple: great teams make great leaders — and the best leaders build great teams through empowering people.

3) Fiction: Focussing on finishing the nonfiction piece this quarter. But these stories live in my head all the time. I’m reading some academic papers related to Appalachian folklore, which is both fascinating and fodder for one of the stories. I will decide later this year which one of these I’m jumping into feet first.

Career Sweet Spot Coaching (limited offer)

I’m offering Career Sweet Spot coaching for half off for the first five people who sign up for 3+ coaching sessions(and you’ll get the Career Sweet Spot Profile, too).

Reply to this email if you’re interested in finding out your Career Sweet Spot.

Here’s the write-up from a couple of weeks ago:

What Are you reading right now?

What kind of month do you find yourself: comfort, challenge, or both?

Remember, you are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

September 1862.
General George McClellan had just delivered what Abraham Lincoln desperately needed: a victory at Antietam stopping Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North. Lee’s battered Confederate army—maybe 40,000 exhausted men—sat trapped with their backs against the Potomac River. McClellan commanded 100,000 fresh troops. The war could have ended that fall. Lincoln sent telegrams from Washington:

Pursue. Attack. Finish this.

McClellan wouldn’t move. He needed more cavalry, better weather, more intelligence. Six weeks later, Lee’s army had slipped away and the war ground on for three more years. When Lincoln finally fired him, McClellan’s soldiers wept. They loved “Little Mac”—his charisma, his organizational brilliance, the way he inspired fierce loyalty. He looked like a leader. He organized like a leader. He had many of the traits we associate with alpha-dog leadership. But when the moment came to actually lead—to make the hard call, accept the risk, and execute the mission—he couldn’t do it.

We’ve built an entire mythology around the “leadership personality”—a charismatic extrovert who takes charge and commands the room. We hand these people authority because they look like leaders. Charisma and confidence is not competence or capability. The person with the loudest voice in the meeting might be the least qualified person to actually accomplish what the team needs.

The personality myth works both ways.

We assume the quiet strategist/analyst lacks leadership potential because she doesn’t dominate conversations. We overlook the systems builder because he’s not charismatic enough for the corner office. Meanwhile, we promote the guy with the biggest presence and the best pitch deck, then act surprised when he can’t execute. The problem isn’t that we have bad leaders. The problem is we’re selecting leaders based on personality performance, rather than actual wiring. We’ve confused the ability to look like you’re in charge with the ability to get things done. And we’ve relegated some of our most capable people to “follower” roles because they don’t fit our cartoon version of what leadership looks like.

That’s the leadership myth.

A proverbial lone wolf who has capacity to accomplish everything by themselves.

No such wolf actually exits.

Real wolves work in packs. Different wolves, different strengths—scout, tracker, protector, caretaker. Young wolves sometimes leave to find mates and start new packs, but they’re searching for connection, not celebrating independence. Teams work the same way. Someone sees the future. Someone builds the systems. Someone sparks action. Someone finishes what others start. Leadership isn’t a position one person holds. It’s a set of contributions multiple people make.

When we begin to think about leadership as related to mission, rather than personalities, more is accomplished in a healthier way.

Every organization or project needs people to lead in one of these four ways.

Lead by Creating. You see what others don’t see yet. You connect past wisdom with future possibility and design the roadmap that anticipates problems before they happen. McClellan excelled here—his strategic planning was brilliant, his ability to envision what the Army of the Potomac could become was unmatched. But vision without execution is just daydreaming. Every pack needs the scout who sees the path forward, but the scout alone doesn’t bring down the elk.

Lead by Connecting. You recognize talent and match people to roles where they thrive. You reduce friction, build consensus, create the bridges that hold teams together when everything else wants to pull them apart. You’re the wolf that keeps the pack unified when younger members challenge hierarchy or when territory disputes threaten cohesion. This is the leader who knows that half of success is just making sure the right people are in the right roles and can actually work together.

Lead by Catalyzing. You spark action when everyone else is stuck in analysis paralysis. You push progress from good to great, remove obstacles, break through inertia. This is what McClellan couldn’t do—he could plan forever but he couldn’t pull the trigger when the moment demanded it. Every pack needs the wolf that drives the hunt forward, that turns potential energy into kinetic energy, that says “now” when everyone else says “not yet.”

Lead by Completing. You turn plans into results and build the systems that make success repeatable. You see projects through with excellence and integrity, creating the reliable processes that translate good ideas into actual outcomes. You’re the sustainer—the wolf that doesn’t just chase prey but knows how to make the kill and get the pack fed. Without you, everything else is just motion without progress.

You don’t need permission to lead.

The team you’re on right now—whether it’s a startup with three people or a corporation with three thousand—doesn’t need another alpha dog fighting for the corner office. It needs you, wired exactly how you’re wired, contributing from your actual strengths rather than performing someone else’s version or vision of leadership.

Maybe you’re the one who sees around corners and maps the future. Maybe you’re the one who knows exactly who should be doing what and can build the consensus to make it happen. Maybe you’re the catalyst who breaks through when everyone else is overthinking. Maybe you’re the finisher who turns all those brilliant ideas into actual results.

The role of a team member is not subordinate to the role of a leader. It’s equal.

And sometimes it’s more important.

While McClellan got the title and the telegrams from Lincoln, it was the field commanders and soldiers who would actually win the battles. The pack doesn’t survive because of the alpha. It survives because every wolf contributes what they’re built to contribute.

• Stop waiting for someone to promote you into a role that doesn’t fit your wiring.

• Stop trying to become the charismatic extrovert if that’s not who you are.

• Stop apologizing for the way you naturally lead.

And lead.

Discover your strengths.
Live in your strengths. (Develop them!)
Lead from exactly where you’re standing right now.

You are needed. Not as a warped version of someone else.

Lead as exactly who you are.

You are doing better than you think.

Want to discover your leadership mode and find your Career Sweet Spot?
Reach out. Respond to this email—I’d love to help you and your team understand how you’re each wired to lead.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

It may be alignment.

This is the story of how I learned that the hard way—and the simple framework that helped me find work that fits.

Quick Assessment (10 minutes): https://form.typeform.com/to/eegZ4NbN

This is a beast of a post. But it’s one I’ve been working on all weekend. I believe it’s important. I hope you’ll read it. But — if not, here’s the TL;DR.

TL;DR (for the skimmers)

• If you’re capable but drained, the issue is often misalignment, not motivation.

• Your Career Sweet Spot is the overlap of Purpose + Strengths + Contribution Mode.

• Take the 10-minute Quick Assessment

I Thought My Career Was Over at 48

It is generally comfortable to sit outside during the early summer mornings of South Carolina. The humidity hasn’t slapped you in the face like a hot towel yet.

This is where I was in 2014 when my brain concluded my career was over. I sat on the porch while house-sitting for a friend, watching the neighborhood get in their cars and drive to work. What was my job going to be now? I had no idea.

Nearly a decade in Central Asia, and over a decade before that as a pastor, made 20+ years of leadership experience: strategic planning, team development, cross-cultural communication, budget management, conflict resolution. I’d led teams, navigated complex organizational politics, coached leaders through crisis, built systems from scratch.

I’d also accomplished those things while working for organizations most hiring managers had never heard of.

For me, my résumé said: “I’ve built and accomplished something significant.”
To others: “Did church stuff and lived in a foreign country for two decades.”

That ended up being my summer of interviews and applications. They all blurred together after a while—the same polite questions, the same subtle skepticism, the same inevitable letdown.

And sitting on the front porch that early summer morning, I started thinking through job possibilities, and all I could think was, I guess a stock clerk at Walmart it is. Anything else I could think of required experience I didn’t have. I felt it: the sinking realization that I was 48 years old, and the vocation I’d mostly thrived in for 25 years meant nothing in this marketplace.

The real question—the one that had my stomach in knots that morning—wasn’t “What job should I apply for?” or, worse, “Am I now completely unemployable?”

The deeper question was this:

What am I even made to do?

The Wrong Answers

A few days later, I got this idea: I wanted to do something with my hands—something completely different from anything I’d ever done before. So, logically, I decided to investigate the ancient art of bookbinding.

Yes, I’m serious.

This would be great. Work with my hands, be creative, sell a product, have little contact with people (I was burned out from people in significant ways). After a day or two of researching, I was close to punching the “Order now” button on Amazon to start buying supplies—when my strategy brain kicked in and I realized I didn’t have a business plan for this.

I set aside my dreams of becoming an artisan bookbinder.

Stop the nonsense, Bernie—let’s be strategic: translate my experience into roles that make sense. At least on paper.

Nonprofit development director. I landed the job at the end of the summer. It fit perfectly, right? I’d rub shoulders with missions pastors and missions-minded donors. I understood the work and the mission. I knew how to lead others. I knew how to connect with people and win them to a cause.

I got the job.

I was drowning on day one. One year in, I was still unsatisfied. Not because I couldn’t do the job—I could. I managed the relationships, ran meetings, produced the reports. Most importantly, I raised the money. I met my KPIs.

But it was a Sisyphean job. I faithfully pushed the boulder up the hill every day. The constant operational firefighting. The endless proposal building. The constant meetings where I had to sell the vision over and over to people who’d already bought in, but didn’t necessarily want to take action.

I was competent. I delivered results. But I finished my days exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hours.

Then: freelance copywriting and website construction. A friend made the introduction. “You’re creative, you’re a great wordsmith, you understand marketing. You’d be great at this.”

And I was fine at it. I had a couple of clients. I started to think about scaling. I built several interesting sites with decent web copy. I made a little money. Probably could have made more.

But “fine” isn’t the same as “thriving.” I was executing someone else’s strategy, managing details that felt disconnected from any larger purpose. The work itself didn’t energize me—it just… happened. Eight hours a day of tasks that needed doing, none of them particularly satisfying when done.

My little cottage business lasted six months.

I tried a couple of other things. I even played barista and ended up managing a local coffee shop for a brief time.

The pattern I couldn’t see yet:

• I was capable.

• I produced results.

• Managers liked me.

• Performance reviews were generally positive.

But something was still fundamentally off.

Every role felt like wearing a pair of jeans that were technically the right size, but cut for someone else’s body. I made them work, but they never quite fit.

I typically blamed myself.

“I should be better at this. More focused. More disciplined. More resilient.”

I’d spent a decade in challenging, cross-cultural environments. I’d navigated ambiguity, led through crisis, built teams from scratch. Surely I could handle a normal job in my home country?

Maybe I’d gotten soft. Maybe church work had made me unemployable. Maybe I was one of those people who could only succeed in the weird, unstructured world of nonprofits in foreign lands. Now, back in “the real world,” I just… couldn’t cut it.

In my mind, the problem was probably effort.

If I worked harder, adapted faster, pushed through the resistance, eventually everything would click.

I was wrong.

The real problem was alignment.

Reading was an important task during these years. I read 300+ books about careers and purpose, starting a business, and how to “find your passion.”

Here’s what I learned:

I didn’t feel like a failure because I lacked capability or commitment or potential. I was struggling because I was trying to excel in roles designed for someone else’s strengths—someone else’s wiring, someone else’s sweet spot.

I was trying to fit into someone else’s pair of jeans.

The question was never about ability: “What jobs am I qualified for?”

Until we stop asking that question, we will keep grinding through jobs that drain us, while wondering why everyone else seems to find work so much easier—energizing, even.

The Turning Point Conversation

This mindset shift doesn’t happen in a moment of inspiration.

For me, it happened during a conversation I didn’t really want to have.

A friend—someone who’d known me for years and watched me cycle through jobs—finally said what others were probably thinking:

“You’re trying to fit yourself into roles instead of finding roles that fit you.”

I pushed back. “I’m being strategic. I’m looking at what’s available and where my experience translates.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But you’re unhappy.”

He was right.

And he asked me a question I hadn’t let myself ask:

“When was the last time work actually energized you?”

I thought back—not to a job, but to moments.

Sitting across from a leader who was stuck, helping them see a path forward they hadn’t considered. Watching someone’s face change when a complex situation suddenly made sense. Taking a tangled mess of competing priorities and finding the throughline that made everything clear. Guiding teams through the strategic planning session they’d put off for months.

Need someone to execute a plan, manage details, or run operations? Turns out, I’m not your guy—in spite of the fact that I’m capable of all those things.

Creating clarity. Guiding decisions. Helping people move forward.

That’s what I do.

And that’s when it clicked.

I’d been asking the wrong question.

Wrong question:
“Of the millions of jobs available, which ones am I qualified for?”

Right questions:

1. What gives my work meaning?

2. What am I naturally, world-class good at?

3. How do I create value?

The Three Questions That Changed Everything

1) What Gives My Work Meaning? (Purpose)

“Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”
So Good They Can’t Ignore You — Cal Newport

This isn’t “follow your passion” advice. (Because that’s bad advice.) I’m not talking about finding work that makes you happy all the time or discovering some mystical calling perfectly aligned with your hobbies.

This is much more specific: what kind of impact makes work worth doing for you?

For some people, it’s building things—seeing something go from idea to execution. For others, it’s solving problems, or creating beauty, or connecting people, or optimizing systems.

For me? It was helping people get unstuck.

Helping smart, capable people who were stuck in complexity find clarity and move forward with confidence. It’s the unique value I bring into the room.

When I do this, my work matters. When I don’t—when I’m stuck managing operations or executing someone else’s plan—work is just… well… work.

This changes everything. Most jobs I’d been pursuing were fundamentally misaligned with what gives my work meaning.

I wasn’t built to run things. I was built to help leaders see what to run toward.

Can you define what gives your work meaning?

2) What Am I Naturally, World-Class Good At? (Strengths)

I assumed I knew my strengths: organization, communication, leadership, strategic thinking, to name a few.

And I was good at those things. But “good at” isn’t the same as “built for.”

What I mean by “built for” is this: what dare tasks which energize you while exhausting others? What comes naturally to you that other people have to work hard to develop? Where do you create disproportionate impact without disproportionate effort?

I started paying attention to patterns—not just what I could do, but what felt effortless when I was doing it.

Here are some things that feel effortless for me because they’re energizing:

• Seeing connections between ideas that seem unrelated

• Taking a complex situation with ten competing priorities and finding the one decision that unlocks everything else

• Looking at where someone is and where they want to go—and designing a path between the two that will actually work

Here’s the key: none of this is exhausting for me. Other people may be completely drained doing this. But for me? It’s energizing.

But when I’m asked to execute someone else’s plan, manage details, run operations—those things drain me. Not because I can’t do them, but because they work against my wiring.

Your strengths aren’t just what you’re good at. They’re what you’re built to do.

When you spend your days doing what you’re merely “fine” at, instead of what you’re built for, you’re trading energy for competence. You might sustain it for a while. But eventually, you will burn out.

What kind of work energizes you? What drains you?

3) How Do I Create Value? (Contribution Mode)

This is the piece most career advice completely misses.

It’s not what you do. It’s how you show up and add value.

Some people create value through execution—they take plans and make them happen. Others create value through innovation—they see what doesn’t exist yet and build it. Others create value through connection—they bring the right people together at the right time.

No single one of these is better than the others. They’re just fundamentally different ways of contributing.

And if you’re wired to contribute one way, but your role requires you to contribute a different way, you will struggle—even if you’re technically capable of doing the work.

I started paying attention to when I add the most value.

It’s never during the execution phase of a project. Not during daily management. Not during operational firefighting.

I add the most value when people are stuck.

When a leader can’t see the path forward. When a team is spinning in endless discussion without landing on a decision. When someone has all the pieces, but can’t figure out how the puzzle fits together.

This is when I show up differently.

I listen deeply, ask reframing questions, connect previously unseen dots, and help the team move from confusion to clarity.

I’m not building or managing the thing. I’m helping the team see what to build and how to move forward.

My contribution style is guide. Not executor. Not innovator. Not manager.

Guide.

And once I saw that, everything else made sense.

How would you describe yourself when you feel you’re contributing the most value?

When Everything Aligns, Everything Changes

Here’s what I finally understood about myself:

• Purpose: I do my best work when I’m helping others get unstuck and move forward with purpose and clarity.

• Strengths: I’m built to see patterns, connect ideas, design pathways, and simplify complexity.

• Contribution mode: I create value as a guide—listening, clarifying, and helping people make decisions they feel confident about.

When all three aligned, I wasn’t trying to fit into someone else’s career path anymore. I could build toward my own.

I didn’t need to be managing operations. I needed to be a coach helping leaders and teams navigate complexity.

I didn’t need to be a project manager executing someone else’s strategy. I needed to be a strategic advisor helping leaders design their own.

I didn’t need more discipline or more effort or more adaptability.

I needed alignment.

When I found it, here’s what changed:

Instead of managing fifteen priorities adequately, I was coaching five leaders through strategic decisions—and the impact was exponential, not incremental.

Instead of coming home exhausted, I came home energized.

Instead of wondering if I was good enough, I knew I was operating in my sweet spot.

Not because I was suddenly more talented. Not because I worked harder.

Because I was finally working aligned.

And once you see the difference, you can’t unsee it.

The Framework

The pattern is everywhere.

I meet a lot of talented people who are frustrated—grinding through a role that drains them. I’ve had the same “I should be better at this by now” conversation I had with myself back in 2014.

Most people aren’t struggling at work because they lack capability. People struggle at work because they’re trying to thrive outside their Career Sweet Spot.

Your Career Sweet Spot isn’t a job title. It’s an intersection.

Think of it as three overlapping circles:

• Circle 1: Purpose — the kind of impact that makes work worth doing for you

• Circle 2: Strengths — what you’re naturally, exceptionally built to do

• Circle 3: Contribution mode — how you show up and create value

Most people optimize for one, maybe two of these. They find work that matters but drains them. Or work that uses their strengths but feels meaningless. Or work that fits their contribution style but doesn’t tap into what they’re actually world-class at.

The sweet spot is where all three overlap.

Where you don’t just perform—you multiply impact. Where work energizes instead of exhausts. Where you’re not trying to fit into an Instagram influencer’s career path—you’re building something uniquely yours.

Why Traditional Career Tools Miss This

Career development is often a fragmented, piecemeal menu of advice:

Personality training. This comes in all forms with various levels of complexity. Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Enneagram—or all of the above—only go so far. Great. Now you know you’re a high I with steady S tendencies. Or an ENFJ. Or an 8 with a 7 wing. Knowledge is not wisdom. Most personality training doesn’t tell you where to use your personality or what roles actually leverage how you’re wired.

StrengthsFinder. This is a powerful tool. There’s a reason 90% of Fortune 500 companies use CliftonStrengths. Yet again—what do you do with the knowledge you’ve gained? You have Strategic, Learner, Relator, Adaptability, Input, etc. Excellent. But it doesn’t tell you which roles let you use those strengths—or how to position yourself for work that actually fits.

Career coaching asks what you want. This is a growing multi-billion dollar industry. We all need coaching—and a significant number of folks find it helpful. A coach will ask: What are your goals? What kind of work appeals to you? What’s your ideal job? None of these questions really show you how you’re wired to contribute or where you’ll naturally excel versus where you’ll constantly grind.

Each of these gives you pieces of the puzzle. But nobody’s showing us how the pieces fit together.

The Growability® Career Sweet Spot connects all three.

It takes your personality profile, your strengths, and your natural contribution style—and shows you exactly where they intersect.

It answers questions like:

• Where will I perform versus where will I thrive?

• What roles will energize me versus drain me?

• How do I position myself so my impact multiplies instead of just increments?

• What’s my actual competitive advantage in the marketplace?

When I finally mapped my own Career Sweet Spot, it explained everything.

Why the nonprofit program director role drained me: it required execution and operational management. My contribution style is guide, not executor. Misalignment.

Why the project management roles made me feel empty: they’re all about managing details and timelines. My strengths are seeing patterns and designing pathways. Misalignment.

What I actually needed: advisory work where I help leaders and teams clarify complexity and make strategic decisions. That’s where my purpose + strengths + contribution style align.

Once you see it, the path forward becomes obvious.

No more applying for jobs that look good on paper. Look for roles that fit your wiring.

Stop grinding. Start thriving.

I never changed who I was.
I finally understood who I was—and built my vocation accordingly.

The Test (Are You In Yours?)

So here’s the question: Are you working in your Career Sweet Spot?

To be fair, most people aren’t. And the signs are surprisingly consistent.

You’re probably outside your Career Sweet Spot if:

☐ You’re good at your job, but it exhausts you. You produce results. You meet expectations. But you go home drained in a way that doesn’t match the actual hours worked.
☐ People in similar roles seem to have more energy. Your colleagues are energized by work you find draining. What feels like a grind for you seems to come naturally for them.
☐ You’re producing results, but rarely enjoying the process. The outcomes are fine. The journey getting there feels like you’re constantly pushing against resistance.
☐ You find yourself thinking, “I should be better at this by now.” You’ve been doing this work for months or years, but it still doesn’t feel natural. You’re competent, but never quite comfortable.
☐ Your wins feel like relief, not celebration. When you complete something successfully, the dominant emotion is “thank God that’s over” rather than “that was satisfying.”
☐ You’re building skills for a career path that doesn’t excite you. You’re developing capabilities because they’re what the market wants or what advancement requires—not because they align with how you’re wired.
☐ You look at job postings and nothing feels quite right. Lots of roles you’re qualified for. None that make you think, “Yes—that’s exactly what I want to be doing.”
☐ You’re succeeding, but it feels like you’re pushing a boulder uphill. The results are there. The effort required to produce them is unsustainable.

If you checked three or more of these, you’re probably working outside your sweet spot.

And here’s what most people don’t realize: it’s costing you more than you think.

The Real Cost of Misalignment

When you’re working outside your Career Sweet Spot, you’re not just tired. You’re paying compound interest on a misalignment tax.

Time cost: years spent building skills and experience for roles you’ll never truly excel in. Every year of grinding in the wrong direction is a year you’re not building toward where you actually belong.

Energy cost: the exhaustion of constant misalignment. Coming home drained. Needing weekends to simply recover. Operating at 60% capacity because you’re spending 40% of your energy trying to fit into a role that wasn’t built for your wiring.

Opportunity cost: the impact you’re not creating. The compounding growth that happens when you’re in your sweet spot—where your results multiply instead of just increment—that’s the opportunity you’re missing every day you stay misaligned.

Financial cost: the raises, promotions, and opportunities that go to people operating in their sweet spots—people who make the work look easy because it aligns with how you’re wired. They’re not more talented than you—they’re just properly aligned.

Add it up over five years. Ten years. A career.

The cost of staying misaligned isn’t just burnout. It’s the life and impact you never get to build.

The Invitation

Here’s the truth I wish someone had told me at 48 (or 18):

You don’t have to spend the next decade trying out roles and hoping one eventually fits properly.

Most do it that way. Try a job. Realize it’s not quite right. Adjust. Try another. Eventually—maybe—find something that works well enough.

It’s the default path. And it might work. Eventually.

But it costs years. And energy. And opportunities you’ll never get back.

There’s a better way.

Map your Career Sweet Spot.

Understand exactly where purpose, strengths, and contribution mode align. Build toward roles that fit your wiring instead of trying to fit yourself into roles.

You can spend 5–10 years on trial and error.

Or you can spend 3–12 months on strategic alignment.

What I Wish I’d Had at 48

I wish the Career Sweet Spot had existed when I was sitting on the front porch of our friend’s house in early summer 2014, staring at my résumé, wondering what I was supposed to do with my life.

It would have saved me years of grinding in wrong-fit roles.

It would have shown me exactly where I belonged, so I could build toward it with confidence instead of confusion.

It would have helped me see I wasn’t broken or unemployable or too specialized—I was just trying to fit into career paths built for people with different wiring.

The Career Sweet Spot shows you:

• Your exact Career Sweet Spot—where purpose, strengths, and contribution mode align

• The roles where you’ll thrive versus where you’ll just survive

• How you naturally create value (so you can position yourself accordingly)

• The specific conditions that support your best performance, attitude, reliability, and teamwork

• Clear language for talking about your fit and positioning yourself strategically

It combines DISC personality profiling and StrengthsFinder—but instead of giving you two disconnected data points, it connects them into a coherent career architecture and coaching.

It’s the map I wish I’d had. And it may well be the map you need.

Start Here

If you’re in transition, feeling misaligned, or just sensing there’s a better fit somewhere—start with the quick assessment:

Quick Assessment

It takes about 10 minutes. You’ll answer questions about:

• What energizes versus drains you

• Where you naturally create value

• What kind of impact makes work meaningful

• How you show up in teams and under pressure

At the end, you’ll get a preliminary read on where your sweet spot might be—and whether the Career Sweet Spot Assessment and coaching could help you find it.

No cost. No obligation. Just clarity on whether you’re working aligned or working against your wiring.

TAKE THE QUICK ASSESSMENT: https://form.typeform.com/to/eegZ4NbN
Takes 10 minutes. Might save you 10 years.

Because you can spend another five years trying to fit into roles that weren’t built for you.

Or you can spend the next three to six months moving toward where you actually belong.

The choice is yours.

But if I could go back and talk to myself at 48 (or 35 or 18), sitting on the front porch wondering if my career was over, I’d say:

Your career isn’t over. It just needs to head in the right direction again.

And I’d hand myself this assessment.

You are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

I hope you, dear reader, had a hope-full holiday season—in spite of all the reasons we have to see hopelessness in a world that seems to be falling apart. I took an unintentional break from Good Dirt over the holidays, which turned into an intentional one. At least that’s what I told myself.

Holidays have historically sent my soul into a bit of a tailspin. I have no real explanation for it. But I’m known for conflicted thinking in most Novembers and Decembers. Starting with my birthday on November 1st through the New Year, my brain lives in a state of both reflection and panic.

This year I turned 58, which means 60 is on the horizon. This feels significant. (It may not be, and my readers over 60 may be able to testify otherwise.) I should be able to look at all I’ve done—experienced, built, accomplished—and feel 100% satisfied. I’ve done more than many. Probably more than most.

• I’ve been married to the same person for almost 37 years and counting.

• My two adult children still like me, and we want to be in each other’s lives.

• I was a pastor and, in spite of having no experience and not knowing what I was doing much of the time, it was a positive season in our lives (and, I think, in the lives of the vast majority of our congregants).

• We lived in Central Asia for the better part of a decade.

• I have a master’s degree in theology.

• I’ve been to 40+ countries.

• I have friends and colleagues I care about (and who care about me) in almost every time zone.

• We get to work with some of the most brilliant and amazing people in the world, doing incredibly important work.

⠀I should be fine, right?

Many would consider this a full life.

Yet, I panic.

Especially in December.

• In less than two years, I will be 60.

• I still want to be a writer—and I have yet to finish a book.

• I’m pretty sure I don’t have enough money for the fast-approaching realities of old age, and I can see myself working to make ends meet for the foreseeable future.

• Tertiary to this thought, I’m entering 2026 as a business/nonprofit consultant and coach with zero clients.

• I’d like to live someplace cold, walkable, and possibly European. This year I reconciled myself to the fact I’m a global Northerner. We’re not talking Chicago. We’re talking Helsinki. (I would take either, to be honest.)

This foreboding feeling of “running out of time” is relatively new for me.

So, as we finally settle into the rhythms of 2026, I’m taking a breath and making a call for how to navigate another year on this sad and beautiful planet we call home.*

Clear vision and rapid, sustainable growth are things I talk to my clients about a lot. It’s what they want.

It’s what we all want.

We want to know where we’re going, and we want the most efficient path to get there. Set your resolutions. Get fit. Manage your money. Achieve your goals. This is what every promoted ad in your Instagram feed has been screaming for the past two weeks.

Take our course, buy our product, follow our model, and you will achieve your dreams.

But after a long walk and a conversation with a colleague, I’ve settled on this conclusion:

Consistency is the key.

Consistency is more important than a clear calling or vision.

In her fantastic book You Have a Calling, Karen Swallow Prior writes about how this elusive “calling” can change. It’s fluid as we move down the winding paths of our lives. Things can change in a moment. Clarity ebbs and flows.

The only way to achieve any vision for the future is consistency now, even before it all becomes clear. Clarity comes with action.

Consistency is more important than growth and capacity.

Many of my consulting clients enter into a relationship with me thinking I have a magic formula for growth. Meanwhile, grifters on Instagram peddle snake oil—promising happiness, fitness, and van life. The problem is simple: that’s not how any of this works. Consistency at the smallest levels is where real progress begins—and where it’s sustained. My successful clients implement a calendar of simple, non-negotiable activities.

Now you have to decide where you need consistency. I recommend baby steps.

This year my commitment to consistency is the following:

• Daily walks

• Daily reading

• Measured weekly progress on designated writing projects

• These weekly Substack essays

• Measured daily marketing activities (for my business)

Different priorities fit different people in different places doing different things. But consistency is key.

It’s the only way the books get done. It’s the only way we save for the future. It’s the only way to shed a few pounds or move to Helsinki. I don’t know what will happen next year or 10 years from now. I do know how I need to live my life today.

What does consistency look like for you this year?

Share in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Happy 2026.

It’s good to be back.

You’re doing better than you think.

Share

What I’m watching:
Beatles Anthology

This is on Disney+. We did a “free trial” and canceled after we watched this. But, even if you’re not into the Beatles, this is an incredibly interesting documentary about both the band and the decade of the 1960s. I highly recommend watching all nine episodes. As relates to this edition of Good Dirt: John, Paul, and George played together of 10 years as teenagers before anyone knew who they were. They were consistent — and, for them, consistency paid off.

What I’m reading:
Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

John Green is a brilliant writer. I like his YA novels, even though my age (as mentioned above) is far from YA (Young Adult). Everything is Tuberculosis is not a novel, though it reads like one. It’s a deep dive into the issues around one of the oldest (and at least by today’s standards) one of the most treatable diseases in the world. Tuberculosis still kills 1.2 million people every year. Most of those deaths are unnecessary. Green explores this disease from every angle, and, as someone who works closely with global poverty, it may be one of the most important books I’ll read this year. It’s an easy reading book, which is sometimes hard to read. But I, nevertheless, recommend it.

What I’m listening to:
Sad and Beautiful World by Mavis Staples

In, yet, another week where we grieve unnecessary violence by our government against our neighbors, I found this song, sung by this 86-year-old woman, to be a huge comfort and blessing. I commend this tune to you, as well.

This is my every Sunday-ish essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

T.S. Eliot

Travel has been our story this Fall.

Asia for three weeks in September/October. Denver last week (where I celebrated another trip around the sun with my amazing family). Next week we take a shorter trip down the road to Atlanta for a week with work friends and colleagues.

Travel is kind of our story in this life.

Travel can be both pain and privilege. Someone once said, Travel is only glamorous in retrospect. And it’s true. Waiting in airports, then smashing together in seats often made for efficiency over comfort, breathing recycled air for hours (days?), sleeping sitting up, and snarfing food and water from a cart whenever it passes is certainly not what they show you on the travel shows.

That said, Renee’ and I have visited 40 countries, and had the privilege of living outside our home culture for the better part of a decade. This changes you.
It should change you.

In his novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut said, “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center … Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

While traveling can put folks on edge, more importantly, traveling puts participants on the edge, if we let it. And from the edge the view is indeed much different.

On the edge.
I’m grateful to have lived much of my life there. Life “on the edge” can also mean “life on the border.” Makoto Fujimura (one of my favorite writers) talks about this in his (must read) book called Culture Care. Border-stalking is a skill I’ve learned from years of travel and living cross-culturally. I find myself comfortable being a lone Westerner in a completely Asian context than when I am in a sea of homogeneity. Strider lived with the elves of Lórien and Rivendell, learning their ways as he stalked the borders of men, dwarves, and even orcs.

Okay — we’ve taken the parallels into a fantasy world — but you see the point?

I’m grateful to have the opportunity to learn how to live life on these rugged and beautiful cultural borders. I am discovering this to be my primary role, the older I get.

While I will never lose the opportunity to reference a character from Tolkien, I will refrain from dressing like a Ranger.

For now.

Here’s what’s in the bin this month:

Something to read:

Lots to choose from this month (I’ve been on a pretty intense reading schedule). But my pick is from a new author named Joash Thomas. His book The Justice of Jesus is a pertinent and important read for thinking about the Gospel and the world we live in today. He provides what I believe to be the best definition of missio Dei I’ve ever read (and it was not even the point of the chapter):

“Lovingly and relationally engaging with the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of our neighbors.”

Definitely put this one on your reading list.

I mention this today because later this week I will be having a conversation with Joash on Global Trellis Podcast. We will be discussing justice, Jesus, and cross-cultural work. I will link it here when it’s live, or feel free to subscribe.

In case didn’t know — I’ve been co-hosting a podcast for over a year now. It’s for folks doing Christian cross-cultural work — but even if that’s not your vocation, it’s worth checking out. Lots of interesting episodes and we always have a great time!

Something to Listen to:

When I lived in Asia, I discovered a group of musicians from Iceland whose music was rooted in stories and folklore. Their music helped me through some tough times — and they became my favorite. Still are to this day. We’ve all matured. But I am finding much comfort and joy in the latest album by Of Monsters and Men.

I will be seeing them live in Atlanta this week. (For the first time!) This song from their latest album is one of my favorites. It’s a song about finding home and community. It’s called Fruit Bat.

Something to worry less about:

AI is here to stay. Probably.
But it’s not the world-changing tech it’s been touted. At least not in its current form. Large language model (LLM) AI has just about reached its capacity. Companies are losing massive amounts of money and the new “models” are not that much better.

This article from Cal Newport is worth reading to gain some perspective on AI in November 2025.

Something to watch:

Keeping with the travel theme — I’ve been watching (in some cases rewatching) Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain. I love this show and I don’t know why. It’s basically a guy traveling to places and eating food with everyday people. Maybe that’s exactly it. It’s common, human, heartbreaking, and beautiful. This is comfort TV for me.

Vietnam was apparently life-changing for Bourdain. He was there several times; the location of his now famous meal and conversation with Barak Obama. I’ve also had Vietnamese street food — and it is as fantastic as he makes it out to be.

🌿 Shoots and Roots

What’s sprouting—projects in motion, words on the page, ideas taking shape.

📘 Nonfiction:

Project: Generative Leadership
One thing I’ve learned in this process: writing can only make forward progress if research has cleared the way. Some of my “stuck-ness” with this project has been because I needed to do more reading. As I read and take notes, I’m less stuck. I’ve gone back to old school notecards, and this is helping me a lot. I wanted to finish this by January 1st. I probably won’t — but I’m not unhappy with the headway.

Common Good Articles:
I have another article coming out in the Winter print edition of Common Good, and have pitched another feature (which I think will be assigned. Talking to my editor next week). If you don’t subscribe to Common Good, I really do recommend doing it now. They’re about to increase the number of issues per year, which means prices will be going up soon. Whatever they charge, it really is worth it.

📚 Fiction:

Project: Dark Academia Cozy Mystery
Think: eccentric professor, internationally set mysteries, and Gothic libraries.

I did some plotting in this one back in August.

Project: American Folklore Fantasy
Think: American Gods meets a John Green novel with cryptids and Algonquin folklore (and much more family friendly than American Gods).

My brain has been here quite a bit this month. I’m finishing up a wonderful story based in Algonquin folklore called Slewfoot by a dark fantasy author who simply goes by Brom. This book hints at the world I am building for this story. I need more books like this one (Portal/dark fantasy based on America Folklore).

Any suggestions?

Thanks for being here.

Remember you are doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish (even though today is Tuesday) essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.

This fall has been quite the travel season for us.
We just returned from Southeast Asia, working with an amazing group of leaders and innovators who are making the world a better place. Next up: Colorado for a mini family reunion. One of the joys of having adult children is bringing the band back together.

Later this month—just before traveling to West Tennessee for Thanksgiving—we’re attending a conference in Atlanta where I’ll be giving a workshop on “toxic leadership.”

I presented a version of this workshop earlier this year, and the conversation has only grown as 2025 progresses. Global Trellis hosted an online conference for cross-cultural workers, and we’ve talked about the issue on the podcast more than once. It resonates because so many have lived it.

I’ve been in leadership, or working directly with leaders, for my entire 30-plus-year career. Here’s the core issue I see:

When structure isolates leaders, dysfunction spreads. The fix is leader-initiated accountability.

Leaders placed on pedestals (or who build one for themselves) create an unhealthy power distance between leadership and the rest of the organization.

Power distance is simply how far people feel from the person in charge. That distance varies by culture and by workplace. You’ve seen it if you’ve been to lunch with the boss and—after she orders—everyone else says, “I’ll have the same.” Or if, in a staff meeting, the supervisor does 90% of the talking, asks few questions, and action items are handed down from above.

A quick self-test

Answer honestly for your team:

• Do people freely say, “I disagree,” to the leader—in the meeting, not after?

• Does bad news travel upward as fast as good news?

• Can the newest or youngest in the room ask a hard question without fallout?

The more “no” answers, the higher the power distance—and the greater the risk.

Researchers have linked high power distance to higher odds of workplace toxicity: fear of authority suppresses honest communication, which lets problems grow unchecked. If that sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it.

Leaders must shorten power distance on purpose—by inviting challenge, building formal feedback routes, and making themselves accountable.

Accountability = shortening the distance

• Independent eyes: Advisors or a board with real authority to say “no.”

• Open channels: Anonymous or skip-level routes for hard news, with guaranteed follow-through.

• Visible numbers: Share health metrics (turnover, workload, conflict resolution), not just revenue.

This certainly isn’t anti-freedom. This isn’t healthy, either.
In healthy organizations, freedom and accountability rise together.

Freedom with accountability is the key to health in my work. I need room to create—inside a structure and a community that hold my feet to the fire. The freedom is life-giving; the fire burns off toxins and keeps the environment safe for everyone.

What is your current freedom and accountability balance? Let us know in the comments.

Oh — you are also doing better than you think.

Share

This is my every Sunday-ish (even though today is Tuesday) essay — a shovel-full of what I’m reading, writing, watching, thinking, and experimenting with in the space of generative leadership, creativity, and the slow, steady work of growing good things.

It’s always free. But if you’d like to support the work — and help fund the coffee that keeps the compost turning — you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

☕️ Much appreciated.

👋 Let’s connect on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear what dirt you’re working with these days.

🎙 I’m a consultant, coach, and trainer with Growability® Consulting, helping businesses, nonprofits and cross-cultural organizations develop clear leadership, sustainable strategy, thriving teams, and better management tools. I also co-host the Growability® Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts.

Need help growing your team, your systems, or your story?
Just hit reply. Growability® Coaching can help.

Grow deep. Lead strong. Compost everything.