No one questioned it. After all, he was in charge.

—

I know a smaller version of this. Not brothers, not a pit a season where I was demoted, and treated poorly by leaders who enjoyed putting a young, arrogant guy back in his place. Not long after, an older man told me something I’ve never forgotten: “Be careful about the size stick you use to hit people with, because one day that may be the stick they use to hit you with.”

Two years later, I was re-promoted, put in a position to lead some of those same leaders. I remember being intentional about it. No big stick. I wanted to honor them, not settle a score I’d been keeping.

Joseph’s brothers walk into that room fully expecting the stick. They sold him. They lied to their father. They have no reason to expect anything but what they deserve, and the man standing in front of them has the kind of power required to give it to them.

He doesn’t use it.

That’s not the same as pretending nothing happened. He leaves the room to weep, more than once, the text says. Forgiveness didn’t mean it didn’t hurt anymore.

—

Joseph tells them himself, eventually: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Not you meant it for evil, but it worked out fine. Not you meant it for evil, but I’ve moved on. Both are true: what they did was wrong and God still used it.

He never got another coat. Not in Potiphar’s house, not in the prison, not standing in front of Pharaoh. What he got instead was character, the kind that doesn’t need a coat anymore to know who it is.

That was enough to carry him from a pit to a palace, and now, finally, into a room with the brothers who put him there.

Maybe that’s the whole point of formation. Not to get your coat back. Not to make the people who wronged you pay for it. But to become the kind of person who no longer needs either one.

This is the last post in the Formation Series. Six seasons, one man, one God who never left any of them. If you’re in your own pit, your own prison, your own two years of waiting; I hope Joseph’s story did for you what it’s done for me. Not an escape from the hard seasons. A reason to trust what’s forming you inside them.

— Matt

Then it hit me. I knew how to work.

So, I worked. For almost two years I set up chairs, swept floors, unlocked doors, made sure the room was ready before anyone else arrived. When I was not working or volunteering at the church, I studied Scripture, leadership, anything I could get my hands on.

At the time, I thought I was setting up chairs. Looking back, God was teaching me how to steward responsibility before He entrusted me with influence. I wasn’t waiting to be noticed. I was becoming something, quietly, the way you do when you don’t yet know you’re being formed for anything.

Then one day he called me into his office, a converted loft above an old gymnasium. I’d been up there before, but this time felt different. He looked at me and asked if I was ready for more. He wanted me to begin teaching. To lead a new group for guys.

I said yes. I had no idea what I was saying yes to.

Within six months, I was a pastor.

—

Two years in, Joseph had settled back into the rhythms of prison. Still leading but still not free.

Then one morning a guard appeared with a straight razor, soap, and a fresh set of clothes.

For the first time in years, he didn’t look like a prisoner.

—

We tend to think opportunities create leaders. Joseph’s story says the opposite. Opportunities reveal leaders.

Pharaoh didn’t meet a different Joseph that day. He met the same man Potiphar had trusted, the same man the warden had trusted, the same man who had quietly learned to steward whatever was placed in front of him. The audience changed. Joseph didn’t.

That’s what leadership formation does. It shapes you long before anyone important notices.

Notice what Joseph didn’t do during those two years. He didn’t stop leading, didn’t stop serving, didn’t let the waiting become an excuse. He kept running the prison like it mattered, not because it would get him out, but because it was his to steward.

That’s the part of Joseph’s story we often skip. We love the palace. God spent years preparing him for it. Leadership isn’t tested the day you’re promoted. It’s revealed.

—

When Joseph finally stood before Pharaoh, something else stood out to me. He didn’t say, “Finally.” He didn’t tell Pharaoh how unfair prison had been. He didn’t spend his first moment with the most powerful man in Egypt explaining why he deserved another chance.

His first words pointed somewhere else: “I cannot do it, but God will.”

That’s formation. Power has a way of revealing what has been growing inside us all along. A younger Joseph might have seen Pharaoh as the fulfillment of his dream. This Joseph simply saw another opportunity to serve.

—

I became a pastor because someone gave me an opportunity. But I was ready for that opportunity because of two years of chairs, floors, and quiet preparation that nobody applauded.

Stewardship doesn’t guarantee opportunity. But when opportunity finally arrives, stewardship is what makes you ready to carry it. Positions can be handed out in a day. Character can’t.

—

I meet leaders all the time who are asking for more responsibility a larger team, a bigger budget, greater influence. Those aren’t bad desires. But I wonder if we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of “when will my opportunity come,” maybe the better question is: if it came tomorrow, would I be ready to carry it?

Joseph didn’t know that morning would change everything. He just knew how to be Joseph. He’d been practicing that for thirteen years. One ordinary morning he woke up in prison. By the end of the day he was second only to Pharaoh.

The promotion happened in a day. The preparation took thirteen years. That’s how God often forms leaders slowly, quietly, long before anyone else notices.

Next week: Joseph’s brothers stand before him again.

— Matt

He was my oversight, but much more than that. In that season he was something like a grandfather, not just to me but to guys like me all over the country.

I came expecting feedback. Instead, he looked across the table and smiled. “You don’t need me to teach you anything,” he said. “You just need time on task.”

Then he told me something I never saw coming he wanted to open a door for me, an assignment I’d dreamed about but never imagined he was considering. I hadn’t asked for it. I wasn’t campaigning for it. That’s why his words carried so much weight. He believed something about my future before I did.

Then he went quiet.

—

The call came months after I’d already sensed the shift. It was brief. Almost a formality. Like a hand-off.

The assignment itself was never really his to keep. He’d since moved on, and in time the new leadership decided I wasn’t the right fit. The man who’d made the promise was gone by the time it came due.

I was disappointed not because I thought he’d lied. He hadn’t. He meant every word when he said it. The hardest part wasn’t losing the assignment. It was realizing that what had become part of my future had only ever been a conversation to him.

—

“Remember me,” Joseph said. Not a demand. Just a request. Three days passed. Surely today. The guard walked by. Not for him. Day four. Pharaoh is probably busy. Week two. Maybe next week.

Hope has a way of inventing new calendars.

Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Joseph kept listening for footsteps outside the door. They never stopped at his cell.

Two years passed. The cupbearer never said a word.

—

Joseph did what any of us would have done. He asked someone to remember him. The tragedy wasn’t that he asked. The tragedy was discovering that even good people forget.

Scripture doesn’t soften the language. It simply says the cupbearer forgot Joseph.

But God didn’t.

Two years is a long time to hold hope in a promise nobody else remembers. I know, because I’ve held it too, an assignment I believed in, spoken by a man who believed it when he said it, forgotten by the time it mattered.

Looking back, I don’t think my problem was hope. Hope wasn’t the problem. I had simply given it the wrong address.

—

If you’re waiting on someone to remember you right now, a mentor, a boss, someone who told you what was coming and then went quiet, I don’t think the answer is to stop hoping. I think it’s to move where your hope rests.

People will forget. Even good people. Even people who meant every word they said. Mentors move on, leadership changes, and people were never meant to carry your future. God can use people. But people were never meant to replace Him.

—

So, what do you do while you’re waiting on someone who’s already forgotten you?

Keep doing the work in front of you. Joseph didn’t stop becoming trustworthy because the cupbearer walked out of prison. The waiting didn’t get to decide what kind of man he became.

Keep your hope. Just move its address.

And keep your eyes open for doors you aren’t expecting. Joseph didn’t leave prison because the cupbearer suddenly remembered on his own. He left because Pharaoh had a dream no one else could explain. The door God opened wasn’t the one Joseph spent two years watching. It was a different one entirely.

—

I don’t know if the man who forgot me ever thought about that conversation again. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t.

It doesn’t matter anymore. But because I stopped needing him to remember in order to believe God hadn’t forgotten.

I don’t think the greatest miracle was that the cupbearer finally remembered Joseph. I think it was that Joseph had become the kind of man who no longer needed him to.

God had another door. He always did.

Next week: Pharaoh has a dream. The prison door finally opens — not because Joseph forced it, but because God’s timing had finally arrived.

— Matt

The influence I once had wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the audience. I had a choice sitting in that chair. Waste the season in front of me. Or use it.

Somewhere underneath the disappointment, I still believed the role I’d just lost wasn’t the end of what God had made me for.

So, I went to work.

—

That’s the thing about formation. On this side of it, you can look back and see what God was doing. Inside it, formation just feels like being squeezed. You don’t get to see the shape you’re being made into.

God does. You just get the squeezing.

For the better part of two years, I read. I studied. I wrote documents I was fairly sure no one would ever read, leadership concepts, teaching outlines, strategic plans, frameworks that lived in folders on my computer. Some days I wondered if any of it mattered. Then one phone call came. Suddenly everything I’d built in that little office had somewhere to go.

None of it was wasted.

—

Joseph didn’t set out to lead the prison he was thrown into. There was no title waiting for him there. No promotion. No recognition. Nothing left to gain.

Which is exactly where you find out why you lead.

He was given small things, a dispute between two prisoners, a schedule, responsibilities no one else wanted. He handled them well. Then he handled a little more. Little by little, the warden stopped checking. Not from carelessness. He’d learned he didn’t need to. Before long, Joseph was leading a prison without ever being called its leader.

That’s how formation works. Joseph didn’t become a leader because someone recognized him. Someone recognized him because he had already become a leader.

Scripture says the Lord was with him there.

Not later. Not when Pharaoh noticed him. There, in a prison. Leading people who couldn’t advance his career, impress his résumé, or improve his reputation.

—

I think leaders often believe the next opportunity is what will finally allow them to lead.

Joseph believed something different. He led whatever was in front of him. That’s what integrated leadership looks like. It doesn’t wait for authority. It stewards responsibility. It doesn’t need a platform to become faithful. It becomes faithful wherever it’s placed.

If you’re in a season where your work feels invisible...If you’ve been passed over...If you’re wondering whether anyone notices...

Don’t wait for the next title before you become the leader you hope to be.

Lead the meeting no one remembers. Prepare like the presentation matters, even if only three people are in the room. Encourage the employee who can’t do anything for your career. Build the system no one will ever know you created.

Leadership isn’t revealed when someone finally gives you influence. It’s revealed by what you do when no one gives you any.

Joseph didn’t know the prison was temporary. He didn’t know two more years were still coming. He didn’t know the man he helped would forget him completely. He only knew what was his to do today.

So he did it.

Maybe that’s the invitation for us, too. Not to spend our energy wishing for a different season. But to become the kind of leaders who would be faithful in any season.

Because God often hides leaders before He reveals them.

Next week: the cupbearer promises to remember Joseph. Then doesn’t. For two more years.

— Matt

I should have run. Stood my ground. Told my boss, clearly, that I disagreed and been willing to be corrected for saying so.

I didn’t see the drift. I had the conversation. I hurt the other person. It took me days to recover. Eventually I called them, and we were able to reset the relationship.

That’s my story. It’s not Joseph’s.

—

He was alone, going about the work in front of him, when he heard her behind him. He knew the voice. Then he felt his cloak leave his hand.

He ran.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had a garment removed.

—

Joseph didn’t out-argue her. He didn’t stay to make his case, prove his character, negotiate a boundary. He left something behind and ran.

Most of the compromises leaders make don’t happen in a dramatic moment like his. They happen in a slower one, a hallway conversation you know you shouldn’t have, a decision you talk yourself into because everyone else already has. My own drift didn’t look like fleeing a room. It looked like staying in one, having the conversation I already knew was wrong, because leaving felt harder than complying.

Here’s what I’ve learned since: the moment to decide who you are isn’t the moment you’re in it. It’s before. Joseph’s no wasn’t improvised. He’d already decided, long before that day, what he wouldn’t do, which is the only reason he could act that fast when the moment came.

If you’re waiting until you’re in the room to decide what you’ll do, you’ve already waited too long. Decide now, on the boring days, when nothing’s testing you. Decide what you’ll leave behind before you’re standing there holding it.

It didn’t protect him.

—

The door didn’t open. It was kicked in. The guards weren’t there for a conversation they grabbed him and took him. No trial. No chance to tell his side. Just the door of a cell closing behind him.

The man who did the one right thing lost everything for it.

—

I wish I could tell you that integrity protects you. That the door only kicks in for the people who deserved it.

It doesn’t, and it didn’t.

Joseph did the one thing right in that house, and it’s the thing that cost him. Not the drift. Not the compromise. The refusal.

If you’re a leader trying to do the right thing right now, and it isn’t working, if standing on your convictions has cost you a relationship, a promotion, a seat at the table, I’m not going to tell you it’ll all make sense next quarter. Joseph didn’t know it would either. He just knew what he wouldn’t do.

That’s the whole note here. Not a resolution. Just a man in a cell who did the right thing and lost anyway.

Next week: what he does in that cell, when no one’s watching and no one’s coming.

— Matt

Joseph was seventeen, and he could not stop talking about his dreams.

He told his brothers about the one where their sheaves bowed down to his. Then the one where the sun, moon, and eleven stars did the same. He didn’t read the room. He didn’t need to; he had a coat that already told everyone whose favorite he was.

So, when his father sent him out to check on his brothers in the field, they saw him coming a long way off and decided they’d had enough.

The coat came off first. Then the pit, empty, no water at the bottom, no rope hanging down.

Above him, he could hear them. Breaking bread. Laughing. “We got him,” one of them said. “We sure taught him a lesson.”

There’s no way they’re going to leave me here.

But there was no food. No water. No rope.

—

I know that pit a little differently.

Two years ago, I walked into my first meet-and-greet in the construction world, the industry I now find myself helping lead. Everyone in the room knew each other. Nobody knew me, and nobody had a reason to care that I was there.

For twenty-some years I’d walked into rooms with a track record that did some of the talking for me. This wasn’t that room. This was a fish-out-of-water room.

My instinct, the old instinct, was to drop a line. Mention a number, a title, something that would let me be, in half a sentence, the person I used to be.

I caught myself. Not because I’m wiser than Joseph. Because I recognized the move. It’s the same one that got him thrown in a pit, the instinct to make sure people know your worth before they’ve had a chance to actually see it.

I didn’t say the line.

I accepted, standing there, that my old identity didn’t carry weight in this new room. The coat, so to speak, was gone.

Maybe that was the point.

—

If you’re in a season where the resume that used to open doors doesn’t seem to work anymore a new job, a new church, a new room where nobody knows what you used to be, you have two options. Say the line anyway. Or let it go.

Most of us say the line. I almost did.

Here’s what I’d ask you: what are you still trying to prove in rooms that don’t require it? Being right was never Joseph’s problem. He wasn’t wrong about the dreams. The problem was who he was still trying to be seen by.

I don’t think you’re being punished. I think you might be getting formed.

Joseph didn’t know, in the pit, that Egypt was coming. He only knew the rope wasn’t there yet.

Neither do we, most days.

Maybe that’s what the pit does.

It separates the coat from the man.

Titles disappear.

Platforms change.

The rooms that once knew your name forget it.

And somewhere in the silence, God begins to show you who you are without any of it.

— Matt

I had slipped out onto the back deck to water some plants. Honestly, I needed to be alone. I could feel the emotion rising and I didn’t want to fall apart in front of my family. I thought I could hold it together long enough to get through the afternoon.

I couldn’t.

Amy and our son Connor, who was home for Sunday lunch before heading back to school, came outside to say goodbye. They found me sitting on the deck, unable to stand, tears I’d been holding back for weeks finally running free. We didn’t say much. We just held each other while I cried.

Connor had never seen his dad like that. After a while, he pulled back and said quietly to Amy:

“I’ve never seen the cowboy cry.”

—

When I was twenty-six, Amy and I moved to the Texas Panhandle. It was a culture shock for a city kid, the flat land stretching to the horizon, the sunsets that look painted, the wind that cuts through you in January like it has something to prove.

There’s a unique culture out there. A code, really. And over time, it became a saying in our family: be a cowboy. Not about boots or horses, though we did our share of that. Being a cowboy meant something more. It meant integrity. Honesty. Hard work. Keeping your word. And when life knocks you down, because it will, you get back up.

We said it to each other in the moments that required it. When someone needed to dig deep, find the resolve, keep going. Be a cowboy.

But Connor had never needed to apply that to me before. I was the one who said it. And now here I was, the cowboy, on the ground.

—

There’s a passage in Jeremiah 17 that I kept coming back to in those weeks. The prophet lays out two options with unusual bluntness.

The first: put your hope in man. In flesh. In what you can see and touch and control. The Bible says this leads to a being cursed and describes the result in sharp, desert imagery. A shrub in the wasteland. Parched ground. Nothing growing. Uninhabited.

The second: put your trust in God. And the image shifts entirely. A tree planted by the water, roots reaching the river. Leaves that stay green even in the heat. And this is the part that stops me every time I read it, it does not cease to bear fruit. Not “bears fruit eventually.” Not “bears fruit when conditions improve.” In a year of drought, the tree still produces. Because the fruit doesn’t depend on the weather. It depends on the roots.

I could put my hope in what I could see. Or I could push my roots deeper into what I knew was true.

Trust, I was learning, is not a feeling. It’s a decision. And sometimes you must make it while you’re sitting on a deck in November, unable to stand up.

Maybe you’re there right now. Not on my deck, on yours. Or in your car in a parking garage before you walk into a meeting you’re dreading. Or lying awake at 3am running the numbers again and coming up short again. You’ve lost a job, or a friendship, or a business deal that was supposed to change everything. You’ve lost someone you loved. You’re in the dirt, and the question sitting on your chest is whether it’s worth getting back up.

Every leader faces this moment. The cowboy gets knocked down. That’s not a sign that something has gone wrong. That’s part of the terrain.

The question is where your roots are.

—

A few days later, I had a chat with Connor.

I told him that being a cowboy doesn’t mean you don’t get knocked down. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel it. Pain is part of this life, for every person who has ever tried to build something, love someone, lead anything. The hurt is not the failure.

Being a cowboy means you know you have to get back up. You get back in the saddle. You keep pressing forward, not because the pain is gone, but because you know who holds what’s ahead.

And, this part matters, a real cowboy is willing to admit when he’s hurt.

I told him that’s what I was doing. And that’s what I planned to keep doing.

—

The Transition Series is finished. Six posts tracing the curveball, the letting go, the fog of the middle, the slow work of becoming something new on the other side.

What comes next is different. It’s not about the stages of transition anymore. It’s about what happens to a person inside those stages, what God does in the wilderness, in the waiting, in the years when the ground looks dry and nothing seems to be happening above the surface.

The Formation Series starts next week.

I’ll tell you this much going in: the tree in Jeremiah 17 doesn’t look impressive during the drought. It just stays rooted. The fruit comes later.

That’s what we’re going to talk about.

— Matt

I was fired.

It was a Monday afternoon. A familiar office, one I had been in hundreds of times over the years. The same office where dreams had been born, where plans had been crafted, where the future had been discussed with hope and energy and the confidence that comes from building something together.

This day was different. The man sitting across from me had been one of my closest friends. Now there was a distance between us I had never felt in that room, the kind of cold that tells you a decision has already been made before anyone says a word. I knew it before I sat down. He knew it too.

The conversation was short. No infidelity. No addiction. No hidden sin. Just an agreement that was contingent on me not sharing my side of the story. I agreed to leave quietly. We signed a piece of paper. And then I walked back to my office, the one I had spent the better part of two decades working in, and I cleaned it out. Quietly. Without ceremony.

And then I walked down the stairs for the last time.

Nearly twenty-two years of climbing up those stairs. One quiet walk down.

—

There was an odd calm in the car on the drive home.

Four miles. I had driven that stretch a thousand times. But this time felt like crossing a border, leaving one country and entering another, not entirely sure what the customs were on the other side.

If I’m honest, Amy and I had both sensed for a while that a season was ending. There had been a growing tension, a slow unraveling of something that had once felt solid. We weren’t surprised. But knowing something is coming doesn’t make the moment of arrival easy. It was still hard. Hard to leave a community I had poured my life into. Hard to close a chapter that had defined so much of who I was.

And yet, alongside the hard, there was something else. Relief. The exhale of a season that has finally ended, even when the ending hurts.

Amy was waiting when I got home. She was tender, compassionate, present in the way she always is when things are hard. And then I saw what she had done.

Steak and lobster.

That’s just her way. Her way of saying: we are not done. This is not the end. This is the start of something great. I needed that meal more than I knew how to say.

—

The next day, my closest friend called.

More than fifteen years of friendship. He didn’t know exactly what to say or how to say it. He just said: “Meet me at Bud’s place.”

Bud’s place was an empty home, the kind that feels like no one really lives there but has been perfectly set up. Quiet. Private. Exactly what we needed.

We sat in silence for a minute. It was tense. We were both holding our emotions. And then we just sat with the tears and let them come. We knew together that this was the end of a season. One that we all knew was necessary, the situation had simply become untenable. That a new one was beginning. That there was no time to sit in it indefinitely. We needed to get a plan and begin moving.

He became something of a coach to me in that season and would be for the one I was headed into. Reminding me that it would be okay. That Amy and I would be okay. That God was not finished with me.

I left that empty house understanding four things I would need to carry into the transition ahead: trust fully in God. Stay connected to Amy. Keep moving. And let the circle, which had just gotten very small, carry me for a season.

—

If you were part of the community I served for nearly twenty-two years, if you have sent a message, a text, a DM wondering what happened and where I went, this is for you.

I am okay. Amy is okay. We are intact, together, and rebuilding toward something we believe God has ahead for us. The silence over these past two years was not abandonment. I agreed to leave quietly and I kept that agreement. I never stopped loving the community we built together.

I want you to know something clearly: I never wanted to leave. Not the people. Not the relationships. Not the years of life we shared together. The leaving was not my choice. But how I left with dignity, without regret, without burning anything on the way out, that was.

I love you. I am proud of what we built. And I am at peace.

—

If you are new to this series and this is the first post you’ve read, welcome. There are five posts before this one that walk through what transition costs and what it can build. I’d encourage you to start at the beginning.

And if you have been with me since Post 1, thank you. You traveled this road with me. You sat in the hospital parking lot, on the plane back from New Mexico, in the quiet office, in the living room at six in the morning. You know the terrain now.

Here is what I know after all of it:

The curveballs will come. The seasons will change whether you are ready or not. The road will be windier than anyone told you it would be. But God is present in the transitions, not watching from a distance, not waiting for you to get stable again before He shows up. He is there in the familiar office and the quiet car ride home and the empty house where your friend meets you with nothing to say but his presence.

Trust Him. Keep moving. Let your circle carry you.

He is there in a wife who sets the table like the story isn’t over.

The new season is already beginning.

We had stayed up way too late processing the what if’s and the we should’s.

Amy and I stumbled out of bed just around six in the morning. Both of our small children were still asleep. We settled into our normal spots in the formal living room, the place where we had started most of our mornings together. Coffee. Quiet. The stillness of a house where kids are still sleeping.

This morning was different. The night before had been heavy, the kind of conversation that runs in circles because neither person has answers, only fears and questions and the wreckage of a season that had just ended without warning. We were young. The future was uncertain. And we understood, sitting there in the quiet, that the next few moves would define our lives.

So, we did the only thing we knew to do.

We invited God into it. We asked for direction. We asked for His will, not ours. And we reaffirmed what we knew to be true, that we loved each other, and that God was in control, even when nothing around us felt like it.

That was nearly eighteen years before the hardest curveball of my life. And when that one came, I already knew where to sit and who to invite in.

—

Nobody told us the road would be this winding.

The version of life we were handed as young people looked something like this: you are born, you go to school, you start a career, you get married, you have children, you build something, you retire. A straight line from here to there. Predictable. Orderly. Progress measured in milestones.

What nobody told us is that the road is a winding, twisting, sometimes doubling-back path full of curveballs good ones, hard ones, and ones you can’t yet tell the difference between. The transitions aren’t detours from the plan. They are the plan. Solomon knew it. He wrote an entire chapter about it. A time for everything for building and tearing down, for holding on and letting go, for the season that is ending and the one that hasn’t arrived yet.

The question was never whether the curveballs would come. The question was always what we would do when they did.

—

There is a tension inside every major transition that I have never found a way to shortcut.

It is the knowing that you need to move into the new season while simultaneously wanting to go back to the old one, even though you understand there is nothing to go back to. The old season is closed. But the new one isn’t fully open yet. And you are standing in the in-between, pulled in both directions at once.

What I’ve learned slowly, across multiple transitions, is that the only way through that tension is to tap into the rhythmic nature of God. He built seasons into creation on purpose. We need winter to make way for spring. The cold doesn’t mean the end, it means something is being prepared. What dies in one season becomes the soil for the next. You don’t get the harvest without the ground being broken first.

Eugene Peterson called it a long obedience in the same direction. Not a sprint. Not a dramatic turnaround. A slow, faithful, sometimes barely visible movement toward what God has ahead. I have held onto that phrase through more seasons than I can count. It has never stopped being true.

—

If I could sit across a table from you in the middle of your hardest transition, here is what I would tell you.

You are not alone.

God promised He would never leave or forsake you. That is not a bumper sticker. It is a covenant. If He was present in your victory moments, and He was, He is present in your transition moments. Not watching from a distance. With you. In the living room at six in the morning when you have no answers and the children are still sleeping. Believe that. Really believe it. Let it be the thing you stand on before you stand on anything else.

Keep moving.

Get up every day and move. Some days it will feel like you are moving backward. Trust the process anyway. The road is winding what looks like retreat is often just the curve before the climb. Over time, when you look back, you will see that you were moving forward the whole time. The long obedience doesn’t always feel like progress. It is still obedience. Keep going.

Let your circle get small — and trust the people in it.

You were not made to do this alone. Not the transition, not the messy middle, not the becoming. Find the trusted few, the ones who will sit in silence with you, who will tell you the truth when you need it and hold their words when you don’t, who will remind you of who you are when you have temporarily forgotten. Lean on them. Receive their wisdom. Let their words carry you for a season. That is not weakness. That is how God designed us to survive the hard chapters.

—

I learned these things in a hard season nearly two decades ago. I practiced them imperfectly across the years that followed. And when the biggest curveball of my life arrived these were the things I came back to.

They held.

Next week: The Transition Series, Post 6 — The Day Everything Changed.

The metrics were off. And the team had gone quiet.

Not dramatically quiet, no one was storming out, no one was saying anything directly. Just that particular kind of withdrawal where people start giving you the minimum. Shorter answers. Less initiative. Eyes down in meetings. If you’ve led people for any length of time you know exactly what that feels like. The numbers were telling me something was wrong. But numbers never tell you the whole story.

There was a version of me, twenty-plus years into my leadership career, years before the biggest curveball of my life, who would have responded to this situation in a very specific way. Tighten the reins. Raise the expectations. Call a meeting and make it clear that the numbers needed to change, immediately. That version of me believed that pressure was the primary tool of leadership. That results were the point and people were the means.

Instead, I sat alone in my office and got quiet.

—

I sat there trying to discern what was actually happening and why. And somewhere in that quiet it hit me.

I was the problem.

I had been so focused on the metrics that I had lost sight of the leaders I was supposed to be developing. I had made the numbers the main thing. And the numbers are never the main thing, they’re the story the main thing is telling. When your people go quiet, the story they’re telling you isn’t about the numbers. It’s about whether they feel seen.

I called a dinner. A private room at our favorite restaurant in Amarillo. No agenda printed, no presentation. I started by doing something the old version of me would have found nearly impossible:

I told them I had lost sight of what mattered. I owned it. I apologized. And I made a commitment to lead differently, to ask more questions, to tailor my approach to each of them as individuals, to be more connected to who they were and not just what they were producing.

The room shifted. Not because I had a great strategy. Because I had told the truth.

Sitting in the car afterward I had a clear thought: this version of me would not have existed in the previous season.

—

Here’s what I’ve learned about becoming the new, and I want to be careful how I say this because it’s easy to get wrong:

Becoming the new is not the moment you get the title back. It’s not the promotion, the new role, the external validation that the season has turned. Those things are confirmation of the becoming. They’re not the becoming itself.

The becoming happens in the quiet office. In the honest dinner. In the moment you feel the old reflex fire: tighten the reins, protect the ego, demand the result, and you choose differently. Nobody gives you credit for that choice. Nobody sees it. But God does. And over time, those invisible choices accumulate into a person.

I am okay being just okay. I don’t need to be the most recognized person in the room or the leader in every room I walk into. It is enough to be a good husband, a present father, a faithful friend, and a leader who asks better questions than he gives answers. That shift didn’t come from reading the right book or magic pill. It came from having everything I thought defined me stripped away, and discovering that what was underneath it was actually worth building on.

The demotion at 29 started building this. The repromotion two years later confirmed it was real. Twenty years of leading from that rebuilt foundation followed.

And then another curveball came. Harder than the first. And the becoming started again.

—

If you are in a transition right now, if you can feel the shape of who you’re becoming but you’re not fully there yet, that’s not failure. That’s faithfulness. Stay in it. Keep making the invisible choices. Keep asking the better questions. Keep showing up to the quiet office and telling the truth at dinner.

The new version of you is being built right now. You just can’t see all of it yet.

Next week I’m going to step back from the story and tell you what all of these transitions have taught me. And then, in the final post of this series, I’m going to tell you what actually happened.

Next week: The Transition Series, Post 5 — What the Transition Taught Me.

I walked back into the building the following week and nothing was the same.

Same hallways. Same doors. Same people I had worked alongside for years. But the week before, I had been demoted in front of all of them — title gone, pay cut, authority removed — and now I was just supposed to show up and act like everything was fine.

It wasn’t fine.

People who had been close allies the week before were suddenly going out of their way to avoid me. Team members I had led, who had celebrated me as their boss, were now looking for ways to remind me of where I stood. It was a church environment with thousands of people watching to see how this young leader would respond. And I was standing in the middle of it with no title, a thirty percent pay cut, and an internal voice that would not stop talking.

This is the Messy Middle. The place between who you were and who you’re becoming. And it is exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds.

—

There’s a story in Genesis that I kept coming back to during this season.

Joseph, the one with the coat, the dreams, the brothers who couldn’t stand him, gets sold into slavery, ends up in Egypt, earns trust and position in Potiphar’s house, then gets falsely accused and thrown in prison. And there he sits. Not for a week. Not for a month. For years.

Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 3 that there is a time for everything. A time for this and a time for that. Most people read that as a comfort, this hard season will end. And that’s true. But what I’ve come to understand is that the Messy Middle is the and in Solomon’s list. The space between the ending and the beginning. Joseph’s prison wasn’t a detour from his story. It was the chapter where everything that mattered got built.

You don’t become the second most powerful man in Egypt by escaping the prison early. You become him by refusing to waste the time you spend inside it.

—

But I want to be honest about what the prison actually feels like from the inside.

Because the Messy Middle isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s loud. There is a voice, and if you’ve been through a significant transition you know exactly the voice I’m talking about, that shows up in the quiet moments and says things like:

You will never survive this.

You were never good enough for that position anyway.

The critics are right.

I catastrophize. I rehearsed worst-case scenarios. I replayed conversations looking for evidence that the voice was telling the truth. And I wanted out, badly. The Messy Middle has two exits that aren’t really exits: you can run, or you can collapse back into whatever came before. Both feel like relief in the moment. Neither leads anywhere worth going.

I was actually offered a job during this season. A role that mirrored exactly what I had just lost; same title, same scope, a clean escape from everything that was hard. And I knew- I knew - that taking it would stunt me. That there were things being worked out in the Messy Middle that I couldn’t take with me if I left before they were finished. So I said no.

That was one of the harder decisions I’ve made. And I didn’t make it because I had it figured out.

—

The shift didn’t come from a sermon or a breakthrough conversation or a verse that unlocked everything.

It came from Amy. And from two kids who needed their dad to hold himself together.

I looked at my family and made a decision. Not a dramatic one. A quiet one. What was happening at work was not going to follow me home. The voice could say what it wanted at the office, I wasn’t going to let it have my evenings, my weekends, my presence with the people who mattered most. And if I was going to stay in the Messy Middle and do the work it required, I was going to do it for them.

Something else shifted too. I realized I had a unique opportunity, while no one was paying close attention, while the spotlight had moved on, to grow. To develop skills I didn’t have. To become, quietly and without an audience, the leader I already believed I could be. The Messy Middle wasn’t the end of the story. It was the room where the story was actually being written.

Two years later I was repromoted. And I came back as a different person than the one who had been sent down.

—

If you’re in the Messy Middle right now, I want to tell you something that I needed to hear and nobody told me:

The discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that something is happening.

Don’t take the exit ramp. Don’t collapse back into what was familiar. Don’t let the voice convince you that the critics are right. Guard against resentment like your future depends on it because it does.

Joseph didn’t know how his story ended when he was sitting in that prison. He just kept becoming. That’s the work of the Messy Middle. Quiet, unseen, and more important than anything happening on the outside.

I learned that lesson in my late twenties. I carried it with me for nearly two decades.

And when the next Messy Middle came - and it did come, harder than the first one - I was grateful I hadn’t forgotten it.

Next week: The Transition

I was in a hotel room in New Mexico when my phone rang.

I had just checked in. Hadn’t even unpacked. I was there to speak to a group of senior leaders — which, at 29 years old, still felt like something I had to pinch myself about. Eighteen months earlier I had been given a promotion I’d spent years quietly hoping for, handed to me by a leader who saw something in me I wasn’t sure I fully saw in myself yet. I had arrived. Or at least that’s what it felt like.

The voice on the other end of the phone was brief. The board had fired my boss, the one who had given me the promotion. I needed to get on a plane and come home immediately.

I asked one question.

“Do I still have a job?”

No answer. Just get back to Amarillo.

I called Amy. Told her we were going to be okay. Said it with more confidence than I felt, because saying it out loud helped. Then I packed my bag, checked out of a hotel room I’d been in for twenty minutes, and headed to the airport.

I had about four hours of travel ahead of me. Four hours is a long time when you have nothing to do but think.

—

Here’s what I knew about myself at 29, somewhere over the Texas panhandle at 30,000 feet:

I had gotten arrogant. The promotion had done something to me I hadn’t fully noticed while it was happening. I felt important. Validated. I had always worried that my lack of pedigree no impressive degree, no famous mentor, no obvious credential would be the thing that kept me out of the room. And then suddenly I was in the room, and I had let that feel like more than it was. The title had become something I wore instead of something I carried.

I was also clear about something else, and I’ll be honest about it here: I wasn’t going to burn my reputation to protect someone else’s exit. Whatever pressure came to circle the wagons around the leader who had just been fired, I was going to guard my name. That decision was settled before the plane landed.

And then there was the thing underneath all of it, the thing that took the most honesty to name.

My passion for the work had never actually been about the corner office or the paycheck or the title. It had always been about the people I was there to serve. Somewhere in the climb, I had confused the two. The platform had started to feel like the point. And God, in His particular way of getting your attention, had just removed the platform to show me what was actually underneath it.

What was underneath it was still good. It was still real. But it needed to be rebuilt without the arrogance sitting on top of it.

—

When I got back to Amarillo, the conversation was short. I was staying on the senior team, but I was being demoted. Thirty percent pay cut. No direct oversight responsibilities. They could see the instinct, but I wasn’t ready to carry the authority. Not yet.

My answer was yes. Without hesitation.

Not because it didn’t sting. It did. But somewhere over New Mexico I had already decided that whatever came next, my answer was going to be yes. Because the alternative — resentment, victimhood, bitterness about what I deserved, was a trap I’d watched other people walk into and never quite walk back out of. I had seen talented leaders spend years proving the organization wrong instead of proving themselves right. I wasn’t going to do that.

The thing about letting go is that nobody can do it for you. And nobody can rush it. You have to get honest about what you were actually holding onto — not just the thing itself, but what the thing was doing for you. The validation. The sense of arrival. The proof that you belonged. Until you name what’s really in your grip, you can’t open your hand.

Solomon said there is a time for everything. A time to build and a time to tear down. A time to hold on and a time to let go. I’ve come to believe that the transitions we handle well are almost always the ones where we’re honest enough to recognize which time it is and humble enough to cooperate with it instead of fight it.

That season, the one that started on a plane back from New Mexico with no title, a pay cut waiting for me, and a clearer sense of who I actually was, turned out to be one of the most important seasons of my life. Not because it was comfortable. Because it wasn’t.

You don’t grow in the seasons that confirm what you already believe about yourself. You grow in the ones that correct it.

If you’re in a letting go season right now a demotion, a title change, a role that’s being redefined around you the question worth sitting with isn’t how do I get back what I lost. It’s what was I actually holding onto, and do I still need it?

Accept it. Pivot. Come back.

But only after you’ve opened your hand.

Two years later, I was re-promoted. The rebuilding season did exactly what rebuilding seasons are supposed to do, it grew what needed growing and stripped away what needed to go. I came back steadier, more grounded, and clearer about why I was doing the work than I had ever been at the top the first time around.

I led from that place for the next sixteen years.

And then the next curveball came. But that’s a story for later in this series.

Next week: The Transition Series, Post 3 — The Messy Middle.

The nurse said it so casually I almost missed it.

Amy was in the wheelchair, our three-day-old daughter bundled in her arms. I had pulled the truck around to the hospital curb and was trying to look like I knew what I was doing, strapping the car seat in, checking it twice, checking it again. When I helped Amy into the front seat and shut the door, the nurse gave the wheelchair a little spin back toward the entrance, glanced over her shoulder, and said it:

“Have fun.”

And that was it. She was gone.

I stood there for a second next to the truck. Amy and I were eighteen months into our marriage. Fifteen months earlier we had left Dallas, relocated to Amarillo, started new jobs, and bought a house all in the same stretch. Then we found out Amy was pregnant. Not the plan. Not unwelcome, but not the plan. And now here we were, three days after everything changed again, being sent home from a hospital by a nurse who apparently found this all very manageable.

I got in the driver’s seat and sat there for a moment. I wasn’t panicking. It was something harder to name a strange mix of uncertainty and excitement that sat in my chest like a question I didn’t know how to answer yet. Everything I had gotten comfortable being had just quietly been replaced with something new. And the person responsible for making that work was the same person gripping the steering wheel.

That’s the curveball moment. Right there. Not the pregnancy announcement, not the labor, not even the first time I held her in that hospital room. The curveball was the nurse walking away. The moment the world handed me something brand new and kept moving like it was completely normal.

—

I’ve been thinking about curveball moments for a long time.

Not the dramatic ones, necessarily, though those exist too. I mean any event or experience that interrupts the everyday flow of life. The moment when what was normal stops being normal and something new is required of you, whether you asked for it or not.

Sometimes a curveball is a gift. A promotion, a new city, a child you didn’t plan on but can’t imagine living without. Sometimes it’s a gut punch a diagnosis, a layoff, a relationship that ends before you were ready. Sometimes it’s both at the same time, which is its own kind of disorienting.

What they all have in common is this: they interrupt the life you had gotten comfortable living. And comfortable is the key word. Because you don’t usually notice how settled into a season you’ve become until something shows up and makes that season unavailable.

There’s a passage in Ecclesiastes 3 that speaks to this. Solomon writes that there is a time for everything a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to tear down and a time to build. He goes on like that for fourteen verses, pairing opposites, covering the whole range of human experience.

The point isn’t that life is random. The point is that life is seasonal. Transitions aren’t interruptions to the story. They are the story. The move from one season to the next, that’s not the thing that happens between chapters. That’s the chapter.

Most leaders I know, myself included, treat transitions like problems to solve as quickly as possible. Get through the uncertainty. Get stable again. Get back to normal. But Solomon is describing something different. He’s describing a God who built transitions into the architecture of life on purpose. Which means the question isn’t how to avoid them. The question is what you do when you’re inside one.

—

I’ve had several curveball moments in my life. Some were good, the hospital curb was one of them, even if it didn’t feel clean in the moment. Some were harder. One of them, a few years ago, was the kind that rearranges everything your calendar, your identity, your understanding of what you thought was solid.

I’m not ready to tell that story yet. But I’m getting there.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to walk through what I’ve learned about transition, not as someone who has it figured out, but as someone who has been through enough of them to know the terrain. We’ll talk about what it costs to let go of a season that’s ending. About the strange fog of the middle, the place where the old is gone and the new hasn’t arrived yet. About what it actually looks like to step into something new, as opposed to just surviving until the uncertainty stops.

And at the end of this series, I’ll tell you what happened.

If you’re in a curveball moment right now the good kind, the hard kind, or the confusing kind where you can’t yet tell the difference, this series is for you. Not because I have a clean formula. But because I’ve sat in that truck in the hospital parking lot, engine running, with no idea what came next.

And I know what it feels like to decide to drive anyway.

Next week: The Transition Series, Post 2 — Letting Go.

I knew the theology. I could have given you a sermon on servant leadership. I had read the right books, used the right language, believed, genuinely believed, that leadership existed to serve.

And then I got the title. And something shifted.

I became short with people. I wanted the final say. I wanted to make every key decision. Nobody in that room knew how insecure I was, and I wasn’t going to let them find out. I confused authority with leadership, and position with trust.

Someone asked me around that time: would you rather be feared or loved?

I would have said feared.

Not out loud. I was a pastor. But if you had watched how I led that year, the answer would have been obvious.

A year and a half later, I was demoted. Still on the executive team, but with less authority. It was public. And honestly, it was deserved.

That season was one of the most important of my life.

Because sitting on the other side of that, I started to understand something I hadn’t been taught and hadn’t learned on my own: I had the position. I had the competency. What I didn’t have was relational authority, and without it, the other two don’t hold.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about leadership authority. There are three kinds:

Positional. It comes with the title. It’s real, but it’s the weakest form. People comply because they have to. The moment the title changes, so does their response to you.

Competency. It comes from actually being good at what you do. Stronger than positional, and harder to fake. People follow because they trust your judgment.

Relational. It comes from years of showing up for people, being present in the hard moments, telling the truth when it costs you, choosing the team over your own image. It’s the slowest to build and the deepest to lose. When you have it, people will run through walls for you. When you don’t, no title or résumé makes up the difference.

Most leadership development stops at two. And most leaders, especially early, mistake position for permission and competency for trust.

I spent my thirties rebuilding. Not my career, but myself. Working to become the kind of leader I said I already was.

When I came back at 32, people wanted me back. Not because the title returned. Because of how I handled the fall. That was the first real deposit into relational authority I’d ever made.

Jesus had twelve men who would have died for him, and eventually did, not because of his position, not even only because of his competency, but because of the quality of his presence with them. He washed their feet. He showed up when it cost him. He led from the inside out.

That’s the model I was supposedly already following. It took a very public demotion to show me how far I actually was from it.

The question I’d ask any leader reading this: which kind of authority are you building right now? And how would the people closest to you answer that question?

He’d just taken the reins from his father. His dad was the kind of man people built careers around — big personality, deep loyalty, twenty-plus years of trust in the room. Now the son was supposed to lead those same people.

He knew what he wanted to say. I could see it. He’d move toward it, then pull back. Move toward it again. Pull back.

Most advisors fill that silence. Offer a framework. Ask a clarifying question. Keep things moving.

I stopped him instead.

“Just say it. Don’t edit it first.”

He did. And what came out wasn’t a strategy. It was a conviction he’d been carrying — about the kind of leader he wanted to be, which wasn’t the same as the leader everyone in that room had loved for two decades.

That was the real work. Not the org chart we built after. Not the accountability structure or the leadership model. Those came later. They were downstream of a man finally letting himself say the thing he actually believed.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot.

The most dangerous place in any advisory relationship isn’t when a leader doesn’t know what to do. It’s when they already know — and they’re just waiting to find out if the room is safe enough to say it out loud.

Your job in that moment isn’t to be smart. It’s to be still.

Most leaders I’ve worked with aren’t stuck because they lack information. They’re stuck because they haven’t said the true thing yet. Not to their team. Sometimes not even to themselves. The question I’ve learned to sit with — longer than feels comfortable — is simple: what do you already know that you haven’t let yourself say?

I’d forgotten the heat. Not just “it’s hot”, but the kind that hits you the second you step outside and makes you question your life choices.

And on this particular July morning, I was sitting in a parking lot that felt just as unfamiliar.

I was 48… and starting over.

A few months earlier, my role of 25 years had come to an abrupt end. I had spent most of my adult life as a pastor - leading teams, building ministries, helping people solve problems.

I was used to walking into rooms with answers.
Used to being known.
Used to feeling steady.

And now I was about to walk into a construction office where I had none of that.

My younger brother, he’s only 16 months behind me, had built a strong business over the past couple decades. I’d had a front-row seat watching him do it and had always been incredibly proud of him (and still am today).

And when everything in my world shifted, he gave me a shot. Brought me in to help scale the business.

I’m still incredibly grateful for that.

But if I’m honest, sitting in that truck that morning… gratitude wasn’t the loudest emotion.

It was doubt.
It was loss.
It was this quiet question I couldn’t shake:

Did I just blow up my life?

I sat there for a couple minutes before getting out.

Not because I didn’t know where to go,
but because I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.

No one was waiting on me inside.

No big welcome. No speech.

Just a small office, a dusty desk, a computer… and a single sheet of paper.

Three bullet points:

Oversee systems and processes.
Help scale the business.
Pray for the company.

I remember just sitting there for a second, staring at that last one.

Pray for the company.

In a construction company.

I was standing there in loafers, no socks, a golf shirt, five-pocket pants looking like I’d just walked out of a church staff meeting.

And I was supposed to help lead in a place where I didn’t understand the language, the pace, or the work.

They were cautious. I was unsure.
Everybody was trying to figure each other out.

So I got quiet.

I asked questions. A lot of them.
Tried to understand how things actually worked before I touched anything.
Just paid attention.

And every now and then, I’d think back to that piece of paper on my desk.

Oversee systems and processes.
Help scale the business.
Pray for the company.

Two of those made sense to me.

One of them… I wasn’t sure what to do with.

But it stayed there. Every day.

A quiet reminder that maybe I wasn’t just here to bring something…
maybe I was here to become something.

That morning in the parking lot… it wasn’t really about a new job.

And even now, I don’t know that I could fully explain what it was.

I just know I walked into a place where nothing from my old life really carried over, and I’ve been figuring out ever since what actually does.

What’s mine.
What was just the role.
What stays… when everything else changes.

I didn’t have clear answers then.

Honestly, I still don’t have all of them now.

But I did have one thing that felt steady from the beginning.

So I started there.

I prayed.

My career was gaining momentum. My kids needed “Dad” time. My marriage required deeper attention. Friendships, leadership, health, finances every area was asking something different of me, and all of it felt important.

So I did what many of us do.

I tried to win everywhere.

I worked to become who each space needed me to be. At work, I showed up ready and able. At home, present and patient. With friends, engaged and encouraging. I wasn’t being dishonest but I was, in many ways, performing. Playing the roles. Wearing the masks.

And over time, it caught up with me.

Because behind all of it was something I didn’t want to admit: a quiet fear of ultimate failure. The fear that if I didn’t hold it all together, something, maybe everything would fall apart. So I pushed on. Managed better. Tried harder.

But instead of becoming more effective, I became exhausted.

That’s when a simple idea from Scripture began to reshape how I saw everything.

In Matthew 11:29–30, Jesus offers an invitation: “Take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy and my burden is light… and you will find rest for your souls.”

For a long time, I misunderstood that.

I thought it meant relief from responsibility. But what I began to see is that it’s actually about how we carry responsibility.

A yoke, in its simplest form, is a tool that connects two together so they can move as one. It distributes weight. It aligns direction. It allows work to be shared.

The shift for me was this:

It’s not a different yoke for every role I play. It’s one yoke for all of life.

That realization changed everything.

Instead of trying to become a different version of myself in every environment, I began to anchor myself to something consistent. To Someone greater than me, fully capable of navigating complexity, pressure, and uncertainty.

When you are yoked with strength, you don’t have to manufacture it.

When you are yoked with clarity, you don’t have to pretend you have all the answers.

When you are yoked with peace, you don’t have to live in quiet anxiety about what might happen next.

Life doesn’t get easier, but it becomes more doable.

This is what I mean by the integrated life.

It’s not about balancing competing priorities perfectly. It’s not about mastering time management or squeezing more efficiency out of your day.

It’s about becoming one person.

You are not meant to move through life simply playing parts.

You are not meant to wear yourself out trying to be everything to everyone.

And you don’t have to live on the edge of spinning out.

The integrated life is about settling into a single, unifying alignment, one “yoke”, that holds steady no matter where you are or what’s required of you.

From that place, something shifts.

You stop striving to prove yourself in every role and start showing up fully present in each one.

You stop managing impressions and start living with integrity.

You stop surviving the demands of life, and begin to actually thrive within them.

Not because life gets easier, but because you are no longer carrying it alone.

That’s the invitation.

And for me, it’s changed everything.

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