Good morning and hello friends,
This article is one installment of a multipart series. Be sure to check out my site for previous segments of this series. It will make more sense if you read them in order.
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The first installment contained Chapters 1-3. This one contains Chapters 13 and 14.
Chapter 15: Fear of the Lord
(Source: “222 Fear of the Lord”, transcribed from a trail recording with Wiggles)
It was a hot, steamy morning. Wiggles and I were on the trails, not the beach. She was panting heavily at my side, her breathing a metronome against the crunch of our footsteps on the packed dirt. We hit a few hills and ridges, and somewhere between the climb and the sweat, I turned on my voice recorder and started talking. What follows is not a polished sermon. It is the raw output of a man walking uphill, literally and spiritually, trying to articulate what God has been pressing into him over a period of weeks.
Several passages and phrases had been recurring in my awareness. Not a single bolt of lightning, but a slow, persistent drumbeat. They surfaced in my Bible study, in my social media feed, in conversations, in the quiet of early morning prayer. They were circling me, and I felt compelled to speak them aloud before they slipped back beneath the surface.
The Fool on the Mountain
The first of these was a line from Proverbs: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
It makes perfect sense to me now. But the understanding came with a companion realization, one that stung: I have been a fool for a long time.
Because of pride, because of certain accolades I had collected over the years, I had positioned myself in my own mind as a wise man on the mountain. I had answers. I had experience. I had the quiet confidence of a man who had figured out enough of the game to feel competent.
But in reality, I had not even begun to understand the things I did not know. I had not touched the tip of the iceberg, let alone grasped the significance of the mass that lay hidden beneath the waterline. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Beginning. I had not even started.
The God-Fearing Man
The second thing that surfaced was a phrase I used to despise.
Before I was a believer, I would mentally scoff at men who described themselves as “a God-fearing man.” I never said it out loud, but in my mind, the contempt was total. In certain social circles, specifically in the dating world, you would find women writing in their profiles that they were looking for “a God-fearing man.” And in my hubris, I would think: How pathetic. This woman is looking for a man who bows down to another man. That would never be me.
For me to get to that point, it would have to be quite a mighty man. And not only would he have to be mighty, but he would have had to prove it to me through combat. He would have had to take me down to my knees and break me before I would confess such a thing.
Well. How far we have come since those days.
Because here I am. A God-fearing man.
And I understand now what the term means. I understand how people got to the point where they professed this attribute of themselves in public. A grown man. A capable man. A man who built businesses, served on submarines, and solved problems for a living. Yet here he is, confessing and admitting that he is a God-fearing man.
And to say that getting to this point did not disprove my earlier understanding would be a lie. The mighty man did take me down to my knees. He did break me. That was precisely how it happened. Every arrogant condition I had set for my own surrender was met, not by an earthly warrior, but by the living God.
The difference is this: I am not bitter about it. I am grateful. I am that man who has been broken, who has been brought to his knees, and who happily, not reluctantly, acknowledges that he fears God.
The Infinite List: Relearning How to Pray
The next recurring theme had to do with my prayer life. For the past six months, I had been praying daily, sometimes all day. And as part of that routine, there were certain requests I recited every morning. Help me with this. Provide me with that. Fix this situation. Grant me this outcome.
The realization I came to is this: if I truly understood God, if I truly understood Jesus, these are not the things I would be asking for. I was asking for earthly, material, dying things. Things that eventually become the very idols that replace Him. Things we pray for and fixate on until we get them, and then we move on to the next new thing.
The list is infinite. It never ends. You got the new car, you want the faster car. You got the first home, you want the nicer home. It is a hamster wheel dressed up as progress.
I had a lot of these things in my prayer points. Asking God, essentially, to give me the things I would use to idolize and betray Him. It is completely antithetical to the whole relationship. So I changed them. I came to an understanding of how to properly define a prayer point that is specific to me, that is godly and righteous. I modified my prayers. I incorporated those new understandings.
Nowadays, I am not asking God for the black Lamborghini with the gold trim, or the house with the big yard for the dogs. That is not the sort of thing I am asking for any longer.
God Multiplies
The next thing that kept surfacing was the Parable of the Talents in Matthew chapter 25. Something I came across while running through my feed struck me. A woman, a life coach and a sister in the faith, made this point about the passage: the things that God creates multiply. They do not merely add. He is a God of multiplicity.
That term immediately reminded me of a line I had heard on one of my morning prayer calls: “We can count how many seeds are in an apple, but only God can count how many apples are in a seed.”
When we plant an apple seed, it does not produce just one apple. It produces a tree that bears multiple apples, each containing multiple seeds, each capable of producing more trees. God’s economy is not addition. It is multiplication.
I have been meditating on that, holding the Parable of the Talents alongside the apple seed, trying to find the application. I feel like there is an understanding, a revelation, that I have not yet unlocked. So I am praying and meditating on it, hoping the Holy Spirit will make clear what He is trying to tell me about it and why it keeps coming up.
The Subtle Path of Wickedness
Proverbs chapter 4 was the next recurring visitor. The passage speaks to giving wide berth to temptation, avoiding the path of the wicked.
What struck me is that this “path of the wicked” does not always look like a dark alley. Sometimes it looks like a pleasant daydream. Something as subtle as: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a large farm that produces my food, with nature trails for my walks, and wide open space for my dogs to run wild?
That is not inherently evil. But at some point, that desire begins to fester and swell. It becomes the thing we wake up to. It crowds out the voice of God and replaces it with the voice of our own appetite.
So the “path of the wicked” is not always a literal footstep or direction. It is the things we think about. The things our heart desires. The things we give our time and mental energy to. So we must be mindful. Protect our eyes and our ears. Look straight forward. Stay on the path of righteousness.
The Empty Cup and the Morning War
The last thing, and perhaps the most practical, was this: be constantly mindful and considerate of what you are filling your heart with.
I wake up every morning and my cup is empty. My heart is a vessel, freshly drained by sleep. And from the moment my eyes open, things begin to fill it. My thoughts, my feelings, the first subjects that occupy my headspace. These are the things that fill the heart. And what fills the heart will basically dictate whether I have a fruitful day or a day of wickedness. It is that simple.
This particular morning, I woke up, and there was a negative subject about a family member already cycling through my mind. Envy. Frustration. Aggravation. These were the first tenants trying to move into the empty house. I had been reveling in these thought exercises, and the day had barely started.
But I hopped out of bed for a prayer call. And that call snapped me out of it. It allowed me to fill my heart with good, fruit-bearing seeds instead of the bitter ones that were already germinating.
And here is the breakthrough: I recognized the pattern. I have noticed the symptoms before, the “not so spiritual” days, the days that feel off from the jump. But I had never traced them back to the cause, which is what I allow into my heart in those first waking moments, before my feet even touch the ground.
The mornings are everything. Your eyes open. First thing: Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God. Thank you for the blessings. I need to be militant about that process. As soon as my eyes open: gratitude, prayer, before I set foot to ground.
This is the fear of the Lord in its most practical form. It is not cowering before a tyrant. It is the sober, reverent awareness that every moment is a choice between filling my cup with His kingdom or with the world’s leftovers. The fear of the Lord is waking up and knowing that what I put in my heart in the next sixty seconds will shape the next sixteen hours. It is respecting Him enough to give Him the first word, the first thought, the first breath.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And the beginning of each day is where the fear of the Lord is tested.
A Moment in the Workshop
Tomorrow morning, before your feet touch the ground, pay attention. What is the first thought that enters your heart? Is it gratitude? Anxiety? The to-do list? A grievance? That first tenant in the empty house of your morning will shape the next sixteen hours. Can you practice, just for one morning, making the first word “Thank you”? Not as performance. As posture.
Chapter 16: The Latchkey and the Lock: How a Generation Built for Survival Must Learn to Kneel
My generation learned to pray with our hands, not our lips. My first altar was an empty house after school. My first congregation was the flickering glow of a television test pattern. My catechism was the sound of a key turning in a lock, the definitive click that meant I was on my own until the headlights swept the driveway. We were not taught to ask for help. We were taught to figure it out. To make a decision and live with the consequence. To see the problem three steps ahead because no one was coming to run the simulation for me.
This forged me. It made me resilient, self-reliant, perceptive. It gave me a steely competence that helped build the digital world while I refused to live my life upon its stage. I am one of the quiet architects, the ones who get it done without needing the credit. These traits are not incidental. They are the psychological bedrock of my generation, and for most of my life, they have served me well. They are my glory.
But I have come to see that my glory is also my cage. The very strengths that helped me navigate a world of broken promises and absent guides are the very walls that now hem me in when God calls. For the call of Christ is not a call to greater independence. It is a summons to radical dependence. It is not an invitation to fortify my emotional keep, but to lay down my drawbridge. It does not celebrate the cynical armor I forged in disappointment, but commands me to take it off, piece by painful piece.
I was the latchkey kid, master of my own domain from age eight. Now I must learn to be a child again. “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3 ESV). For me, this is not a sweet metaphor. It is a spiritual demolition. To become like a child is to relinquish control, to admit need, to trust that someone else holds the key and knows the schedule. It is to unlearn my deepest survival instinct.
I watched the systems fail. I saw the company man get the gold watch one year and the pink slip the next. I witnessed vows made before God shattered in divorce courts. My pattern recognition, that brilliant, defensive radar that scans for betrayal, is now trained on the Divine. I approach God with the same cautious, wait-and-see skepticism I applied to every employer, every institution, every promise-maker. I hope for the best, but I have contingency plans for the worst, even in my prayer life. I hold back a part of myself, a reserve fund of self, just in case this whole “faith” thing goes the way of every other guarantee.
This is my great barrier. I have mistaken God’s faithfulness for human fickleness. I have projected the failures of earthly fathers onto my heavenly Father. My prayer becomes, “Your will be done… but let me just keep my hand on the wheel, in case You get distracted.” I have built a faith of qualified surrender. I will follow, but only so far. I will trust, but only so much. I am the rich young ruler, not walking away sad, but negotiating. “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” (Matthew 19:20 ESV). I want the eternal life, but I am terrified to sell what I have and give to the poor. My poverty is not in goods, but in trust. I am rich in self-preservation.
My ironic detachment, that cool, amused stance that got me through Cold War drills and cultural chaos, becomes a spiritual dead end. I learned to laugh so I wouldn’t scream. But God does not want my irony. He wants my ache. He wants my raw, undefended yearning. The kingdom of heaven is not a subtle, clever joke. It is a wedding feast. It is a father sprinting down the road to embrace the prodigal. It is a pearl of such great price you sell everything for it. There is no room for a wry smile in the face of such abandon. My detachment, which protected my heart from a world that didn’t care, now insulates me from a God who cares too much.
My generation respects competence, not titles. So I chafe under the title of “Lord” if I do not yet see His competence in my particular circumstance. I want to see the blueprint before I hand over the keys to the build. I want to understand the business plan of the cross before I take up my own. I will follow a leader who has proven himself in the trenches. But God often leads me into the trench first, and reveals His competence only after I am in it, up to my neck. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8 ESV). This is maddening to a soul that prides itself on thinking three steps ahead.
And then there is the work. I am a relentless worker. I show up. I do the job. I derived my worth from being indispensable. This bleeds into my faith. I approach my relationship with God as a project to manage, a skill to master, a responsibility to discharge. I will serve on every committee, host every small group, teach every class. I will work for the King, but often to avoid sitting with the King. Activity becomes a substitute for intimacy. I know how to be useful. I do not know how to be still. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 ESV). The command is anathema to the latchkey soul. Stillness was vulnerability. Stillness was when the emptiness of the house became audible. I learned to fill the silence with noise, with tasks, with the hum of my own competence.
So what does God ask of me? The Gen Xer who comes to the foot of the cross? He asks for everything. And in asking for everything, He offers to redeem everything.
He asks for my independence. Not to destroy it, but to redirect it. My ability to “figure it out” is a gift. But He wants me to figure out His heart. To study His word with the same fierce self-reliance I applied to fixing a bike chain. To seek His face with the same dogged determination I used to hunt for information in a library stack. Turn that analytical, problem-solving mind toward the divine. “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13 ESV). He is not asking me to stop thinking. He is asking me to think on a different plane.
He asks for my defensive pessimism. He wants to transform my pattern recognition from a shield into a discernment. I am right to be wary of cheap promises and easy answers. The world is full of them. I bring that skepticism to the marketplace of spiritual ideas. I test the spirits. But then, I bring that weary, wise heart to the foot of the cross and let it be shocked by a promise that cannot break. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23 ESV). My cynicism is meant to be the refining fire that burns away the dross of false teaching, leaving only the pure gold of the gospel.
He asks for my ironic detachment. He will take my laughter, which has been a wall against pain, and turn it into the joy that is my strength (Nehemiah 8:10). He will meet me in my “whatever” and show me the “what if.” What if it were all true? What if love was not a transaction but a sacrifice? What if meaning was not something I constructed, but something I received? He will not strip me of my humor. He will deepen it, until it is no longer a defense against the world’s absurdity, but a celebration of a greater, more glorious Story that makes sense of it all.
He asks for my competence. My drive to be valuable, indispensable, good at what I do. He sanctifies this. “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23 ESV). My work ethic becomes worship when offered to Him. But He also asks me to lay down the idol of indispensability. I am not the savior of my family, my job, my church. There is only one Savior. My competence is a gift from Him, to be stewarded for Him, not a source of identity apart from Him. I must learn to rest, not as a sign of weakness, but as an act of faith that the world continues to turn on His axis, not mine.
He asks for my privacy. My instinct to guard my heart, to not broadcast my vulnerability, is not entirely wrong. “Guard your heart, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23 ESV). But He asks me to guard it for Him, not from Him. And He asks me to selectively, wisely, lower the drawbridge for the body of Christ. My deep, loyal friendships forged in necessity are a picture of the church. I transfer that loyalty. I let a few trusted brothers and sisters past the wall. I let them see the cracks. I let them help carry the load I was never meant to carry alone. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2 ESV).
The transformation is not an erasure. It is a redemption. God does not make me someone else. He makes me more fully who I was always meant to be. The latchkey kid, forever scanning the horizon for the returning parent, becomes the watchful servant, awaiting the Master’s return with hope, not anxiety. “Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks” (Luke 12:35-36 ESV). I am still the one with the key. But now I understand it was always His house.
I am still the one who shows up and does the work. But now the work has an eternal weight. I am still the one who sees the problem coming. But now I am learning to bring it to the One who holds the solution before the problem even exists.
My path is the path of unlearning. It is walking back into that empty house of my childhood and, this time, noticing I was never truly alone. It is feeling the fear, the self-reliance, the defiant loneliness, and then speaking the truth into that memory: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4 ESV). He was there in the silence. He was there in the figuring it out. He was the source of the resilience I thought was mine alone.
He is calling me now, not to abandon the strength He gave me to survive, but to surrender it back to Him so He can make it holy. So He can use my guarded heart to protect what is precious. Use my competent hands to build what is eternal. Use my weary, watchful eyes to see His coming kingdom.
The key is in my hand. I learned to use it to lock the world out. He asks me now to use it to unlock my heart, and let Him in.
A Moment in the Workshop
Which of the five things God asks for resonates most painfully with you right now? Your independence? Your defensive pessimism? Your ironic detachment? Your competence? Your privacy? Pick the one that makes you most uncomfortable. That discomfort is a signpost. It points to the wall He wants to help you lower. You do not have to demolish it today. Just acknowledge it is there. And ask Him for a key.
Bridge: From Detox to Drill
You have done hard work in this section.
You have named the kingdoms that cannot be mixed and felt the cost of that clarity. You have looked in the mirror and found the antichrist wearing your face. You have traced the wound in every cult, including the ones you have belonged to without knowing it. You have held up your idols in the light and seen them for what they are not evil things necessarily, but things that displaced the only One who deserves the throne. You have heard the voice of a God who asks not for your performance, but for your trust. And you have looked at your generation’s deep-wired survival instincts and heard the invitation, terrifying and tender: Learn to be a child again.
That is the detox. It is the stripping away of the counterfeit scaffolding so that what is real can finally stand on its own.
But dismantling is not the same as rebuilding. Tearing down the old altar is not the same as building a new one. And this is where many people get stranded. They have done the work of deconstruction. They have walked away from the systems that co-opted their faith. They have named their idols, sat in the desert, confessed the wounds. And then they find themselves standing in the cleared space, clean and empty and very, very quiet, wondering what comes next.
What comes next is the drill.
Not the dramatic. Not the next mountaintop. Not a new system to replace the old one. The drill is something humbler and harder and more enduring than any of those things. It is the daily practice. The rhythm. The small, repeated act of choosing the narrow path before the alarm clock has fully sounded, before the coffee is ready, before the world has had a chance to reclaim your attention.
The ancient teachers of the faith called these practices disciplines. That word has lost some of its force in our age. We think of a discipline as something imposed, punitive, restrictive. But in its older sense, a discipline is simply the pattern of a disciple. It is what a person who is being shaped by a master does day in and day out when the feelings are neither high nor low but simply absent. It is the work of showing up when showing up is all you have to offer.
There is a moment in every soldier’s career when the training stops and the deployment begins. The obstacle course is behind you. The classroom lectures are done. The drill sergeant has said what he has to say. Now it is just you, your pack, and the terrain ahead.
This is that moment for your faith.
You have been through the earthquake. You have walked through the crucible. You have done the detox. Now you need to build the rhythm that will carry you through what comes next. Not a rhythm you feel your way into on good days. A rhythm you practice on the bad ones, the ordinary ones, the Tuesday-at-3 p.m. ones when the fire is nowhere to be found and the only thing tethering you to the Vine is the habit of reaching for it.
Part IV is the toolbox. Each chapter is a specific, practical instrument. Not inspiration. Not theology. Tools. Things to pick up, to use, to fail with, to pick up again.
Let us build the rhythm.
PART IV: THE POWER OF THE PAUSE
(Tactics for the Trenches)
Focus: Practical, daily disciplines. How to stay connected to the Vine when the feelings are gone and the grind is relentless.
Part IV Introduction: The New Rhythm
There is a moment in every soldier’s career when the training stops and the deployment begins. The obstacle course is behind you. The classroom lectures are done. The drill sergeant has said what he has to say. Now it is just you, your pack, and the terrain ahead.
This is that moment for your faith.
Part I was the impact, the blast that woke you up. Part II was the recovery, learning to walk again in the rubble. Part III was the detox, pulling out the shrapnel of false systems and self-righteous pride.
Now what?
Now you need a rhythm. Not a feeling. Not a theology. You need habits. Tactics. The daily, repeatable, unglamorous disciplines that keep you connected to the Vine when the Vine feels like a dead stick in the ground and the grind of life is relentless.
I will tell you something no one told me in the early days: the feelings go away. The fire of October 3rd, the 3 a.m. classroom, the avalanche of knowing, they do not sustain themselves. They are the lightning that starts the fire, but lightning does not keep the hearth burning. Logs do. Daily, deliberately placed, often boring, sometimes damp logs. Placed one at a time. In the dark. When no one is watching.
But there is another lie that must be confronted before we lay the first log. It is the lie of the spiritual bunker.
I feel it in the prayers that ripple through my morning quiet, in the anxious questions whispered between believers, in the titles of the books we buy and the sermons we stream. We are waiting for the rapture. The event. The moment the sky splits and the divine rescue arrives. And in this waiting, a subtle lie has taken root. It whispers that our primary task is to remain untouched, unstained, unsinged by the world. To retreat into a spiritual bunker, to preserve our holiness like a museum piece under glass, and to wait out the storm in a cellar of our own making.
God does not make museum pieces. He forges weapons on the anvil of obedience. And the anvil is never in the cellar.
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock” (Matthew 7:24-25 ESV). Notice the sequence. He hears the words. Then he does them. The doing is the building. The obedience is the mixing of the mortar. And then the storms come. Not as a hypothetical, but as a certainty. The proving is part of the promise.
A faithful servant, entrusted with the master’s resources while he is away, does not bury them in the cellar out of fear. He puts them to work. He engages. He takes the risk of the marketplace. The master’s return is the moment of accounting for what was done with what was given, not for how successfully we hid from the world. “Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house” (Matthew 5:15 ESV).
The hidden Christian in the cellar is in contact with no one they can love, serve, or transform. They are a lamp deliberately smothered. This is not vigilance. It is disobedience disguised as piety.
The approaching night is not our cue to nap. It is our cue to labor with urgent diligence. “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9:4 ESV).
This section is the toolbox. Each chapter is a specific, practical instrument for building the new rhythm.
Chapter 17 confronts the first idol you will trade your old ones for: the clock. Productivity and busyness are the respectable sins of the achiever. This chapter names them and lays the altar bare.
Chapter 18 is a literal toolkit, eight scriptural promises to clutch when the disorientation becomes anxiety and the ground feels like it is giving way again.
Chapter 19 teaches you to stop. Not for a grand Sabbath, but for the daily, intentional pauses that prevent the soul from running itself dry.
Chapter 20 is about relearning how to pray. Moving from the cosmic wish-list to the daily walkie-talkie. From “God, give me a Lamborghini” to “God, give me today’s bread.”
Chapter 21 boils every decision, every confusion, every spiritual question down to a single, clarifying inquiry: “Am I obeying?”
Chapter 22 introduces the discipline of release, the counter-cultural, counter-intuitive practice of yielding in a world that praises the grind.
Chapter 23 models the daily, quiet, persevering pursuit of God on a morning when the fireworks have faded and the silence is all that remains.
Vigilance is not panic. It is attention. It looks like prayer with a plan. It sounds like practice before performance. It feels like showing up when no one claps.
Stay awake. Clear-minded. Steady. Throw your full weight into today’s assignment. Let Him find us at our post, lamps trimmed, hands working, hearts known.
Let us build the rhythm.
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