I have little patience for the sanctimony that surrounds golf and fly-fishing. I’m a very sentimental person who loves traditions and tries to pull extraordinary analogies out of ordinary things for a living, but the hushed, piano-backed descriptions of Augusta National Golf Club as “sacred ground” and trout streams as sanctuaries drives me crazy. Golf is not church. Trout are not sacraments. These are games. Thoroughly unnecessary ways to spend an afternoon.

And yet they continue to capture the time and attention of otherwise reasonable people.

If the point of golf were simply to be outside, a walk would accomplish that far more efficiently than chasing a ball around for five hours. If the point of fly fishing were merely to catch fish, a real worm beneath a bobber would outperform a carefully tied “fly” every time.

Measured by their stated intentions, both pursuits are wonderfully inefficient. They ask us to embrace needless difficulty, to devote ourselves to skills that refuse to reward effort in predictable ways, and to accept that the direct route is often the wrong one.

They are, in their own way, contrary acts. Glimpses of the strange arithmetic of grace. Finding significance by losing ourselves for the sake of another. Receiving by giving. Becoming strong through weakness. We find life in the contrary act of self-sacrifice, and death in the fleeting glory of optimization.

Perhaps that’s why so much has been written about the spiritual significance of these hobbies. Spend enough time reading golf, fly-fishing, or any nature/outdoorsmen writing and you begin to notice a familiar refrain. The golf course’s endless blades of grass remind us of how small we are. A trout stream silences the noise in our minds. The mountains put life in perspective. Spirituality, we’re told, is simply becoming aware that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

There is something undeniably true in that. Golf teaches humility. Fly fishing demands a combination of surrender and optimism that cannot be forced. The natural world exposes our illusions of control and reminds us that we are creatures before we are achievers.

It’s a beautiful sentiment, but is it enough?

Unfortunately, those moments never seem to last. The round ends. The river is behind you. The drive home begins. Emails pile up. Someone cuts you off in traffic. Your child spills milk across the kitchen table. The injustices against you multiply and your attention is drawn back again to yourself on center stage.

There is a time management theory that I’ve been reading about known as Parkinson’s Law. It’s the idea that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give yourself a week to finish a task, and somehow it takes a week. Give yourself an afternoon, and it somehow gets done before dinner. This resonates with me, but like so many management/self-improvement techniques, it seems to discount my uncanny ability to defy my own guidelines and restrictions…. that’s a conversation for another day.

I wonder if our attention follows the same law.

Our minds seem determined to fill whatever space we leave available. We imagine that if we could just spend a few hours walking fairways or standing in a river, we’d finally quiet the noise inside us. And for a while, we do. We remember that we are not the center of the universe.

But attention, like time, refuses to stay empty.

If it isn’t occupied by something enduring, it fills itself with whatever is nearest at hand. Anxiety expands to fill the available space. So does ambition. Comparison. Self-improvement. Self-justification. Even moments of transcendence become another possession of the ego, another story about the kind of person we are. We become people who fish, people who golf, people who appreciate beauty, people who have perspective.

The ego can even make humility about itself.

Perhaps that’s why “outdoor spirituality” often feels profound in the moment but difficult to carry into life on Monday afternoon. It offers an experience of transcendence, but not a reason that transcendence should endure once the experience is over. The Gospel offers something different and even more contrary to the acts of everyday life than a round of golf or a morning on the water.

Christianity is built on something called the “scandal of particularity”. The message that the God who made the universe did not merely invite us to contemplate the cosmos. He entered one tiny corner of it and took on a particular body, in a particular place, at a particular time, for particular people, including you.

The truth is not merely that I belong to something bigger than myself. The truth is that the source behind the source (s/o Malcolm Guite), the One who is “bigger” than everything, made me and knows my name.

He knows the frustrations that appear with my work, my marriage, and my children, as well as my golf game. He knows the rage that comes out on the fourth hole after three missed putts. He knows the pride beneath my desire to fool one more rising trout. He knows the ambition beneath my work and the subtle ways I try to justify myself through competence, achievement, and admiration.

And before I can improve or “fix” any of it, He gives me the grace of His unearned favor—His love and mercy.

That is a different kind of humility. This is something that lasts beyond the experience, beyond the day. Not simply recognizing my smallness, but discovering that my small life is seen, forgiven, and held by the God who made all things.

This is the most significant contrary act of all. Not that we climb our way toward transcendence and peace, but that the Prince of Peace has come looking for you and finds you wherever you are.

The truth is that you aren’t given an unspecified amount of time to reach your potential or attain self-actualization. Your white-knuckled chase for excellence will drive yourself mad and wring any possibility of joy out of your life. The truth is that today, right now, Christ has already claimed you as His own forever.

I believe that adventures in golf, fly-fishing and other outdoor diversions can awaken our longing for that reality. They can teach us humility. They can loosen our grip on ourselves for an afternoon. But only grace can continue to fill the spaces of our lives where the pursuits of glory threaten the true joys of this life that we’ve been given.

God has filled the spaces of your life with freedom. Swing away.

If you enjoyed this piece, please let me know! And if you’d like to support the Cross Street writing project, share it with a friend and consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Thanks!

I’ve spent this summer as I often do, looking for breaks in my schedule to get outside and pick up a golf club or a fly rod. Some days I wonder, Why? Doesn’t my life already have enough frustrations and disappointments? Why seek out more? And yet I do. Because for some strange reason, I really do love golf, and I really love to fish.

In an old interview with No laying Up, professional golfer Jordan Spieth was asked how he stays motivated after achieving historic success and earning hundreds of millions of dollars before the age of twenty-five.

“You realize pretty quickly that this is a game that can’t be mastered, no matter how hard you try. The intoxicating part is when you feel like you’ve been given some momentum, when you feel like you’re on the right side of it, you just want to see how far it can take you.”

Spieth was describing a sustained experience of momentum that is completely foreign to us amateur golfers. But what resonates with me is that intoxicating feeling of being taken out of the ordinary and into new air, where the past disappears and all you feel is the rush of hope and possibility.

It shoots through your body like electricity, even if only for a brief moment, before you resign yourself to familiar frustrations. It’s the feeling of sending your club cleanly through the turf and watching the ball fly to a place you knew it was meant to go but doubted it could ever reach by your own imperfect hand. It’s the tug of the day’s first fish on your line just minutes after untangling it from a tree branch.

The momentum of that single moment, it delivers true physical and emotional joy. It’s the experience of something coming from nothing—the nothing, in my case, happens to be my golf swing and casting technique.

But what’s beautiful and true is that you’re not experiencing the power of creation itself. The uninterrupted humility that accompanies golf and fly-fishing won’t allow you to believe that for very long. What you’re experiencing is the givenness of joy: being pulled into a moment where something beautiful and unexpected has come to be. Not because of you, but perhaps in spite of you. And yet you’ve been welcomed in close enough to see it, even to grab hold of it with your improper grip.

This is grace.

This is what Cross Street is about: paying attention to the places where our culture promises mastery, optimization, and control, and discovering instead that the deepest joys of work, play, and life are received as grace.

This summer and fall, I’m planning to establish a new rhythm: a shorter piece on faith, work and self-help culture each week, followed by a longer essay near the end of each month.

I’m also hoping to write more about the worlds of fly-fishing and golf—two of my healthier obsessions—to explore how the language of self-help, leadership, and optimization has found its way into both pursuits, and how each, at its best, can direct us instead toward the grace of God.

I’d love to hear what you think and what you’d like to see more of. Feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment on the Substack app.

A few weeks ago, I sat in a class with 9 UVA students. I began, as I always do, with a check-in on the highs and lows of their lives. Between public and private conversations, I learned that a third of them had either lost a friend to suicide or had a friend seek treatment for suicidal ideation in the last few days.

I don’t have to tell you how dark and empty some of our homes have recently become, or how desperate our young adults are for a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.

You’ve probably noticed this in your own conversations. The language people reach for when they’re struggling isn’t just “stressed” or “overwhelmed,” but something deeper. I feel useless…worthless…like I don’t matter. Researchers have begun to take this language seriously, noticing how often it shows up among young adults facing depression and suicidal ideation. Jennifer Breheny Wallace calls this the language of “mattering”, of experiencing the presence or the absence of meaning, purpose and affirmation that our lives have true value.

I’m seeing the absence of all these things in too many anxious faces and tragic headlines. The question is, why? I can’t think of a more pressing question to ask. It isn’t a question left to the mystics and career counselors alone, it’s something that we all wrestle with, trying to keep our feet above the fires of hopelessness.

Arthur C. Brooks takes a shot at answering it in his important new book entitled, “The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness”. The Harvard “professor of happiness” provides story after story of young and middle-aged men and women struggling to make sense of their lives and find the meaning and purpose they need to endure. He combines these reflections with decades of social science research that become digestible observations, like his equation:

Happiness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning

When you break happiness down to this, and you make the concession that enjoyment and satisfaction are not in decline—given that young people are having as much “fun” as their predecessors, and that the type A strivers disproportionally represented in mental health statistics are achieving unparalleled levels of “worldly success”—it becomes clear that the happiness crisis finds its source in a lack of meaning. So, what is meaning according to Brooks?

Meaning = Coherence + Purpose + Significance.

Coherence is how the events of your life fit together in a narrative that makes sense, particularly your struggles. You may not understand the reason for the suffering and chaos in your life, but you have hope that in time the reason for these events will be made known.

Significance refers to the positive effect of your presence and actions on the lives of others. Think George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, whose own suicide attempt is thwarted by a guardian angel revealing George’s significance by showing him an alternate reality in which he doesn’t exist and everyone he has ever cared for is either suffering, in danger, or leading entirely worse lives in the absence of his love.

When it comes to purpose, Brooks says that modern life becomes “flat” without a transcendent purpose, when our happiness pursuits mimetically align with societal standards of beauty and wealth. When status and personal gratification become our reason for being, life becomes a predictable and endless search for control and optimization. Control becomes an illusion we chase, a fantasy which if ever attained would come at the cost of amputating the very vulnerabilities that make relationships worth having. And the excellence promised through optimization, sadly produces an unrelatable man who is even a stranger unto himself.

True purpose, according to Brooks, requires goals and direction that lead us out of ourselves. A road map, if you will, with checkpoints of progress along the way. A life void of purpose is akin to a lost child aimlessly, and with great paralyzing fear, endlessly searching for their parent in a large scary forrest. The child neither knows where they are nor where to go. Without a clear destination in mind, the Dark Wood remains our beginning, middle and end. But when we have professional, spiritual or personal aspirations to improve our lives, then we have something to look forward to, a goal to pursue, an end to measure ourselves by.

This makes sense. It diagnoses the malaise and meandering at the heart of so much pain and despair. It gives us hope that this darkness will not simply pass, but that we can chart a way out of it ourselves. Most importantly, it hopes to inspire the despondent among us to take action and live lives with energy and optimism.

But…

While Brooks aims to provide a word of hope to the hopeless, I worry that he replaces the burden of meaninglessness with the weight of progress.

When you attach the idea of progress and growth to purpose, you open the door back up to control and optimization. When our destination becomes a measuring stick, it deepens the shame of failure. We turn inward, and human nature takes over—pushing us towards self-preservation or withdrawing into isolation and paralysis. The hope of being pulled out of ourselves is thwarted by the law of progress, continuously reflecting our shortcomings back to us.

Regardless of where you rate on Brooks’ scale of meaning, however well-equipped you are with a coherent understanding of who you and where you’re meant to go, your journey will still be filled with transgressions and tragedies. And when it does, if your north star is the benchmarks of progress, you will find yourself once again in the Dark Wood, right where you started.

The good news of the Cross, of Jesus’ death and resurrection, provides a different road map, one in which your destination comes to you. One in which your purpose to love your neighbor as yourself is simultaneously given to you and fulfilled at the same time, in Jesus’ act of self-sacrifice. God is not waiting for you at the end of your journey; He has come to meet you in the ditch. We don’t progress upwards to meet a God who is statically observing us, we encounter a savior who descends to us in our static state of imperfection.

We find that purpose itself is woven into the reality that we live and move and have any being whatsoever. Creation itself involves meaning and purpose, which you are and have been given from beginning to end. We were created in love, the very thing we were created for.

We find significance in losing ourselves for the sake of another. By trading optimization for the contrary act of self-sacrifice. Through the simple act of listening to a friend’s story, and for a brief moment giving up our obsession with our own. We try and we fail at love every day, but we have been mercifully loved and forgiven today, regardless of where our life has taken us…this is our significance in the coherent story of salvation.

In a world so full of pain and isolation, the hope worth leaning into is not that you can progress your own way out, but that the light of grace has found its way in to you.

When our students shared the recent suffering of their friends, I was lost for words. “I’m so sorry” I said repeatedly. What is there to do but pray and offer a little love and solidarity—a shadow of the same love we have been given ourselves? I think this is all we can do. In fact, it might be the very purpose of our lives.

For the eighth time this past Sunday, someone asked me the simple question:

“How are you doing?”

Without a second’s thought, I said the exact same thing:

“Things are good. Really busy, but busy in a good way.”

I walked away and immediately felt that familiar discomfort. Because I’m not sure that it’s true. And even if it is, it’s the least interesting or thoughtful thing I could possibly say.

“You’re busy? Cool…”

Even more unsettling than the truth that I’ve become significantly less interesting than my three-year-old son, is the feeling that those words weren’t even my own. Like I was giving a testimony someone else had written.

Busy, but in a good way? Who am I trying to convince, and of what, and why?

The truth is that we live in a world where busy has become a kind of virtue. A subtle badge of honor.

To be busy is to be needed.
To be needed is to matter.
And to matter is to feel justified, to not be passed over or cast aside.

So, we repeatedly say that we’re busy, hoping, straining, for our lives to mean something…or at least to appear that way.

This is why John Mark Comer’s book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry resonates with so many people. It’s not just that we’re busy, it’s that we feel compelled. Like life is always half a step ahead of us. Like we’re constantly catching up, even when there’s nothing obvious to catch up to. Comer gives language to that quiet, chronic pressure, the sense that if we slow down, even for a moment, something important might slip through our fingers. In a world of notifications, deadlines, expectations, and endless options for self-improvement, he helps us see that what we’re experiencing isn’t uncommon, but it’s far from good.

And more than that, he exposes how deeply this way of living has worked itself into our souls. The addiction to our phones, the inability to sit in silence, the subtle pride in being “busy, but in a good way”, these aren’t just bad habits. They’re symptoms of a deeper restlessness. Comer is especially helpful here because he doesn’t just critique our schedules; he connects our pace of life to our capacity for love, attention, and presence. He helps us see that hurry isn’t just exhausting, it’s corrosive. It eats away at the very things we say matter most. This is why the apostle Paul begins his definition of love with the word, “patience” (1 Corinthians 13:4).

Comer offers a diagnosis that feels both uncomfortably accurate and strangely inspiring. I feel that way too! you think as you read him breaking things down, page after page. When he recounts his decision to step down from leading a megachurch in Portland, Oregon, to be able to walk to work, go on dates with his wife and play LEGOS with his kids again, the amens come rolling out of me. I can sympathize. I want that too. I need that too!

His book is compelling, and it hooks you quickly because he’s right. Hurry does something to us. It fragments our attention. It thins out our relationships. It makes prayer, worship and time with our loved ones feel like one more task to manage instead of a place for rest, play and joy. He puts his finger on the unrest, exhaustion and emptiness of a life motivated by performance and lived in the pursuit of not being left behind. There is a price we pay for the pathological busyness we find our lives consumed by, and Comer describes it well.

And so, he offers a vision.

Slow down.
Practice silence.
Keep Sabbath.
Simplify your life.
Follow a rule of life and become, in his language, an apprentice of Jesus.

There’s something deeply appealing about that.

To sit at the feet of Jesus like Mary.
To pay attention and simply listen.
To live an unhurried life.
To live inside a Wendell Berry poem. Yes, please.

But somewhere along the way, something subtle happens. Without meaning to, the solution slowly begins to sound a lot like the problem.

Because now the question becomes: Am I doing this right? Am I practicing enough silence? Am I observing Sabbath correctly? Am I becoming the kind of person who is unhurried, present, and at peace? Why am I still impatient, anxious and dissatisfied? And before long, this vision of the Christian life starts to feel like just another hurried performance. A more spiritual version of: “Busy, but in a good way…”

Not to mention, bring on a bad diagnosis, “The doctor called. They want to do more tests...” and you’ll be clambering for something more than a rule of life.

The language of apprenticeship and discipleship can do this to us because they underestimate the power of pride. We can’t help but anticipate a future return in which we’ll become the master ourselves. Apprenticeship to Jesus suggests that Jesus is primarily a teacher, a guide, a model to imitate. That Jesus is a dispenser of secret wisdom and advice that will bring you happiness and joy. That Jesus is a better version of the Dalai Lama, Marcus Aurelius, Stephen Covey and Tony Robbins—better, but still a version of the same thing. And if you sit at Jesus’ feet, what you will take away are the principles necessary to become the best version of yourself, to become more like the Master Himself.

When faced with the ruthless, pathological busyness of our lives, this can feel like a hopeful drink of cool water. But it simply is not the Gospel…this is Buddhism wrapped in stoic philosophy wrapped in James Clear’s Atomic Habits with a “Christian” bow on top. Give it three years and you’ll be just as burned out by it as you were by your parents’ Christianity when you began. There is nothing new under the sun. We still need the Gospel. We still need the Cross.

While Comer’s conception of apprenticeship to Jesus prefers ladders and techniques over a cross, Good Friday, in response to our perpetual urgency to justify ourselves, provides the Good News of Jesus’ three simple words, “it is finished” (John 19:30).

Jesus calls us to love our neighbors and to witness to the One whose sacrifice enables and inspires every miraculous act of self-sacrificial love we express. I fear that in practice, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry calls us to a disciplined rule of life that manifests as the pursuit of personal fulfilment, rather than a cruciform life focused on extending the same grace we’ve received to our enemies and loved ones.

There is nothing wrong with discipline. I wish I had more of it. I wish my kids had more of it. My coworkers, my teammates, we all could be at least 12% more disciplined. Discipline may help us close a deal, restructure a board, or better organize an event, but that is not what will save us from the deeper fear of not measuring up. From the fear of sin and death.

There is nothing wrong with learning from Jesus. But the discipleship and apprenticeship we undertake in response to the Gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection will always be one of humility. It will always be an experience in which there is no future promise of the lines being blurred between creator and creation—between savior and sinner.

Yes, we can, and we should, slow down our hurried souls and sit at the feet of Jesus, but the good news is that life has a way of slowing you down, whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, it tends to be painful. It tends to involve sin and suffering and failure and even death itself. But what you’ll find as you sit there, at the foot of the Cross, humbled by your inability to fix yourself, is simply…Jesus. Jesus is truly enough to save you.

You don’t become a better friend, a less hurried husband, or a more patient boss because you’ve decided to ruthlessly eliminate those shortcomings from your life. You don’t become a better parent simply by choosing to become one.

You become a better parent when you are met with mercy in the prison of failures that you and your father and your father’s father have built. Mercy from the only Father who actually has a leg to stand on when it comes to giving you advice.

And here’s the best part. He doesn’t even give you advice. He gives you His life. He gives you grace. He gives you forgiveness and hope, a future that isn’t dependent on your successful discipleship, but is instead secured by His promise that you are marked as His own forever.

If any church is to be mistaken for a schoolhouse of virtue this Holy Week, may it be a house of humility, where the weary and heavy laden arrive with nothing more than their imperfect, undisciplined hearts and open hands and are revived by the life-giving mercy of our crucified savior.

Maybe it’s just that I’m writing this on Good Friday, or maybe it’s because we need reminding of this every day. Without Christ on the Cross, life is not just busy or overwhelming, it’s ruthless.

For many years, I’ve spent this week struggling to hide my cynicism and taking far too much self-righteous pleasure in judging the New Year’s resolutions made by people foolish enough to share them with me. I’ve done the same thing with self-help literature. With the confidence possessed only by someone nobody wants to share a beer with, I’ll offer the snarky response: “If we are the problem, how can we expect to be the solution?” Don’t these people know that we’re helpless to actually solve our real problems on our own? Don’t they know that trying to “fix ourselves” is worse than futile according to Scripture: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh” (Jeremiah 17:5)?

All of this is true.
But I have a confession to make.

I’m tired of being the jerk who rolls his eyes at your sincere desire to improve yourself. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a better husband, father, boss, employee, or friend. The real question is not whether you want to change, but where you are placing your hope for that transformation to actually take place.

So this year, along with continuing the work of reading popular self-help and business leadership books and reframing them through the Cross Street Substack, I’m officially making New Year’s resolutions—but I’m calling them goals…

Imagine if your life were a startup. How would you shape, structure, and lead it to be most successful? That’s the question at the heart of The Happiness Files by Arthur C. Brooks, a collection of essays drawn from his weekly column in The Atlantic, bestselling books, and Harvard Business School course, “Leadership and Happiness.” His answer is deceptively simple: manage your life in ways that lead to rewards that are actually valuable; love, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Or, in other words, happiness.

The Happiness Files is a solid read. Made up of 33 short essays, it’s easy to jump between topics like procrastination, work–life balance, and defining success. And what makes the occasional optimization language—backed by social science research—palatable is the “end” Brooks consistently directs readers toward: the objective value of love and happiness, which he openly derives from his Catholic faith. According to Brooks, we weren’t made to spend our lives collecting wealth and power; we were made to pursue love and happiness. If your life is a startup, that’s your bottom line.

Another key idea in his writing is that “happiness is not a feeling; it’s something you can get better at.” No surprise that a social scientist who teaches a course on happiness would frame it as a skill, but this becomes particularly interesting when thinking about New Year’s resolutions. We tend to believe that achieving a goal will bring lasting happiness, but our satisfaction is usually short-lived. Before long, we move the promise of happiness out of the present and into the future, onto the next goal.

Brooks suggests shifting our focus away from outcomes and toward daily practices, asking whether they align with values like love and happiness rather than expecting those values to arrive once a larger objective is achieved. As he puts it:

“Goals don’t make you happy. Habits do. Goals are something you achieve once; habits are something you live every day… Happiness is not a destination to be reached; it is a direction to be traveled.”

Goals and resolutions often fail because we load them with the promise of future happiness. But by attending to daily practices, relationships, meaning and grace, our lives can be opened up to humble transformations over time, rather than becoming another self-improvement project fueled by willpower alone.

I find Brooks helpful here, though perhaps not in the way he intends. Shifting happiness away from our successes is a message worth shouting from every rooftop and pulpit in town. But suggesting that we can attain happiness through preferred daily habits can quietly sound like we just need to choose happiness—something I’ve tried to shout at my disappointed five-year-old, who has enough wisdom to reply, “Daddy, it’s just not that easy.”

The deeper wisdom comes from examining our daily practices, assessing how they align with values like love and happiness, and then (most importantly) discovering how often we still fail to be happy, patient, kind, forgiving, or content on our own. The wisdom for 2026, and for all time, is that there are places in our lives, wounds and challenges, that can only be filled and healed by God and his grace alone.

I’m not entirely sure why I prefer the word goal over resolution. Maybe it’s because a resolution tends to announce a dramatic change just over the horizon, while a goal can be something small and repeatable, something we attempt imperfectly and expect to fail at along the way. Or maybe (definitely) it’s just because I like the slight separation it gives me from the rest of you naïve resolution setters.

Of course, goals share the same genetic weakness as resolutions. Given enough time and a little sprinkling of human nature, both are guaranteed to turn into resentment when we fall short. So perhaps the distinction doesn’t really lie in what we call these ambitions, but in the posture we adopt toward them and the environment in which we tend them.

I texted a friend this morning to announce my goal of running a (cumulative!!) marathon every month this year. He replied that his goal was to do one pull-up. We’re impressive athletes…What I love about these goals isn’t just that they’re achievable, but that they’ve already giving us reason to talk about something together, and most importantly laugh at ourselves in the process. Sharing goals is less about accountability and more about humility: being honest about what we’re attempting, how it’s going, and why we want these things in the first place (we want to look better, feel better, and move better when our children, wives and friends need us).

If you’re interested in seeing how fun setting goals with a group of friends can be, check out this podcast from No Laying Up:

The real goal of this year is to identify the places in my life that need attention while recognizing that they’re problems only God himself can solve. Impatience, loneliness, insecurity, anger, entitlement (I’m describing my friend, not myself), these are the areas of our lives most ripe for resolutions. And yet the truth is that God’s grace is our only hope for deliverance from the plagues they bring down upon our lives.

With a little humor, a little humility, and maybe a little friendship, perhaps the goals you set for 2026 can be less about self-improvement and more about naming the places in your life that only God can fill with grace upon grace.

So, make some goals, share them with friends and prepare yourself for a year of disappointment, laughter and grace.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

***I was recently on the Make the Most of Your Money Podcast. Check it out here:

Let me know if you’d be interested in a Cross Street podcast, and say a prayer that my friends agree to do it (E & T, give the people what they want!)

In the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam and Eve are not tempted by excess or indulgence, but by the power of comparison. The serpent doesn’t offer them pleasure for its own sake. He offers perspective. He offers knowledge. “You will be like God,” he says, “knowing good and evil.” In other words, you will gain the power to stand above the world and declare what is better and worse, in and out, worthy and unworthy.

This is the original sin of pride: the desire not merely to live in the world, but to rank it.

Once comparison enters the story, everything fractures. Shame appears. Blame follows. Relationships strain. Humanity’s sense of itself is no longer rooted in gratitude, but in evaluation. We stop receiving life and start measuring it.

That curse has never left us, and few things intensify it more than money.

Money doesn’t merely buy goods and services; it communicates status, belonging, and identity. It tells us where we stand in relation to others. It promises safety, admiration, and control. And in a world of constant visibility, money becomes one of the primary ways we keep score.

This is why Morgan Housel’s new book, The Art of Spending Money, is such an important and timely contribution. Housel’s central insight is deceptively simple: money is best used not to impress others, but to pursue independence, purpose, and a life aligned with what actually makes us happy. Money ought to be a tool to improve your life, not to influence other people’s perception of your life. He consistently warns against letting social comparison dictate our spending and our ambitions. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. And as Housel admits, desiring respect from your peers isn’t toxic in and of itself, but when it comes at the expense of your time, money and true identity, it will kill you.

One of Housel’s most powerful questions is this:
If you were stranded on a desert island with only your family, what would you buy?

It’s a brilliant exercise. Strip away the audience. Remove the spectators. Eliminate the possibility of signaling. What remains is function, comfort, and care for those you love. On an island, nobody cares what you drive, wear, or display. The status symbols collapse. Utility and peace rise to the surface as what you truly want, what you actually need. In a similar chapter, Housel suggests spending your money on the inside of your home, where you retreat to for quality time with family and friends, rather than renovating the outside of your home, solely for the purpose of pleasing passersby and winning the game of comparison.

It’s a clarifying thought experiment, and one worth returning to often.

But it also reveals a tension worth naming: are we made for independence?

Housel rightly critiques dependence on work we hate, bosses we fear, and schedules that steal time from family, friends, and meaningful rest. Financial freedom, in this sense, can be a real good. It can loosen the grip of anxiety and create space for presence, generosity, and love, while debt can compound anxiety and sell off your future into the hands of your creditors.

And yet, there is a danger lurking beneath the language of independence.

The Bible doesn’t describe human beings as creatures meant for self-sufficiency. From the beginning, we are described as dependent—dependent on God for breath, on the earth for sustenance, and on one another for compassion and solidarity. “It is not good that the man should be alone,” God says, before sin even enters the world.

Christian faith doesn’t culminate in independence, but in interdependence: love of God and love of neighbor. Our lives are meant to be porous, entangled, vulnerable, and shared. We were made to need one another and to be needed. We were made to love sacrificially, and to receive it even more.

This is where money can subtly deceive us. When money becomes a means of avoiding dependence, insulating ourselves from others, withdrawing from obligation, or escaping the inconvenience of relationship, it begins to serve not freedom, but isolation.

The goal is not to need nothing. The goal is to recognize our need of the right things, and to realize that they’ve already been given.

The desert island question works precisely because it removes us from community. But the truth is: we do not live on islands. We live among families, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and yes, even enemies.

We hurt one another. We disappoint one another. We compare ourselves relentlessly to one another. And yet, we cannot flourish apart from one another.

This is both the challenge and the beauty of humanity.

Comparison thrives in community because community exposes difference. Someone is always richer, more admired, more accomplished, more secure. The temptation is to use money or achievement as a shield against that discomfort. To rise above it. To win.

Luke Burgis, in his book Wanting, shows how deeply comparison is wired into our systems of desire. We do not simply want things; we want what others want and what society says we should want. We learn what is valuable by watching whom others admire. Our desires are contagious.

Burgis acknowledges that we can’t stop the habit of mimicking altogether, and so he points towards several anti-mimetic ways of living to disrupt unhealthy imitation and re-anchor our desires toward the good. The most compelling anti-mimetic move is to curate our models of desire. Choose what he calls “thick models” whose desires lead toward generosity, peace and humility. Avoid rivals whose success depends on your loss in some sort of zero-sum game.

One of the things I love about Wanting is how it “crosses” the lines of self-help and humility that are so often at odds with one another. Avoiding models who don’t share our values and transforming our own desires seems like one of those simple bits of wisdom that is far from simple to execute. But Burgis confesses with great humility that our will power is not strong enough to transform our desires on our own. We can’t pretend to cast aside the curse of comparison, but there is hope in surrounding ourselves with models of grace that redirect our instincts to imitate rather than pretending to eliminate them.

Money, in this framework, is no longer fuel for imitation but a tool for freedom. Not freedom from responsibility, but freedom from the chains of comparison and condemnation, the freedom to love our neighbor rather than compete with them.

The curse of comparison cannot be solved by better budgeting or clearer goals alone. At its root, comparison is a theological problem in need of a divine solution.

The world holds out success and winning at the game of comparison as our path to peace and happiness. The Gospel offers and proclaims a radically different hope. Not evaluation, but grace. Not ranking, but mercy. Not independence, but communion.

In Christ, we are freed from the exhausting task of proving our worth. We no longer need to declare ourselves better or worse, in or out. Because we are already named and claimed, loved and forgiven. From that place, money can be seen as a gift rather than a verdict and used as a tool to better serve our families and communities instead of a way to secure our identity.

This does not mean we stop caring about how we spend, how we work, or how we earn a living. It means we stop asking money to save us, to give us a worth, a belonging, or a peace it was never meant to provide.

I hope and pray that whatever state and mood you find yourself in today, that you do have a wonderful Thanksgiving. A day in which the spirit of gratitude grabs ahold of you for however long it wills, and you find yourself giving thanks for the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

God has given us so much to be thankful for. The good work of loving our neighbors, but most of all the gift of His mercy and love that give us the hope to do that work, however imperfectly.

Jesus is the way, the truth and life. His love for you was written in blood before you were born, his grace is your hope for today and his promise is your life for tomorrow.

I’ll leave you with a prayer, a bit more appropriate for the dinner table than Flannery’s. I encourage you to read it aloud with your family and friends today.

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have
done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole
creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life,
and for the mystery of love.

We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for
the loving care which surrounds us on every side.

We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best
efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy
and delight us.

We thank you also for those disappointments and failures
that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the
truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast
obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying,
through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life
again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom.

Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know him and
make him known; and through him, at all times and in all
places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen.

Happy Thanksgiving

One of my favorite quotes about faith and work comes from Martin Luther: “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.”

It’s a line that hits hard in a culture where our worth seems to rise and fall with our productivity. But Luther’s point, and the Gospel’s promise, is that because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, we have been freed from the exhausting burden of having to work, earn, or prove our worthiness before God. His love, forgiveness, and redemption are not rewards for performance; they are gifts of grace.

This means that work—whether in an office, a kitchen, a field, or a classroom—is no longer a test of our value or a way to secure our identity. The Cross has already declared who we are: beloved, forgiven, redeemed. It frees us from chasing status alone and introduces the possibility of pursuing our actual interests and talents with a purpose beyond our own immediate satisfaction. It gives us meaning and significance outside of what other people think of us, because we already know who we are; “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” (1 John 3:1) The Cross unburdens us from the performative nature of work and frees us to simply do the work God has given us to do; to love our neighbor.

This work isn’t a test or a curse. It’s the good work laid out for us from the very beginning.

“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it… The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.’”—Genesis 1:28, 2:15

Before Sin even entered the story, work was given not as a curse, but a calling—a means by which creation is tended, order is sustained, and neighbors are cared for. When we are freed from having to use work as proof of our goodness or worth, we are free to see it as a gift.

We still fail, of course. We make mistakes, lose jobs, disappoint others, and fall short of our own expectations. But because our worth isn’t at stake, we can pick ourselves up, start again, and continue in the good work God has given us to do: to love our neighbors, support our families, and care for God’s world.

God doesn’t need your good works; He’s already taken care of that. Then what are we to do with this life, with this freedom we’ve been given? Turns out your neighbor needs a ride to work. Grab your keys.

My first instinct was to say that they should turn to Scripture. Are these voices pushing you towards the Word of God, towards Jesus, towards the Cross? Or are they taking you somewhere else? It was a fine answer, but it eventually became clear that what was on at least a few of their minds, even more than the euphoric and intoxicating minefields of partying and hookup culture, were the daily tasks of their present and future work. Where do we find Jesus in the work of each day? In the spreadsheets, staff meetings and case studies? The Bible may not say anything specific about the position or development you’ve been asked to analyze for work, but it does say a lot about God knowing and caring and being present in every aspect of our lives. So, if my faith has something to say about my actual life, how does Jesus show up and help me from 9-5?

The truth is that Jesus didn’t die on the Cross so that you would make better business decisions.

Jesus died and rose again so that you would find hope and mercy on the other side of whatever decisions you make. Jesus wasn’t crucified to save you from being fired or ensure that you get your homework in on time. This would be the Prosperity Gospel, and a complete denial of Jesus’ own words that “in this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

Jesus didn’t die for you to make more money or get better grades; He died to save you from those being the only things in your life that define you and give your life meaning and purpose. He hasn’t overcome or saved you from the daily challenges of work, but He has overcome the need for you to save yourself through success. And because of that, you are free to simply do the work God has given you to do. To work, fail, and try again.

In his book Measure What Matters, venture capitalist John Doerr discusses his own system called OKRs—Objectives and Key Results. Unlike core values and mission statements that articulate who you are, OKRs address how best to go about defining and measuring what your work is trying to achieve. If you’re looking for a goal-setting framework for the work you feel called to do (or simply find yourself doing), it doesn’t get much better than this. Every MBA grad I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks is familiar with Doerr’s work and uses some version of his system with their teams.

In the OKR approach, an objective is the “what”: a clear, ambitious direction that inspires action. A key result is the “how”: specific, measurable outcomes that tell you whether you’re moving toward that objective. OKRs helped Intel navigate intense competition, gave the founders of Google focus as they grew out of a garage, and shaped global initiatives through the Gates Foundation.

According to Doerr, OKRs are not just about hitting targets; they are about alignment. In his system, objectives are discussed and established by the whole team, not solely from the top-down. Objectives are displayed publicly at work—transparency is a key component of this. When everyone in an organization knows what matters most, people can row in the same direction. And because key results are measurable, they help strip away illusions and force leaders and teams to look honestly at whether they are making progress or not.

I began this book expecting to have to reframe its language of self-help and leadership into something more honest and recognizable within a Christian understanding of who we are—namely, people who need far more than the help we can offer ourselves. But Doerr never really gave me that opportunity. Instead, he simply kept talking about what works and what doesn’t when a business pursues its desired outcomes. Measure What Matters is full of practical frameworks for how to structure and run an organization—nothing more.

And I think that’s precisely where its strength and staying power lie: in resisting the temptation to present OKRs as a path to salvation or a way to secure ultimate worth through success. Doerr’s advice doesn’t need to carry moral or existential weight; it can be taken for what it is—a clear, useful approach to measuring whether your organization is accomplishing what it set out to do. Period.

When Christians talk about work, we can easily get stuck between two unhelpful extremes. On one side is the temptation to believe that work doesn’t really matter—that it’s just a necessary evil until we reach our final rest. On the other is the temptation to believe that work is everything—the place where we prove ourselves and secure our identity and worth.

The Gospel offers a different story. Scripture teaches that God Himself gives us work to do, even before the Fall in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15). But this gift of work was never meant as a test of our value, nor merely as a way to pass the time or earn a living. God gives us work so that others might be fed, clothed, cared for, and protected. The farmer, the engineer, the nurse, and the parent all participate in God’s ongoing provision for the world.

This means our work truly does matter, and God cares about the quality of the work we do. Not as a means of salvation, but as a way of loving and serving one another. OKRs and performance metrics can help us do that work well. They’re tools of stewardship, not unlike the plow or the spreadsheet, practical means of carrying out the tasks God has entrusted to us.

The Gospel brings real peace and true freedom by putting our work in its proper place, by measuring what truly matters about the work we’ve been given to do. The results of our work matter, but they are not proof that we matter. By centering our lives on the ultimate purpose of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection—to redeem us from sin and death and claim us as His own forever—the Gospel frees us to see the inherent purpose of our work: to provide for and care for our neighbors, to communicate that they matter.

Jesus didn’t die so you could make better business decisions. He died for you. Now go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.

I was speaking with a friend recently about the core values and mission statements displayed by all sorts of institutions. We’ve all seen versions that sound noble but ring hollow: phrases like “Excellence, Integrity, Service” lining the walls of office buildings, yet communicating very little. A good mission statement shouldn’t be an empty platitude; it should give real shape to the team that’s been assembled and hope for the work to be done.

That got me thinking about the value statements our families make. At home, the hope is that our values have meaning and purpose because they’re connected to something transcendent, rather than something we create. Perhaps there’s a point of connection between how our faith shapes life at home—how we aspire to speak and treat each other—and how we might carry that same spirit into our work.

The thinking behind a family’s core values goes something like this: we are imperfect people, perfectly and unconditionally loved by God, trying imperfectly to love and care for our families and neighbors. There’s nothing hollow here. It’s rooted in the story of Scripture—who we are, who God is, and how God has called us to live.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we may walk in them.”
(Ephesians 2:8–10, NRSV)

Could the core values of our families serve as a framework for shaping the values and objectives of our work?

Here’s the challenge: there’s a fundamental difference between our families and our businesses. We might wish this weren’t so, and we might even use familial language at work, but we don’t treat family members and coworkers the same way. We try (and fail) to love our families unconditionally, regardless of performance, but work is measured by performance. That’s simply reality. This is why workplaces often borrow athletic metaphors—teams, goals, results. A family doesn’t measure your performance before deciding whether to keep you around the dinner table, but a teammate who consistently violates core values or underperforms can be cut. That’s expected, even necessary, in an environment where results affect others and the quality of the work itself.

So how do we reconcile this with our faith in a God whose property is always to have mercy, and our hope to love others as we’ve been loved—even the “others” we work and play with? Yes, home and work are different, but the common denominator is me, and my hope is that I don’t leave my faith at the door when I punch the clock at work. If the Gospel is a universal and objective truth with reach into every part of our lives, then how do we avoid siloing it off from 9 to 5?

That’s the challenge and the opportunity. Because grace doesn’t erase the difference between family and business; it creates points of access where the love of God can bleed into both.

A central truth of the Gospel is that it works with the existing facts of our lives, not some idealized image of who we should be. Jesus doesn’t reserve His mercy for the winners: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 ESV). Jesus enters both the highs and lows of life with grace, proclaiming good news amid our real experiences of success and failure. The Gospel calls a thing what it is: you are a sinner and a saint, a sinner and yet justified by the blood of Christ in this very moment.

This means that when assessing and shaping the core values of an institution, we can begin with who we actually are, rather than who we wish to be. The core values of an organization shouldn’t be aspirational slogans, but the fruit of honest conversation among the team itself that engages the real facts of who they are.

The question isn’t “Who do we want to be?” but “What makes us who we are? What’s our DNA?” Given who we are as a team, with all our gifts and challenges, what standards should we uphold to ensure that we’re building the right team and cultivating the right culture? Aspirational values can create a dehumanizing focus on outcomes above all else, while values grounded in who we truly are foster an environment that prioritizes quality and cultivates a genuine culture of service.

We may not work with our teammates as we live with our families, but our identity as sinners redeemed by grace remains constant, wherever we find ourselves. The core values of our businesses and our efforts to uphold them may operate in a conditional reality—we may have to fire employees or turn away clients—but those decisions aren’t made in a grace-free vacuum. They’re made beneath the persistent, merciful shade of the Cross.

Check out next week’s newsletter, where I’ll take a closer look at the objectives and daily tasks of work. Many of these reflections have been inspired by John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters, which describes how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) move organizations from core values and purpose into action.

Where is Jesus in this? That’s the question we’ll take up next.

Long before he took over the internet and your local bookstores with his Stoic-inspired self-help books, Ryan Holiday understood a basic truth about human behavior: we resist prescriptions from others and often push back by doing the very opposite of what we’re told. In 2012, while still working in marketing, he staged a publicity stunt for the film I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. By launching a campaign against its womanizing plot, he intentionally provoked protests that drew attention to the movie: “The best way to get these kids to see this movie is to tell them not to.”

We don’t like being manipulated by outside forces, whether it’s relentless marketing, an economic downturn, difficult people, or a bad diagnosis. Being told what to do steals away from our sense of autonomy and either motivates us to rebel or to slip into a defeated malaise. The question is: how do we endure and overcome these challenges rather than run or collapse? At the heart of Stoic philosophy is the ability to distinguish between what is beyond our control, such as other people, circumstances, or even death, and what remains within our control, which is our response to these outside influences.

In The Obstacle is the Way, famously read by both the winning and losing teams of the 2014 Super Bowl, Ryan Holiday describes overcoming obstacles as a discipline of three critical steps: Perception, Action and the Will. “It begins with how we look at our specific problems, our attitude or approach; then the energy and creativity with which we actively break them down and turn them into opportunities; finally, the cultivation and maintenance of an inner will that allows us to handle defeat and difficulty” (9).

-Perception helps us to avoid panic in the face of obstacles and the poor decisions that follow. The perception of our mortality is emphasized by thinkers like Seneca who prescribed the daily practice of meditating not only on our own death, but even the death of our loved ones. We’re all going to die, so don’t let the greatest obstacle of them all sneak up on you and leave you stuck in despair and inactivity. The expectation of prosperity leads to resentments, while the expectation of adversity can lead to preparation and the turning of an obstacle into an opportunity.

-Action is the discipline of responding to challenges with persistence and flexibility in the service of our ultimate goals. This flows from the perception we’ve fostered. Holiday argues that desperation, fear and powerlessness are a matter of perception, and in classic Stoic fashion, says that we can choose to give in to such feelings or choose not to. When we choose not to, we replace despair with the courage of right and effective action:

“with energy

with persistence

with a coherent and deliberate process

with iteration and resilience

with pragmatism

with strategic vision

with craftiness and savvy

and with an eye for opportunity and pivotal moments” (70)

-Will is the third and final discipline to overcome the defeats and difficulties of life. Much like we prepare our bodies for adversity through exercise and nutrition, we can also prepare our minds for the hard roads of life, hoping to never walk down them, but ready to take them on when the time comes. This is what Holiday calls the cultivation of our internal power, the building up of our “inner citadel”. Through the art of acquiescence and the practice of cheerfulness in challenging times, the resilience required to choose right action in the face of turmoil comes from the will power we develop over time:

“Life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens—at that exposing moment—the world gets a glimpse of what’s truly inside you. So, what will be revealed when you’re sliced open by tension and pressure? Iron? Or air? Or bullshit?” (135)

At times the message of The Obstacle is the Way makes me want to jump up and run through a brick wall, or at least begin by going on a run. Other times it has the opposite effect, when I acknowledge that my will-power simply doesn’t work this way. It reminds me of reading St. Paul’s words on perseverance, character and endurance in the New Testament:

“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3-5 ESV)

When I hear this as an aspirational challenge to overcome suffering on my own, I feel anxiety. Not because of an aversion to these virtues, but instead from the frustration that I can’t will them into being by simply trying harder or reading the right book. I do long for my life to look like this, to be someone who endures suffering and defeat with grace and hope, but when my hope is found only within the walls of my inner citadel…Stoicism simply isn’t enough.

St. Paul knew this. If we look closely at his words, or simply place them within the larger context of Scripture, we hear the same promise echoing throughout: the power to endure and overcome obstacles is found in the power of the Holy Spirit, not in the power of me. We don’t need a system; we need a savior. Don’t get me wrong, a system helps, but it doesn’t save. A system can help you better approach the work that God has given you to do, but it can’t resurrect your marriage, it can’t reconcile you with your neglected children, and it can’t break you out of a cycle of resentment or shame that might be holding you back from ever beginning to face these obstacles in the first place.

What we need in order to engage the real struggles and sufferings of life, and to simply do the work we’ve been given to do, is real hope that doesn’t reenforce the walls we’ve constructed, but kicks them down and crashes in with an authority that overcomes the darkness of uncertainty.

When my son was two months old, he was diagnosed with Metopic Craniosynostosis. A birth defect that would require surgery to remove and reconstruct the cranial vault of his skull. One of the emotional obstacles my wife and I faced was that the surgery couldn’t take place for another six months, when he would be old enough to survive the procedure. For months we couldn’t sleep, battling one intrusive, yet realistic, thought after another.

One thing I learned early in my career was that one of the most unhelpful, and often cruel, things you can say to an anxious or grieving person is, “everything is going to be okay.” More often than not, what they’ll hear is, “you’re making me uncomfortable and anxious, let’s change the subject.” How do you know everything is going to be okay? It certainly doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’m on my own, and my only hope is to dig myself out…but I can’t find the shovel.

But one day, a few months before the operation, I was overcome by a deep certainty that everything was going to be okay. Not that the surgery itself would go smoothly, or even that my son would survive it, but a profound peace in knowing that no matter the outcome, even if my son were to die, everything would be okay. The gift of trusting that the God who created us has also died for us, is risen for us, and has promised that my son and I will one day be together again with Him in paradise. I imagine this is what the Holy Spirit actually feels like, like a pure gift appearing at the oddest times, offering hope beyond the darkness, beyond my own ability to endure the mundane and unbearable obstacles of life.

My son survived the surgery, thanks be to God, and I survived the wait, thanks to the Holy Spirit that gave me the perspective, the energy and the will to know that in the end everything will truly be okay. “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me…In the world you will have trouble. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 14:1, 16:33 ESV)

We pick up books like The Obstacle is the Way searching for hope. Hoping that after they’re read and put down that we’ll be transformed into a person who can better face the outside forces pinching in on our dreams and aspirations. Holiday’s work can and does inspire you to lift up your head, to look at the obstacles in your own story as a chapter, rather than the end. But the obstacle isn’t the way. Jesus is. True hope isn’t found in ourselves. We’re all going to die and pass away with everything else. Our hope in the midst of adversity is found in the God who has already revealed to us the end of our story, that in the end everything will truly be okay because of his enduring mercy and the hope and the promise of resurrection.

Lord, you know the obstacles we face—the fears, the setbacks, the struggles that feel too heavy to carry. Remind us that our hope is not in our own strength, but in your Son who has already overcome the world. Give us the courage to endure, the gift of your Spirit to hope and to act with faith, and the peace of knowing that in you, everything will one day be made whole. Amen.

A friend once told me a story about celebrating with someone after their graduation from Duke’s business school. At the party, someone asked the graduate what the most important thing he had learned about business was. With a little grin, the graduate replied that it could all be summed up in two words: “It depends.”

His answer may have sounded evasive, or like some kind of postmodern relativism, but it actually points to something true about both business and life: so much depends on context, circumstances, and most importantly the story we believe we are living in.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre illustrates this in After Virtue (p. 210). He asks you to imagine standing at a bus stop when a young man you’ve never met approaches and says, “The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.” You understand the sentence, but it makes no sense. What does it mean? That depends on the story. Perhaps the young man is mentally ill—that would explain it. Or maybe yesterday someone who looked like you asked him in the library for the Latin name of the wild duck, and today he’s mistaken you for that person. That would explain it too. Or perhaps he’s a foreign spy, waiting at a prearranged meeting, and this strange phrase is a poorly chosen code sentence. One story is sad, another is comical, and the last is dramatic. One might lead you to ask for help, another to laugh, and the last to physically defend yourself. Three wildly divergent responses, but all justifiable. Without the right story, you can’t make sense of what’s in front of you, and you can’t know how to respond.

This is true in our lives and our work. It affects how we treat others, and just as importantly, how we understand our own identity and the deeper purpose we long for.

The struggle comes from our lack of a common story framing our collective lives, or at least our inability to see that we have one. This is no modern phenomenon. Since Cain and Abel, we’ve been looking at the world through our own lenses, tinted with self-interest. If we don’t recognize that the person sitting across from us is operating out of their own understanding of the world and their place within it, then we’ll struggle to listen, to adapt, and to meet them where they are, whether they come to us as customers in need of service or as teammates in need of leadership. And if we ourselves don’t have a deeper story providing meaning and purpose from outside ourselves, then we’ll wander aimlessly with no goal beyond personal gratification. Instead of working for our customers, neighbors, and families, we’ll inevitably focus on doing things to them, serving our own ends rather than their needs.

As Jesus reminds us, it isn’t our own creative efforts that redeem, sustain or transform us. It isn’t within ourselves, or what we perceive to be in the minds and hearts of others, where we find meaning, purpose and happiness. It’s the story of creation and salvation, written by the creator of the universe Himself, that gives us life and hope: “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches.” (John 15:3-5 ESV)

The good news is that the Gospel gives us the one true story to make sense of our lives, our work and our neighbors. In Christ, we are freed from relying on optimization for our narratives of success and happiness. In Christ, we are shown who we are actually meant to be and what we are meant to do, but most importantly we are given the mercy we need to keep going when our lives look nothing like what they’re supposed to. Within that story, even the smallest task has meaning, and our work, whatever it may be, becomes an act of service rooted in grace.

Lord, help us to rely on you for all truth. The truth about who we are. The truth about who you are. Remind us that apart from you and the one true story of our lives we can do nothing. Remind us today that our redemption and our hope to do the work of serving our families and communities comes from your grace alone—from the story you have already written and proclaimed as finished.

Amen

For many of us, the place we find ourselves in is a place of wanting to be somewhere else. Wanting to improve. Wanting to be where we think we should be. Where we want to be. This is why we plan date nights with our wives, begin a new diet or sleep routine. This is why we read books like James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

This is even true for James Clear himself, who as a high schooler took a baseball bat to the face, was rushed to the same hospital where his little sister once received cancer treatment, and underwent a year of physical therapy to regain his eyesight and mobility. As a young man wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps to professional baseball, his was an experience of losing hope and then trying to bring it all back to life through the discipline of his own habits.

He may not have made it to the major leagues, but he did eventually write one of the most popular self-help books of the 21st century.

Whatever it is you’re wrestling with, we can all empathize with the desire to improve. The desire to gain control of our lives, to arrive at or return to the place we want to be. To reconnect with our spouses and children, to do the work we’ve been given to do, and to do it well. The question is, “how do we get there?”

As James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, there are three layers of behavior change, with “identity” properly placed at the vital center:

Outcome \ Process \ Identity //// Process //// Outcome

• Focusing on outcomes and goals alone restricts your happiness and feeds the “arrival fallacy”. You fall into the trap of thinking, “once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.”

• Focusing on the process (habits) gives yourself permission to find happiness and satisfaction along the way.

• But our habits and behaviors are often a reflection of our identity, the inner belief system that makes sense of the world and our own actions within it.

⁃ If your inner belief system is riddled with self-doubt, then your habits will reflect that.

⁃ If your identity compliments your desired outcome, then there is hope for behavior change.

If our identity is the engine behind all behavior change, the question remains; “how do we get where we want to be?” How do we change our identity and put an end to the negative self-talk?

For Clear, our habits are the bridge between who we see ourselves to be and who we want to be. By making small “realistic” changes in our habits, our identity will change along the way—we will become what we do.

But this is where self-reliance doesn’t end up getting us very far. Believing that we can simply change our own identity by changing our habits is like telling a drowning man to stop drowning. Will-power alone is never enough. If it was, self-help books, ironically, wouldn’t be flying off the shelves.

It is true that small changes in our lives can make big differences, but to say “you are what you do” is a cruel delusion. This framework for an identity will crush you under a trickling weight of resentments, directed not only at your imperfect self, but also at those you blame for getting in your way, the very loved ones you began your journey of improvement for.

It’s a half-truth that if you can just write one sentence, you are a writer…if you can encourage just one person, you are a leader. Initiating these habits can lead to significant changes. And James Clear is a master at describing them in simple and accessible ways (future newsletter), but the full truth is that our habits are bound up with our desires and our desires are driven by love—either the love we crave and pursue for ourselves, or the love that breaks in upon us and changes everything.

Real change and transformation come from being changed, from being transformed. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

We need an identity that aligns with our desired outcomes, but even more than that, before we can even begin to find hope for change in our lives, we need an identity that isn’t dependent on our performance. We need an identity we receive, not achieve.

• God has shown me that I matter and that my voice matters, so I write a sentence, I am a writer.

• God has encouraged me, so I encourage others, I am a leader.

At the heart of this newsletter is the truth that we are more than what we do. But God has given us work to do. Work in the marketplace, in our homes, and in communities. Our true hope for doing this work and doing it well, of improving and finding ourselves in a true place of peace, rests in knowing that God has already transformed and declared who we are through the Cross.

Lord, we too often try to remake ourselves through our own strength, hoping that better habits alone will give us peace. Remind us today, and every day, that it’s through your grace and your sacrifice alone that our true identity is secured. Take our desires to improve our lives and direct them towards the work of love you have given us to do. May our desires be shaped by your love and our habits flow from your grace. Give us rest in who you have already declared us to be, and the courage to do the work you have prepared for us.

Amen

Subscribe now