The Struggle is What Makes the Adventure

Last night, our family time at the campsite was cut short when a nasty thunderstorm blew in. It was the whole package: thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. We quickly retreated to the tent where we rode out the storm and eventually fell asleep. While we were trying to settle the boys in, they were a bit panicked. I think there’s some lingering impact from an absolutely brutal storm we endured in the tent earlier this summer…..which included Pax getting flooded out in the middle of the night. In an attempt to calm them down, I encouraged them that these are the moments that make the adventure. It helped…..a little.

Think about your favorite movie. The struggle is what makes it. If Darth Vader wasn’t around, Luke Skywalker’s journey would have been a borefest. If the Hunger Games never occurred, Katniss would just be another girl. If Michael Jordan didn’t have the Detroit Pistons, his legend may not have been as iconic. The triumph over struggle is what makes it good.

I think about this a lot when it comes to work and money. It’s fun when we experience wins, achieve our goals, and continue to experience up-and-to-the-right progress. But the struggle? The struggle is what makes those moments so much sweeter. I remember back to January 2020, seven months after leaving my career to start my coaching business. That was the month when our monthly income exceeded our modest expenses. Until then, we were riding the struggle bus and supplementing our income from savings. It was a scary time, but the struggle made the win feel all that much more satiating. I can think of so many other struggles we’ve faced in the last 15 years. Struggles that oftentimes felt like they would break us. Like the struggle of fertility. Finding out I’ll never become a biological father, then the nearly three-year wait in the adoption process, then the failed adoption when we were ready to go meet our child. Gut-wrenching struggles. So when we met Finn and Pax four months later, it was the sweetest of the sweetest wins. It was the best day of our lives. All these years later, it was the struggle that defined us, not the win. When I look at my kids, I remember everything that went into becoming a parent and finally meeting them. I will never take that for granted.

So yeah, we’re huddled up in a tent with a storm whipping right through us. Not ideal, for sure. But the struggle is what makes the adventure.

How Much Lemonade Can You Make?

I’m a big believer that good can always come from bad situations. Turning lemons into lemonade, right? But what happens when there are just too many lemons? I suppose we should keep making lemonade, but how much lemonade can you make?

As I read the ridiculous paragraph I just wrote, I can’t help but think about how overwhelming some seasons are. Sometimes I expect it. Schedules get tight. Travel starts landing on the calendar. Deadlines overlap. You can see it coming from a mile away…..and it lives up to the hype. Other times, they sneak up on you. A few things take longer than you expect. Distractions throw you off your game. You’re exhausted after a busy streak, causing you to lack focus and energy. You’re busy cleaning up messes from other less-than-ideal circumstances. Your kid breaks his arm……

There are times in life when disappointing others seems like my vocation. I whiff on texts, fail to deliver on commitments, and generally feel like a bad friend. This feels like one of those seasons of life. Just yesterday, multiple people told me I let them down. They are right….I did let them down. All I could do was apologize, ask for forgiveness, and commit to doing better.

At the Omaha YP Summit that I spoke at a few weeks ago, I attended a few other talks. One of them was about preventing burnout. It was in the same ballroom I would later be speaking in, so it was a good opportunity to see how the room felt. To be honest, though, I just needed to hear a talk about burnout. In the talk, one thing in particular caught my ear. It was a concept called a Kanban board. Here’s how I understood it (which may or may not be a proper or full definition of its full powers). You make a board with three sections (left to right): To-do, in-progress, and done. Then, you unload every single thing in your brain that needs to get done. Personal, work, ministry…..everything. Drop all these items in the to-do section of the board. Then, each day, decide which items get moved over to the in-progress section, and execute only those items. Attack those items aggressively, and give no thought/stress/worry/energy to the items in the to-do section. Those items will have to wait for another day. Execute, then repeat.

Just the mere act of unloading everything from my brain to the board was a relief. However, I’m still thinking of items I missed, and the execution has been iffy. I’m still working on finding my rhythm, but it’s already starting to feel better. I’ll probably write a follow-up post about how the process is going, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and recommendations for keeping the train on the tracks.

I’m tired of making lemonade, and I’m sure some of you are, too. Just know you aren’t alone. Let’s walk this messy road together. Have an awesome day!

The Silent Dream Killer

Cole and I recently recorded the debt section of our upcoming video course, Meaning Over Money. This was some pretty fire content and I can’t wait for the course members to experience it when we launch next month. In it, I refer to debt as the silent dream killer. Debt doesn't quietly sneak into our house when we’re sleeping at night. Rather, we invite it in, roll out the red carpet, welcome it with open arms, and tell it to stay as long as it wants.

Debt is the financial version of instant gratification. I want that car NOW…..so of course I’ll agree to pay $400/month for the next five years. I want that vacation NOW……so I’ll just put it on the credit card and worry about it later. I want that bigger house NOW……sure my mortgage payment will go up, but I can afford it. I want to upgrade my furniture and appliances NOW…….and the store has a really sweet 0% interest offer. Every act of financial instant gratification has one inevitable outcome: tomorrow’s me will have to pay the price for something yesterday’s me enjoyed. This sounds fine until we realize tomorrow will someday be today, and today will turn into yesterday. There will come a time after we get back from that trip, after the new-car smell wears off, after our house fever subsides, when we’ll still have to pay for the decision we made in the past. Over time, decision by decision, it starts to erode our freedom. The tension and pressure slowly builds. Not all at once, but more like the analogy of boiling a frog. Little by little, our dreams start to die. But we don’t make these decisions knowing it’s going to crush our dreams and our freedom. That’s not how it works…….which is why I call it the silent dream killer. It’s sneaky.

As I was writing the content for our Meaning Over Money course, I was reminded of a story I hadn’t thought about in a while. In early 2019, on the heels of making my decision to step away from my career and into my new pursuit, a few people started to take notice. A woman in my life, who was watching some of the decisions I was making and was aware of my expertise in coaching, approached me and asked if we could talk. She confided in me that her husband makes $300,000/year at his job, and she makes another $100,000. They were in their early 40s and have had a stellar income for many, many years. I wasn’t sure where this conversation was headed, but then it turned on a dime and her face started to change. She shared how her dream in life was to stay at home with her kids, but her husband’s $300,000 income alone wasn’t enough to support their family. Think about that! They couldn’t afford to drop from being in the top 1% of income earners in America……all the way down to the top 2% of income earners. They couldn’t pay the bills only making $300,000!!! That’s the negative power of debt, in action! She didn’t hate her job, but she so desperately wanted to live out her purpose of being a stay-at-home mom. She started sobbing. She felt trapped, hopeless, and helpless. On the surface, they were living the dream. Beautiful home, luxury cars, Instagram-worth vacations……they had it all! But every day she woke up sad, unfulfilled, and increasingly resentful. She would have given up all of the stuff and status in a heartbeat, but her husband and the culture around them saw it different.

When I think about her story, I get sad. I remember the look on her face, the desperation in her eyes. I started thinking more about her in the days following our recent recording session. So I reached out to her. I wanted to know how she’s doing. I went into that conversation with a lot of hope and optimism, but it was quickly squashed. One year has gone by since she vented to me about her situation. Since then, it’s only gotten worse. She’s grown to hate her job……and her anger and resentment towards her husband has magnified. On most days, she cries on the drive between daycare drop-off and the office. She says it feels like her dream is slipping away one day at a time. Her and her husband are in counseling, but she said it feels hopeless and divorce appears to be a possible (if not likely) outcome. In her words, her husband cares more about what others think of him (and the title below his name on his business card) than he does about her. He justifies it by saying he’s only trying to provide his family the best life possible, but all the while his marriage is dying and his wife’s spirit is draining.

This story feels heavy to me. It impacts me deeply. I wish I could say it’s an extreme story, or a rare story…..but unfortunately it’s not. I hear different versions of this story every single day. The details are different, the incomes are different, the dreams are different, and the decisions looks different. But one thing is consistent from story, to story, to story: the debt….the silent dream killer.

Here’s the important takeaway. If this particular family wants something better, something different, something awesome, they can have it! The decision is 100% theirs. And they can make that decision today! All they need to do is make one very difficult, very counter-cultural, very impact decision. It’s not easy, but it is simple. You and I also get to make that very same decision! Every one of us has a choice to make, and it’s 100% on us to make that choice. We aren’t victims of our income, or our education, or our circumstances, or the way we were raised, or anything else. Those things may make our journey a little harder or a little easier, but they cannot stop us from walking towards the light.

Some of us need to downsize our house (or apartment). Some of us need to downgrade our car. Some of us need to sell some toys. Some of us need to stop caring what others think. Some of us need to take a few less vacations. Some of us need to stop confusing our identity with our job title. Some of us need to take a step back and realize “providing for my family” does not mean providing them with all the stuff we never had growing up.

So, who’s with me? Who’s ready to make the hard choice? Who’s ready to kick the silent dream killer out of the house and replace it with a life full of meaning and impact?

Seasons of Need

Photo by Kat J on Unsplash

“Someday, I want to be the one on the other side of the table. I want to be the one giving.” This – and a few different variations of it – have come out of the mouths of several people I’ve worked with over the past three months. These are people who are experiencing some tough life situations. Job losses, medical emergencies, divorces, mental illness, legal situations, you name it. Life can be brutal! When it hits us, it feels like a wild haymaker punch we didn’t even see coming. It can leave us feeling breathless, disoriented, and oftentimes helpless.

But here’s the thing: EVERYONE goes through it. Not at the same time, not in the same way, and not in the same areas of life. But we ALL go through seasons where life knocks the wind right out of us. We usually forget that, because when we’re going through our own junk, many of the people around us have it pretty good (or so it appears). As a result, it can leave us feeling even more down and even more lonely. Truth is, each one of us just went through something heavy, or are currently going through something heavy, or will soon be going through something heavy. None of us can escape it. There’s no amount of money, or title, or status, or race, or gender, or anything else that can protect us from it. In some ways, that’s a really depressing thought. On the other hand, it should tell us that we’re never alone!

When people I’m working with blurt out some variation of “someday, I want to be the one on the other side of the table”, I often respond with something like “heck yeah you will!”, or “like you were last year when you did (cool amazing thing) for (that one person)?” I sometimes laugh on the inside when people make these declarations about wanting to be the person on the other side of the table. I don’t laugh because it’s funny…..far from it. I laugh because I can immediately think about situations in the past when these very people have made profound differences in other people’s lives. They just forget about it in this moment of need. The current feeling of helplessness blinds them to the fact they’ve always been the person on the other side of the table…….until this very moment when they weren’t.

It makes me think about a situation in our own life. Many years ago, Sarah and I paid off $236,000 of debt. That’s a topic for another conversation, but it’s something cool we did. I totally recommend it. Not stupidly finding yourself in $236,000 of debt, but rather getting out of whatever debt you are in. IT. CHANGES. EVERYTHING! When we’re free from the debt and that burden isn’t weighing us down, we can actually look up and see past our own junk. When our debt was finally paid off in mid-2012, Sarah was working four 10-hour days per week at a daycare. She got Fridays off, which made for some pretty cool 3-day weekends. About five months after becoming debt free, we saw there was someone in our life that was really struggling to make childcare work financially and logistically. Sarah decided to do something pretty amazing: she volunteered to provide free childcare for this family every Friday. For 99 Fridays (nearly 2 years), Sarah volunteered her day off to provide free childcare to a family who needed it. I’m still proud of Sarah for that gesture!

Fast forward five years. Sarah and I are now parenting two infants. Sarah was staying home with the kids (our big “why” for getting out of debt, by the way), I was traveling a fair amount as my career was heating up, I was a youth group leader, I was on a handful of boards (including one internationally), and it felt like the walls of life were closing in. We were flat-out struggling to figure it all out. Sarah comes home one day and said to me “there’s a lady at church who wants to watch our kids for free every Friday so I can get some rest and get some things done.” Wow, talk about life coming full circle! We were in a season of need, and someone unknowingly met that need in the exact same way we meet another family’s need five years earlier. My first question to Sarah was “do we even know this family?”, to which Sarah responded “no, but she seems really nice.” Perhaps it’s a testament for how overwhelmed we were at the time, but we humbly and gratefully (and quickly) said “yes.” It was exactly what Sarah (and our marriage) needed. We are so grateful for the love and generosity this family showed to what was then considered strangers. We are strangers no more. Today, I work alongside the mom, I’ve led mission trips with the dad, and I have a very special bond with their teenage daughter who loved on my kids way back when they were just little nuggets. They are some of the most loving and most generous people we know, and I’m so grateful to have them in our family’s life!

We all go through seasons of need and seasons where we can serve those in need. I pray you have the heart, humility, and self-awareness to embrace both sides of that coin. If you are in a positive season of life, be on the lookout for people who you can lovingly serve. Conversely, if you’re in a tough season of life, be willing to let others walk alongside you to help you onto your feet. After all, the sooner you get back on your feet, the sooner you’ll be able to play the role of the loving servant again.

If you have any stories where you’ve been on either side of need, I’d love to hear! Please share in the comments. Also, if you found this post valuable, would you mind sharing it with someone who may also find it valuable? I think there are people who need to hear this message today!

“We all go through seasons of need and seasons where we can serve those in need. I pray you have the heart, humility, and self-awareness to embrace both sides of that coin. ”