I will just say it.

You really think you are playing life smart. But I have to tell you the truth…

you

Are

Not.

There are some parts of you standing at the window. Guarding your life and just waiting on something to go wrong. You have done this so long that you call it “just being realistic”. But it’s really fear.

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I mean, let’s be honest… when the relationships in your life are finally good… guess what you do?!

Because there’s no way this can be too good to be true. The money finally shows up… so you are already calculating for the day it leaves. This season of your life is actually calm for once. And you still cannot feel any of it. Because like I said… you are standing at that window… guarding.

And you know what’s keeping you stuck in this pattern? You believe that if you see the loss coming… it will hurt less. That if you keep one eye on the exit, keep your guard up… then when the bad thing comes, you will be ready for it. It will not be able to blindside you. So you never fully walk into the good day. You spend the good day protecting yourself against a bad day that hasn’t even shown up yet. And if the bad thing never comes… you missed the good thing entirely. Because you were so busy guarding it that you never got to enjoy and embrace it.

I’m sure you are asking how do I know this?

Well, last summer I almost died. I was literally in a hospital bed in ICU with cerebral malaria, and there was a stretch of it where I did not know if I was going to even see my daughter grow up.

And you would think facing that would make me want to grip everything tighter. But laying in that hospital room, nearly losing all of it, I learned something that guarding could never teach me.

All that bracing… all those years of standing at the window keeping watch… had not added anything to my life. It had not stopped one thing from coming. It had not protected anything. The only thing it had ever did was rob me of the days I had.

Do you remember that widow in the Bible who was down to her last little bit of flour and oil? When the prophet found her she told him she was going make one last meal for her and her son and she was going eat it and die.

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Look at what the prophet tells her to do that makes no sense… he tells her to make him something to eat first. And he promised that if she does that… her flour and oil will not run out until the rain came.

I am not about to tell you that nothing bad will ever happen to you. That would be me lying to you and selling you a fantasy. But I will say this… the floor might drop from under you. You might lose something. You could lose some of what you are holding right now, and no amount of bracing will decide that.

I wish I could write you a letter that would write away all of your fears, anxiety, bitterness, loneliness, regrets, doubts and pain… but the bravest thing a human being can do… is not guarantee you will never ever lose. Nobody can do that. The bravest thing is to hold something you love… take that chance… and while you know you could lose it… you hold it with with open hands… on purpose… and love it all the way while you have it.

To say I know this could be taken away, and I am still going to be fully here for it anyway.

It’s time to stop watching the door and turn around and actually look at the people in your orbit and in your room and love them fully. Enjoy every moment without looking for the crack or for something to go wrong.

Stop standing at the door.

Stop standing at the window.

Be here for the good day while it is still today.

I will write you next Sunday.

Gold,

P.S. If you made it to the end of this letter… I just want to say I love you and I am super proud of the person you are becoming for real.

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Anger.

This week, it came out of nowhere. It walked in and took over everything. Now I have over the years felt hurt, sad, disappointed, upset… but angry… not in years.

I already know… most people will not tell you the truth about how angry they are. Most people hide it. They smile over it and post through it.

But this week I did something different.

I accepted it and allowed it. I let it sit in the room with me like a guest I did not invite… but was not going to pretend I could not see it or feel it.

You might be asking… what in the world happened? What made you angry?

Keep reading I will eventually get to that part. But I want to show you something I found underneath it that I believe belongs to you.

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Because as I sat with it this week, one question circled me. And the question unsettled me a little bit more than the anger did.

If I have not seen anger in years… where has it been?

I know my story. I know what I have lived through, walked away from, rebuilt, buried, and survived. And you cannot tell me a life like mine produced no anger for years at a time.

And me being an over-thinker, detective and conspiracy theorist… I had to get to the bottom of it. What I discovered was maybe anger had been showing up the whole time.

It just came in wearing something else.

What I’m about to hand you on this Sunday… is something deep.

God showed me, anger you refuse to feel changes clothes.

And me of all people should have known that. I have written to you for months about the costume I wore. I just never thought to check whether my anger had a wardrobe of its own too.

So let me describe some of the outfits anger likes to wear. See if you recognize anything hanging in your closet.

Outfit 1

Outfit 2

There is a sarcasm that calls itself humor. The little jab dressed up as a joke. “I’m just playing”. But watch where the jokes keep landing…

Outfit 3

Outfit 4

There is a numbness that calls itself peace. You have not blown up in years. You also have not felt much of anything in years. You call it peace. But what if It’s really anesthesia.

Outfit 5

outfit 6

There is the politeness with ice in it. The “I’m fine”. The “it’s all good”… said through a jaw that has been tight for ten years.

Outfit 7

Here me clearly, somewhere along the way, somebody taught you that anger was not allowed. It wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t classy. It makes people afraid of you. It doesn’t look good on a women and it makes men look evil.

Maybe you grew up in church like me and got handed the eleventh commandment… thou shalt not be angry. So you kept the anger and got rid of the evidence.

Maybe you watched anger tear up a house you lived in… and you swore you would never become that person. So you locked the whole room and called it self-control.

Or maybe you learned very young that your anger changed nothing. So you got busy just being good.

Or maybe somebody you love needed you to be the calm one. The steady one. So you took the job… and everytime you thought about resigning you became remorseful.

Hear me.

All you were doing is burying your anger alive… and calling it maturity.

And even buried anger is still anger.

There is a man in scripture I have written to you about before. I called him “The elder brother”. The faithful one. Never left home. Never broke a rule. Never raised his voice. Never missed a day in the field. Stay faithful to his father.

Until his father threw a party for the brother who did everything opposite.

And then it came up… out of the ground in one sentence.

“I have slaved for you”.

Anger!

Read that again… slowly. Years of fury… buried underneath years of faithfulness. He did not know it was there. Nobody knew it was there. He looked like the most peaceful man in the whole story… right up until somebody else got celebrated.

That is the thing about buried anger.

It always surfaces at somebody else’s party.

… nope don’t do that.

I can sense you trying to logic your way out of this feeling. But let me make it more plain.

It’s that feeling you got when you saw their IG post and that resentment and anger started coming up through your chest… heading towards your head. So you put their page on mute because in your mind you couldn’t unfollow them.

That feeling that came over you while standing as a bridesmaid in your girlfriend’s wedding. And you had to swallow it because there was no way you could break character in front of all these people.

That feeling when you did all the work… but only your boss got publicly recognized for it. They accepted it and never even acknowledged you.

So what do you do with it?

Let me hand you the verse the entire church skipped:

Look at that. Scripture opens with the permission. It assumes the anger. It commands the honesty… and it draws the line at what you do with it.

And then the very next line… do not let the sun go down on your wrath.

Do not bury it overnight. Deal with your anger while it is still light out… while it still looks like what it actually is.

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This week, for the first time in a long time, I let mine speak.

Someone who cut me off, reappeared in my life. And I wasn’t going to have a repeat and just go along with the motion and act like everything was good. I wasn’t going to bury this visit. This time I sat with it. I felt it. And I opened my mouth to express it… and I didn’t sin.

The anger had finally been heard. And anger that has been heard stops needing a costume.

So before the sun goes down on you tonight… maybe let yours speak too.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

P.S. Sometime this week, find a page nobody will ever see… and finish this sentence honestly. “If I am telling the truth, I am still angry about…” Do not fix it. Do not spiritualize it. Just finish the sentence… while the sun is still up.

P.P.S. If you want to go deeper… I said the rest of this out loud. The second entry in The King’s Notebook is called “The Two Letters Anger Carries…” It is waiting below, whenever you are ready to sit with it.

I said something like…

Then a reader wrote me back in an email. They did not argue with me. They just asked me a question. They took my thought one step further than I had taken it… and this was a question I could not ignore.

So today, I want to think out loud with you about the question she asked me.

Here is what she said in her email:

That last line… that last line made me think… and guess what?! She was right.

You can absolutely grow in the wrong direction.

So after a few emails back and forth… I sat with her question.

What is the measure?

And the longer I sat with it, the more I saw something hiding inside the word itself.

Because there are two kinds of measuring.

And I promise you, all of us reach for the wrong one.

Comparison is a beast… because you start holding your life up against someone else life.

Man… I remember doing that for years to myself.

And you know what’s stranger about that practice… it never ends. It never satisfy. Because at the end of each day of comparison… we still go to bed empty. Why? Because comparison is a real mental, emotional, psychological race with no finish line.

I believe one of the root problems within humanity is that we are always trying to measure ourselves against something or with something. This is the kind of measuring that destroy us internally. I think the reason we reach for this type of measure first is because humans naturally feel like they need something external to measure against. When the truth is… you really don’t.

But there is a second kind of measuring. And this is the one I believe the reader was actually trying to pull out of me.

This type of measure is very interesting to me because in order to inspect something, it really takes work. Inspection is what a real gardener does. This gardener does not stand at the fence ranking his field against his neighbor’s. Instead… he kneels down, he gets close and he puts his hands in his own soil. He examines his own fruit.

But check this out… Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree that had not produced in three years. Now the owner of the vineyard was done with this tree and wanted it to be cut down. He said:

“Why is it even taking up the ground.”

But thee gardener saw this situation differently.

He told the owner give it one more year. Let me dig around it. Let me put fertilizer on it. Let me tend to it.

Man, this got me so excited because I want you to notice what the gardener did not do. He did not compare the fig tree against the other trees.

This is what he did… his measure was to inspect. He got close. He gave it grace. He gave it time. And he fed it.

I do believe one can truly evaluate growth by doing this type of inspection. Grass grows, weeds grow, a garden grows. If the grass over grows and the weeds sprout all over the garden that does not change the overall purpose of what was planted. That’s when our job as tenders of the garden or keepers of the garden is to inspect. Not compare.

That’s when we prune. That’s when we cut. That’s when we uproot. That’s when we trim. That’s when we have to do the ugly, dirty work in our lives or in this case the garden. We just have to cultivate, have the hard conversations, make the difficult changes, water what needs to be watered, remove who needs to be removed etc.

The moment we see things growing that don’t align with what was intended to be cultivated is where we do the hard work. Not the time we measure against what’s growing.

So let me finally answer the question.

What is the measure?

The measure is not the garden next door. The measure is the seed.

What was planted in you... that is what everything growing in you gets held against. Not what is growing in someone else. Not how fast someone else is moving. Not how visible another person harvest is.

When the gardener kneels down and holds the fruit in his hand, he is not asking, is this better than the neighbor’s? He is asking one question only.

Is this what I planted?

That is inspection. Measuring what is growing... against what was intended.

Maybe you kneeled down in your own life this year and did not like what you found. Weeds everywhere. Things growing you never planted. Whole season overgrown.

Hear me... the weeds do not changed what was planted.

Overgrowth can cover a garden. But it will never replace what was planted. The purpose underneath the mess is still the purpose. That is why the gardener said give it one more year. He was not being sentimental. He knew what was in the ground.

So this week... I want you to get off the fence.

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Stop measuring your life against fields you were never assigned to. Unfollow the people who you keep comparing your life too.

Kneel down in your own soil. Pull up what you never planted. Water what you did plant. And give yourself the same three things the gardener gave the fig tree... grace, time, and another year.

I want you to carry this one question with you into your week:

She was right. Growth alone is not the measure.

The seed is.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

p.s. To the reader who sent me the question that became this letter... thank you. You did not just read the letter. You stepped into it. The garden is better because you are in it.

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It’s funny how loud your thoughts become when everything else becomes silent. And all I can think about is this topic that the whole nation is discussing right now:

Does that person even know where I am right now? How did they even become my best friend... what did either of us ever do to earn a title this heavy?

If I took my last breath tonight and died in this room... how long would it take for my best friend to find out? Would they cry? Would they say “I just talked to him yesterday”?

Would they miss me... or would they just move on with their life and tell everyone they were my best friend?

Would they keep sending texts to my phone and reels to my DM... even though they know I am gone?

What is a best friend? And how do you become one?

As you can see I have a lot of questions tonight and no real answers.

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I’m writing you about this subject this morning because I have a feeling you’ve had thoughts like these too… at an hour like this… when nobody sees you and there’s nowhere to hide from yourself.

This week there is a story about Nolan Wells that is everywhere, a young man who died and his friends lived… I am not here to write about what happened to him. I do not know and neither do you. I do know there is a family grieving tonight and I will not borrow from their pain to make a point. But everywhere this story travels… Every headline, every interview, and every argument inside the comment section… the same two words keep appearing.

Best friend.

The entire country seems to be asking one question.

“Were they really his best friends?”

And right now in this dark room, I am realizing something very uncomfortable. I don’t know if I can answer that question about my own life. If someone asked me today who my best friend is… would the person I name say the same thing? Or have I mistaken history for intimacy… loyalty… and all of our memories for covenant?

You know lying here in the dark, I keep replaying my own life. There was a season my name was in thousands of people’s mouths. People called me friend, brother, family… I have been claimed by more people than I can even count. Yet during the loneliest season of my life... I could count on one hand the people who actually knew what I was going through. I’ve learned something I wish someone had taught me years earlier.

Some people know your birthday. But very few know your true breaking point. Most people see your success. Only a couple of people know what keeps you awake at two in the morning. Some people know your public story. And only a few know the private battle you’re praying your way through right now. I told you in a previous letter that you can spend your entire life surrounded by people... and still never be deeply known by any of them.

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So what is a best friend?

The ceiling won’t give me a definition tonight. But it keeps giving me pictures and scenarios.

I keep seeing a boat leaving a shoreline.

And I keep thinking... maybe a best friend is simply the person who counts you before the boat leaves. The one who looks around and cannot settle themselves until they know where you are. A best friend might be the one who notices your absence… maybe they hear the change in your voice before you tell them you’re struggling. Maybe they recognize that something is wrong because they’ve learned your rhythm.

Now, I don’t mean to get cliché, but when I think about friendship in scripture I wander to Jonathan. Most people remember Jonathan because he helped David. But that’s not the remarkable part in the story. The remarkable part is what Jonathan actually gave him. The Bible says Jonathan loved David as his own soul. And it says Jonathan took off his robe... and gave it to David. Then his armor. Then his sword. Then his bow. Then his belt. We often picture that as a generous exchange of possessions. But I see something totally different here. Jonathan wasn’t giving David extra clothes. He was removing the visible symbols of who he was and gifting it to his friend.

The robe represented his identity. The armor represented his protection. The sword represented his strength. And the belt represented his readiness. Jonathan wasn’t just giving David what he owned. He was surrendering what he could have become. And not only surrendering… he was stripping himself of everything for his friend.

Hear me clearly, David wasn’t taking Jonathan’s future. Jonathan was placing it into David’s hands. And what’s even more crazy is that Jonathan never got to witness or enjoy David’s success. Because he died before David ever became king.

But let me go deeper. Saul, who is Jonathan father… knew David was going to become king. Jonathan knew David was going to become king. The father and son both had the same information.

But they each had completely different hearts.

Saul spent his life trying to kill David because he feared losing the throne. However, Jonathan spent his life protecting David because he loved David more than the throne.

One loved his position more than his friend. The other loved his friend more than his position.

Maybe that’s the difference between competition and covenant.

Now, I'm thinking about Jesus… when Jesus finally defines friendship, He doesn’t talk about chemistry. He doesn’t mention shared hobbies. He doesn’t say friendship is built on history. He says,

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Notice what Jesus used to define friendship. It wasn’t emotion. But rather sacrifice.

Maybe we’ve reduced friendship to proximity. When Heaven defines it by what you’re willing to lay down.

And somewhere between my ceiling... and these Scriptures... a sentence is finally formed.

We’ve turned “best friend” into something we write under birthday pictures. Into something we hashtag on social media when posting about someone. Into something we just say because we’ve known someone for a long time.

But friendship was never supposed to be a caption. It’s deeper than that.

It was always meant to be a covenant. A pact… like a real pact. Not this fake, phony, some-timing, seasonal, on and off stuff.

Real covenants always cost the person who keeps them. And I don’t think our generations get that.

Because they cost time.

Attention.

Presence.

Difficult conversations.

Interruptions.

Second phone calls.

Forgiveness.

Third phone calls.

Money.

Misunderstandings.

Driving across town because something doesn’t feel right.

Checking again because your spirit won’t let it go.

And I could keep going but I think you see my point.

Anything that costs nothing... eventually means nothing.

So… let me hand you a few questions.

Ask yourself:

1. Who really knows something is wrong with me… even without me having to say a word?

2. Who really has permission to interrupt my life because they love me too much to ignore what they see?

3. Who knows my life rhythms good enough to recognize when something is wrong with me?

4. Who would be the first to come looking for me before anybody else realized I was missing?

Okay… now totally forget whether you have that kind of friend. I want to ask you an even harder question…

Have you become that friend to someone?

Naw, please don’t try to close this letter right here… don’t run from what feels slightly uncomfortable. We all want to have that person there for us… but whose future are you currently helping to build even if you never benefit from it? Who have you protected recently without needing credit? Whose mother has your phone number and knows how to reach you? Whose absence would disturb your peace enough that you’d stop everything and go looking for them? Whose success are you secretly competing with instead of celebrating?

You see… Jonathan teaches us something we often miss about friendship.

Friendship isn’t measured by how often someone stands beside you. Or how many times you talk a day.

It’s measured by what they’re willing to lay down so you can become who God created you to be.

I have to be honest… I’m so tired of these fake friendships where the same people they stand beside are the same ones they talk about behind their backs. It’s too many people claiming each other publicly and behind closed doors… they can’t stand each other.

It’s almost three in the morning now. And I’m still staring at this ceiling.

I still don’t have a perfect definition of a best friend.

But I challenge you to do something.

After you finish reading this letter… text the first person or two who came to mind while reading this.

Not because it’s their birthday. Not because you need a favor…. but simply because covenants should be spoken while people are still alive to hear them.

One day there will be a last phone call. A last laugh. A last conversation. A last “I’ll call you tomorrow.” And none of us will know which one it is. So don’t wait until the funeral to discover who mattered.

I’ll leave you with this… be the friend who counts heads before the boat leaves. Be the friend who notices when that person goes silent. Be the friend who goes back. Be the friend whose love costs something.

Be the friend that made a pact and refuses to break it.

I’ll write you again next Sunday.

Gold,

p.s. if no one came to mind… that’s ok. The right people will come into your life.

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I thought by now she would be sleeping in, and I would be getting back to my regular sleeping routine. That has not happened. And you know what... I am kind of happy it hasn’t.

For the last 881 days, my entire life has changed. I thought I was going to be raising and teaching a little human how to live. I failed at that in the first seven days as she began dismantling that illusion.

I tried to show her what time we go to sleep and what time we wake up... and she revolted against my teaching. I proceeded to teach her how to be polite, how not to be disruptive and loud... and she ignored the entire practice and yelled at the top of her lungs. I began to show her how to be patient while I prepared her milk... and she demanded that her needs be met immediately..

Somewhere in those first few months I came to an honest conclusion. The way of life as a baby might be the best life ever.

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So one day, during one of her naps, I sat back and asked myself a question. I began to wonder whether I had misunderstood the entire relationship between her and I. So, I started to ask questions like:

What if she didn’t just come here to be raised by me?

What if she had also come to raise something in me?

And that is when I started paying closer attention.

Here is what my daughter has taught me over the last two years... these are things I have now built into my life as a forty-year-old man.

I noticed something that instantly put my daughter in a better mood. Whenever she started jumping up and down, or spinning in circles, everything about her changed. More smiles. More joy. More energy.

So one day I started mimicking her. Whenever she jumped, I jumped. Whenever she spun, I spun... even when I was tired, even when I was not in the mood.

And I instantly felt different. It felt like a rush of dopamine hit me. Energy running all through my body. It almost felt like I was high on something. Don’t laugh at me.

It felt different than a gym workout.

It felt like life.

You know, somewhere along the way, adults stopped moving for joy. We only move to lose weight, count steps or fix something we dislike about ourselves. My daughter does not jump because she hates her body. She jumps because she is inside one. We exercise to correct ourselves. She moves to express herself. Somewhere between her age and mine, movement stopped being a celebration and I think it started feeling more like punishment.

Now, most days you can find me jumping and spinning in circles for no reason at all. Because joy has to go somewhere.

Yes. Naps.

There was not a day that went by that my daughter did not take her nap. And when she missed one, I could tell... her whole mood shifted. This little human would go down at the same time every day, like clockwork, without me initiating anything. Her naps were just as important as her nights.

I used to treat her nap time as my free time. Then one day I laid down when she laid down. And I had almost forgotten how a nap felt, because I had not taken one in years. Maybe decades.

Listen to me when I tell you. A fifteen, thirty, sixty minute nap will change your mood, your patience, and even your decision making.

It is part of my life now. I do not catch one every day. But most days, you will find me napping like a baby.

Because I learned through watching her that children do not consider exhaustion a badge of honor. They do not brag about running on four hours of sleep. And they don’t equate depletion as ambition. When their bodies ask for rest, they surrender to that notion. It is a rhythm she lives inside.

Adulthood taught me to rest only after I had earned it. My daughter taught me that rest is not a reward for finishing life. Rest is part of how life is sustained.

This was a strange one.

Even after she learned to talk, my daughter would hold full conversations with her dolls and her stuffed animals... about things that made no sense to me at all. And I noticed it would shift her whole mood. She could be two minutes past crying, start talking to them about nothing, and end up laughing and whispering like the tears never happened.

So one day I joined the conversation. I just started talking about nothing with her, in a language I am not sure either of us was speaking.

And my whole mood shifted. What started as playing ended with me feeling pure joy... laughing with my daughter about absolutely nothing.

Now we do it a few times a week, on purpose. And I will confess something. I started doing it with my close friends too. I get on the phone and just start talking nonstop about nothing, and they say... Marquise, what are you talking about... and then they start laughing.

It works. Try it.

Here is what I saw in her. Not one of her conversations is a transaction. Nothing has to be accomplished for it to be worth having.

Think about your last ten conversations. How many of them had an agenda? A goal? A point? Adults have forgotten how to communicate without an agenda. Every conversation has to solve something now, sell something, explain something, network with someone or move something forward. My daughter reminded me that sometimes language does not need to take you anywhere. Sometimes the laughter is the destination that day.

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This one was big for me.

My daughter would get upset... genuinely upset... for a few minutes. And then she moved on. I am not saying she forgot. I am saying she did not let it consume her day, and she did not let it change how she felt about herself. She does not deny what she feels. When she is angry, the entire room knows. When she is hurt, she cries with her whole body. But once the feeling has moved through her, she does not live in it forever.

This blew me away because she would be upset with me for a minute... and five minutes later she would climb into my lap like nothing happened.

She taught me that you can feel a thing all the way through without carrying it for days. Now I let myself feel whatever disappoints me, in the moment it happens. And then I practice what she practices. I put it down and release it.

The biggest thing I noticed about her in reference to this practice is she feels everything and files nothing.

We are the opposite as adults. We keep records. We carry Tuesday’s offense into Friday’s dinner. She has no storage system... I had spent years either suppressing my emotions or allowing them to become my identity. She taught me another way: feel it honestly, express it fully and then give yourself permission to return to love.

Nobody has taught her yet to build an identity out of a wound.

This might be the deepest one.

When my daughter wants something, she asks for it. That is the entire process. There is no justification or working up the courage. She does not say sorry to bother you. She has a need, she names the need, and she fully expects the need to matter. And it doesn’t matter what time of day it is

She has never once apologized for being thirsty.

And when I noticed that, it stopped me in my tracks. Because I know grown, accomplished, impressive people... people running companies, leading families... who rehearse a simple request five times before they say it. And they attach an apology to every need.

She has not learned that.

My daughter taught me that an unspoken need does not become less real. It often becomes resentment.

And I need you to know there is nothing shameful about saying, “I need help. I need rest. I need reassurance. I need you to sit with me.”

Jesus said something I have read my whole life in ministry and only now I can truly say I understand after 881 days of watching her.

Unless you become like a little child... you will never enter the kingdom.

I always thought that verse was more so about innocence. But now I have a revelation that it is more about recovery. The recovery of our original state.

Because everything my daughter does naturally is everything I have spent forty years trying to get back. The moving for joy. The resting without earning it. The talking without an agenda. The feeling without filing. The asking without apologizing.

She is not learning how to live.

She already knows how to live.

The world will try to teach it out of her. The same world that taught it out of you and I. Little by little, it will hand her the same lessons it handed us... that rest must be earned, that needs are a burden, that feelings should be filed and stored in our memory, that every conversation needs a point, that her body is a project to manage instead of a joy to live in.

And to let her teach it back to me, before I forget again.

Because we spend the first years of a child’s life trying to civilize them.

Stop jumping.

Sit down.

Be quiet.

Don’t cry.

Wait patiently.

Stop asking so many questions.

Do not interrupt.

Do not make a mess.

And then, decades later, we pay people to teach us how to move again, speak again, feel again, rest again, become curious again and reconnect with ourselves.

Maybe children are not incomplete adults. Maybe adults are children who have forgotten something.

So why I am telling you all of this?

You knew everything on this list once.

The jumping. The resting. The nonsense and the laughter. The letting go. The asking without apology. You did every single one of these things, every day, without being taught.

Which means none of this was ever missing from you.

It was not untaught to you... it was taught out of you.

And anything that was taught out of you.. is not gone.

So maybe the work of becoming yourself is not what we thought it was. Maybe you do not have to learn how to live.

Maybe you just have to remember.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold

p.s. leave a comment with your thoughts about this letter.

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Steve Jobs, one of the great innovators of our lifetime, a man who wore the same thing everyday… delayed nine months of medical treatment for rare pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in favor of a carrot juice diet and acupuncture. He died at his home in Palo Alto at 56 years old.

Pastor Zachery Tims built one of the fastest-growing megachurches in the country, attended by thousands and watched by millions, and testified publicly that God had delivered him from drug dealing and addiction. In 2011, at 42 years old, he was found dead alone on the floor of a New York hotel room. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose. He preached while a private battle returned.

Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, demanded her fee in cash, upfront, and kept the purse on the piano where she could see it while she sang. She had watched too many artists of her era die cheated and broke to let that money out of her sight. She spent the last 35 years of her life refussing to board an airplane after one terrifying flight in the 1980’s, turning down invitations from all over the world because of a fear she never conquered. Everyone believed she died at home without a will. Then, nine months after her death, her family found three of them. All handwritten. The one a jury ruled valid was in a spiral notebook, stuffed under her couch cushions.

Billy Graham preached to 215 million people in person. More than anyone in human history. And he chose to be buried in a $200 plywood coffin built by inmates at Angola, a maximum-security prison, with a simple cross nailed on top. Near the end of his life, the man who counseled twelve presidents was asked what he would change about his own life. He did not wish for another crusade or a larger crowd. The world’s most famous evangelist said he would have preached less, studied more, spent more time at home with his wife and children... and stayed out of politics. He died quietly in his North Carolina home at 99 years old, nearly blind and nearly deaf. The man who filled stadiums left the world in a room without an audience.

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All of these people came from different fields, different backgrounds, carried different gifts and built different kinds of empires. But they belonged to the same brief human story. And they all have something in common.

Graham died at ninety-nine in his own bed. Jackson and Tims died alone in rooms, surrounded by everything except someone who truly knew what was happening on the inside of them. Jobs died in his home thinking he had more time. Aretha was surrounded by family and still sleeping on secrets stuffed under the cushions.

When I look back at what I once wanted... what I spent the whole first half of my life chasing... it was success. Money. Freedom. Mansions. Stages. The next big thing. Not because anyone forced those things on me, but because the world kept holding them up as the evidence that a life had mattered if you had those things.

And who am I to tell you that wanting to be known is wrong? Who am I to call your beautiful home vanity, or your thriving business, or your platform, or the wealth you want to leave your children? Maybe those desires are not evil at all. Maybe the danger was never in having those things.

Maybe the danger is believing they have the power to satisfy you.

I am stuck today between the ambition I was raised to worship and the peace I was never taught to want. And the longer I sit with it, the more I see what I was actually chasing. It was never the mansion... it was rest. Never the stage... it was mattering. Never the money... it was safety. Never the crowd... it was to be known, fully, by somebody who wasn’t going to leave me.

That is why I had everything I ever wanted and still wanted something I could not describe.

Now go back and look at every story I just told you at the start of this letter.

They all end in a room.

A bedroom. A hotel room. A hospital room. A room in a house. And in that room, none of the trophies or things they built say anything. The awards do not speak. The numbers do not testify. The buildings bearing their name cannot tell us who you became.

Graham preached to more souls than any man who ever lived, and his regret was not smaller stages. It was time. With his wife. With his children. With his God.

So why are we exhausting ourselves to reach destinations whose former inhabitants have already warned us are empty?

What if I become everything the world told me to become... and still fail to become who I was sent here to be?

What if the greatest tragedy is not dying without an empire... but building one that required the death of your soul?

Then I look at Jesus.

No house. No physical dynasty. No visible fortune. Nowhere permanent to lay His head. And two thousand years later the world is still being reshaped by a life He simply gave away. He did not spend His life proving how much He could gather. He spent Himself showing how much He could pour out.

And Solomon. The wealthiest, wisest king in the book. The man with access to everything a human being could want. He looked back at all of it, all the sweat and all the building, and he said he saw nothing but “smoke”.

“Smoke and spitting into the wind”. (Ecclesiastes 2, The Message)

Wisdom could not stop his death. Wealth could not buy him permanence. Achievement could not rescue him from the fate every person shares. The king and the servant, the famous and the forgotten, all arrive at the same door.

But this is what stops me when we talk about Solomon.

After he called it all smoke... he did not say quit living.

He said go eat your bread with joy. Drink your wine with a glad heart. Love the one you love. Do your work like it matters, because it does. The man who had everything came down off the mountain to tell us the treasure had been at the table the whole time… not at arriving at the top.

So I will not call your dream vanity.

Build, if you are called to build. Be excellent. Make the money. But whatever you are really after underneath it... the rest, the mattering, the safety, the being known... do not wait for the mansion or the money to hand it to you.

Because it won’t.

Death empties every hand.

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Jesus had nowhere to lay His head, yet He was never homeless.

Maybe that is this whole letter in one line.

Stop chasing a bigger life. Come home to a deeper one. Because one day everything you and I have built will belong to somebody else. Our names will be spoken for the last time.

But maybe… just maybe, the love you gave stays inside somebody’s courage. Maybe the truth you told stays inside somebody’s freedom. Maybe the time you gave away stays inside somebody’s healing... and keeps moving through people long after your body has gone back to the ground.

I have spent enough of my life asking how much I could achieve before I die.

The question now is how deeply I can live before I die.

Maybe that is the question waiting for all of us in the room.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

p.s. If you haven’t watched my new video entry… watch below … it shares more of this message.

I have been building something alongside these letters. I call it The King’s Notebook. It is where I say the things that are kinda too heavy for a page... or might require me to say it slowly, out loud, with nothing between us but the truth.

The first entry is finished.

It is called The Most Dangerous Thing a Man Can Become. I will not tell you here what it is about… but I will tell you that it is the most honest I have ever been in my entire life on camera.

I made it for you.

You do not have to watch it today. And to be honest, you do not have to watch it at all if you don’t want. But if something in these letters has been finding you... this is the same voice, just closer.

The door is open. Come and see when you are ready.

[ WATCH THE FIRST ENTRY ]

I’ll write you Sunday, like always.

Gold,

P.S. If it moves you, do not keep it to yourself. Send it to the one person you thought of while you watched. That is how the room fills... one person carrying it to another.

The moment you earn it… it stops being a gift. It becomes something like compensation. And perhaps the purest gifts cannot be fully expected either. Because the moment you expect it… it stops being a gift. It becomes something you were simply waiting on.

So based on my premise a real gift, by it’s very nature, carries two qualities:

It is unearned.

And unexpected.

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Where you are in life right now may be more of a gift than you realize. Your life is not an accident. You are not an accident. God has not misplaced you, even in seasons when it feels as though your life has wandered far from the original plan. God has not made a mistake.

Now you may not have expected to be here.

You may not have chosen this version of the story.

But when you look back honestly, how much of your life actually happened according to plan? The jobs you found. The friendships you formed. The obstacles you overcame. The rooms you entered. Even some of your greatest victories arrived in ways you could not have predicted and, truthfully, could never have earned entirely on your own. The very things you thought made your life uncertain… that unpredictability and its lack of explanation… may be the same things that reveal it as a gift.

If you take a look over your life and be honest, most of it was a surprise.

I know we like to pretend we knew exactly what we were doing. We take credit for the outcome, organize the story into neat steps and even sometimes attempt to teach other people the formula… as though we had a framework from the beginning.

But the truth is, most of it surprised us.

That is the evidence that it was a gift.

Because the unplanned thing is the only kind of thing a gift has ever been.

Consider how creation actually works.

No one plans for the wildflowers to end up on the side of the road. They simply... appear there. Growing in a ditch nobody was tending, in places no gardener hand selected, and somehow those wildflowers become more beautiful than the carefully arranged garden down the street.

The sunset. The rain that came when it was not in the forecast. The seed the wind carried somewhere no one intended... that later became a tree people would sit under for shade.

Nothing in nature earns the right to exist. The lily does not toil for its beauty. The bird does not audition for the sky. And yet the whole earth is covered, every single spring, in gifts nobody planned and nobody paid for.

You are part of that same creation.

I want to say this again, you cannot pay for a gift.

The moment you try... you insult it. You turn someone’s generosity into a transaction. You hand back the very thing that made it beautiful.

It is possible that all the years you spent trying to earn your place here… all the accomplishments you collected to prove that your existence was justified… were not expressions of gratitude. Perhaps they were a quiet refusal to receive what had already been given.

Look at your life. The real shape of it.

Most of its best parts were never planned. The person you did not expect to love. The turn you did not choose that put you at the right place at the right time. The door that closed and sent you somewhere better than the place you were trying to reach. The child, the calling, the friendship, the second chance...

Unearned.

And yet you keep calling those things detours.

But what if they were deliveries?

What if the unplanned shape of your life is not proof that something went wrong... but proof that you have been receiving gifts the entire time? Most of them were the ones you never would have thought to ask for.

The unexpected may have been one of the most generous forces in your life. You just kept mistaking it for a mistake.

Here is the whole point of this letter:

Where you are in life right now is not necessarily an accident that must be corrected or a problem that must be fixed.

It may be a gift.

Not because every moment has been easy. Not because every loss was fair. But because even inside this unplanned part of life… something is still being given to you. A new way of seeing things. A deeper capacity to love. A strength revealed you did not know you possessed. A life you could not have designed, but one that may still contain more beauty than the life you originally imagined.

The best things were never planned.

They were received. Soften your heart a little and take a deep breathe and receive the gift of where you are right now in life.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

It is the gap between how capable you are... and how scared you secretly feel.

On paper, you are an adult. You run things. People depend on you. You have built something, carried something and survived something most people never could. So by every measure the world can see... you are grown, grown.

And then something small happens.

A text goes unanswered. A door you expected to open stays closed. What you were waiting on doesn't arrive on time. You discover people are talking negative about you. Someone whose opinion matters to you goes quiet. A room turns slightly cold.

And with no warning, you feel something that does not match the size of the event at all.

You feel like a child.

I want to tell you about a time I really noticed him.

I was in the same room as one of my mentors, and I found myself trying to catch their eye. You know the kind of communication you have with someone you have known a long time... the kind that does not need words. We had always had that.

But each time I tried to lock eyes, it failed.

Now that was not normal. Connecting and communicating with our eyes have always been a thing.

Something was off. It felt like they were avoiding me. And I felt my body sink... into something I can not truly describe here… but I will try. It felt like I had been set down somewhere and left. Like a puppy in the window, auditioning to be picked.

Later, I sent a text. Just checking in. No response back.

A few days later I reached out again... and watched my message go from blue to green.

Something had shifted.

Something had changed.

With no warning. No announcement. No explanation. The connection just... stopped.

And the grown man I had become... disappeared.

In his place was a small boy who was suddenly certain he had done something wrong. That he was about to be left. That if he could just be better, do more, fix it fast enough, the warmth would come back.

It took me years to understand what I had watched.

That was not the man in me reacting.

That was the child.

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For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me.

I had done the work. I had the success. I understood myself better than most people I knew. So why could one person’s disapproval still undo me in seconds? Why could I reason my way through anything in my business... and not reason my way out of a feeling?

Here is what I finally learned. And it changed my life.

But the part of you underneath… the part that produces your fastest, deepest, most automatic reactions is triggered by the subconscious mind. And that part of your mind doesn’t respond to logic.

It runs on something much older.

It’s been stated that everyone’s subconscious mind is stuck in the age of 4-7 years old. It’s a child.

Long before you learned to reason, your mind was learning survival.

As a child, it quietly asked two basic questions:

Am I safe?

Am I loved?

The answers you believed became the blueprint for how you would move through the rest of your life. That blueprint is why logic often fails.

You can tell yourself you’re enough, yet still feel inadequate. You can know people love you, yet constantly fear rejection. You can be completely safe, yet live as though danger is around every corner. Because the deepest part of you is not responding to your present reality.

It is responding to an old pre-set.

One of the clearest pictures of this in Scripture is Mephibosheth.

When Mephibosheth was only five years old, everything that made his world feel secure collapsed in one single day. His father, Jonathan, was killed. His grandfather, Saul, died in battle. As panic swept through the palace, his nurse fled with him, but in her haste she dropped him. And From that day forward, he lived crippled in both feet (II Samuel 4:4).

But notice how that defining event of his life happened while he was still a child.

Before he became a man…

Before he developed influence…

Before he could fully understand what had happened…

His nervous system learned something.

Safety can disappears without warning.

The people who you depend on and the people who protect you can suddenly be gone. Removed. No longer exist. Just… vanish.

Now many years passed and Mephibosheth grew into adulthood, but the story he learned as a child quietly remained in control. He lived in a town called Lo-debar, a place whose very name reflects barrenness and emptiness. He wasn’t simply hiding in a location.

He was physically living inside an identity that had a real address.

Then one day King David searched for him… not to punish him, but to bless him. When David located Mephibosheth, David restored Saul’s land to him. He invited him to eat continually at the king’s table. He gave him honor instead of judgment.

Every external circumstance displayed here declared one message:

You are safe now.

But listen to Mephibosheth’s response:

“What is your servant, that you should look upon such a dead dog as I?” (II Samuel 9:8)

Wow… everytime I read that line I need a second to process.

That sentence reveals something deep.

That even though his circumstances had changed.

His identity had not.

The way he viewed himself.

The way he felt about himself.

David saw a son of Jonathan.

However, Mephibosheth still saw a discarded dog.

His location had changed to the palace. His seat had changed to the table. His future changed. But the little boy inside him was still answering from the day he was dropped. His subconscious mind.

This is why logic alone cannot heal deep wounds.

David could restore his land.

David could restore his position.

David could restore his wealth.

But none of those things automatically restored the story Mephibosheth believed about himself.

His deepest reactions were still being governed by conclusions formed long before he had the maturity to question them.

And how many of us are doing that same exact thing in our life right now?

God has opened doors, yet we expect rejection. He has called us His children, yet we secretly live like orphans.

He has prepared a seat for us at His table, but yet inwardly we are still are trying to sit at other people tables who clearly don’t want us there. So we live a life believing we are unworthy to sit at our own table that God has for us.

The older part of us… the frightened child that learned survival before it learned truth; keeps trying to steer our lives using an old pre-set wired in pain.

The miracle wasn’t simply that David invited Mephibosheth to the table.

The miracle was that grace kept inviting him until his inner story could finally catch up with his new reality.

Perhaps that is what God has been doing with us all along.

Not merely changing our circumstances. Yet patiently rewriting the story we have been telling ourselves since childhood.

But I really want to say something here that most of us miss when we read Mephibosheth story.

Go back and read it slowly. David restored the land. David gave him the seat. David called him son. But the very last line of the chapter... after all the honor, after all the restoration... says this.

“So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he ate continually at the king’s table... and he was lame in both his feet.” (II Samuel 9:13)

Read that again.

He ate at the king’s table.

And he was still “Lame”.

The restoration did not fix his feet. He walked into the palace with the limp. He sat down with the limp. He would carry that limp for the rest of his life.

So why does the text put the honor and the wound right next to each other, in the same breath?

When you sit at a table, your legs go underneath it. Hidden. Out of sight. God did not heal the limp... God used David to provide him a place where the limp no longer disqualified him. The very thing he was ashamed of was finally covered. Not because it was gone. But because he had been given a seat.

And I think this is the part that can set somebody free today.

You keep thinking you have to be healed enough to deserve the seat at the table.

You keep waiting until the fear finally leaves... until the inner child in you finally calms down... until you finally feel whole. And then you will let yourself sit down. Then you will believe you belong.

But Mephibosheth teaches us the opposite.

You do not get healed and then come to the table.

You come to the table... and the healing happens there.

You may be lame for a long time. The old fear may still rise when a room goes cold. The child in you may always be a little afraid. And none of that disqualifies you from the seat.

So sit down anyway.

Sit down limping. Sit down afraid. Sit down still believing half the time that you are a dead dog instead of a son. Sit down before the story in your head has caught up.

Because grace did not wait for Mephibosheth to feel like a son before it called him one.

And it is not waiting for you either.

So here is what I will leave you with.

You do not heal that child in you by being harder. You heal that child the way you would heal any frightened child.

Not with logic. With presence.

Not by arguing. But by staying.

You become, at last, the safe adult you never had. You turn toward the part of you that you have spent your whole life running from. And instead of shaming the younger version of you, you do the thing no one did for you back then.

You tell her or him they are safe now.

***

Next Sunday can’t get here fast enough.

Gold,

P.s. no matter who has left your life with no explanation and no conclusion, remember this … it wasn’t the grown adult that walked out on you … that person who hurt you was also five years old … it was their inner child responding to you.

I sat with that line for two days, because I used to say it too. In that same exact tone. It took me almost dying to now fully understand what I was actually confessing when I said it.

So this Sunday, I want to touch the most disguised idol in the building.

Purpose.

Calling.

The two things nobody’s allowed to challenge.

We’ve been handed two definitions and told to pick. The first: purpose is impact. What you were born for. The millions, the reach, the dent you will make in the world. The second sounds more spiritual and is somehow worse: calling is self-denial. Disappear into the mission. Empty yourself for the work, for God, for the people. Lose yourself and call it obedience.

I built a church at twenty-three. A thousand people. I wrote sermons at three in the morning through real tears, for a real God, with a real love for those people.

And I will tell you something I could only say now, on the other side of it.

A great deal of what I called my calling was the most sophisticated hiding place ever built.

I poured myself out week after week and underneath the pouring, I was … drowning. The work let me be wanted by thousands at once without ever being known by one. I called it sacrifice. But it really was avoidance.

Here’s what I want to scream from the mountain top, and it’s the whole reason for this letter.

God’s first word to a person was never go do.

It was “come”.

Before servant, son.

Before assignment, belonging.

I keep going back to the old story in Luke 15. The one we all call the prodigal son.

The funny thing is, the word prodigal does not even mean what most of us were taught. It does not mean lost. It does not mean backslidden. It does not mean rebellious.

It actually means extravagant.

Wastefully lavish.

Recklessly spending without restraint.

That alone gives the whole scripture a different shape.

Because if we are honest with the story, the son is not the only prodigal person in it.

The son was prodigal with money. But the father was prodigal with mercy.

The son spent recklessly. The father forgave recklessly.

The son squandered an inheritance. The father squandered his own dignity.

In that culture, fathers did not run. Men of honor did not sprint down dusty roads toward disgraced children. Yet before the boy could finish his apology, before he could negotiate his way back into the family, before he could prove he had changed, the father ran to him.

He spent his reputation the way the son spent his money.

So which one was really more prodigal?

I will be honest with you about something. After I had sat with this for years, I found out a pastor named Tim Keller had seen some of the same things in the text. He called it the prodigal God. I came to it through my own wreckage. He came to it through study. Same story, different trails. I will tell you the part of the trail that is only mine.

Because there is something else hiding in plain sight.

Jesus never called this story “The Prodigal Son.” That title was added much later.

In Luke’s account, the story sits beside a lost sheep and a lost coin.

Lost sheep. Lost coin. Lost son.

But by the end of the story, the younger son is not the one who is lost.

He is inside. Back at home. Having a party.

The elder brother is the one standing outside now.

The younger son comes home afraid to enter because of what he has done. The elder son refuses to enter because of what the father has done. One is ashamed of his failures. The other is trapped by his successes.

And that is where I think we have missed the deepest part.

Most sermons treat the brothers like opposites.

One runs away trying to become himself. The other stays and obeys trying to become himself.

One says, “If I leave, I will find life.” The other says, “If I work hard enough, I will deserve life.” Both are looking for the exact same thing.

Identity.

However, both misunderstand the father. Both are trying to earn what was already theirs.

The younger brother finally admits he is broken. The elder brother never does.

That is why the most heartbreaking line in the story is not spoken by the younger son. It is spoken by the older one.

“I have slaved for you.”

Slaved.

For his own father.

The younger son said he wanted to become a servant. The elder son already believed he was one.

The younger brother wasted his inheritance in a far country. The elder brother wasted his sonship in his own backyard.

And I believe that is truly the real tragedy. Because a person can be far from home and know they’re lost. But a person can also be standing in the Father’s house for years and never realize they're lost because they’ve been relating to love like an employee.

The son’s anger wasn’t really about the party.

It was about grace.

Because the moment he saw his brother being loved without earning it, his entire identity was threatened. If sonship can be received, then all those years of striving were unnecessary. If the father gives freely, then the whole system he built his life on collapses.

A lot of what we call purpose or calling is the elder brother’s resentment with a mission statement.

So let me say this plainly. The way your mama would understand it and a billionaire would understand it in the same room.

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The work was never supposed to be the place you go to earn what you were already given for free. Real purpose does not flow towards becoming someone worthy. It flows from a self that already knows it is loved. You cannot pour from a cup you never let anyone fill. And the man who empties a self he never actually met is not holy. He is hiding. And he has dressed the hiding in the one costume no one is allowed to confront.

If your calling requires you to abandon yourself to fulfill it, then it is not your calling.

The elder son thought he was called to be a servant. So he abandoned being a son. He abandoned himself.

The most radical, terrifying, holy thing a high-performing person can do is not to give more. It is to come home first. Be a son before a servant. Be known before being useful. And then, from fullness instead of from fear or competition, go and do your work.

That is a different kind of purpose.

It cannot be measured in millions. And it is the only kind that will not leave you at the top, successful in public and a complete stranger to yourself in private.

And if I am honest, that is why this story will not leave me alone.

Because I remember that moment in life when I did not see myself in the younger brother anymore.

I saw myself in the older one. The builder. The worker. The achiever. The one who kept showing up. The one who secretly believed love must be earned. The one who knows how to sacrifice but does not know how to receive. The one who can lead thousands and still cannot sit at the table without feeling guilty.

Maybe that is you too.

Maybe you are not exhausted because you are carrying too much. Maybe you are exhausted because you are carrying a version of yourself God never asked you to be.

Maybe nobody ever asked you to disappear. Maybe nobody ever asked you to prove your worth. Maybe the pressure, the striving, the endless need to become something, is not coming from God at all.

Maybe the father has been saying the same thing to you that he said to the older brother all along.

“Son, you have always been with me. Everything I have is yours.”

Not will be.

Is.

Maybe the life you have been chasing is already sitting in arms reach, waiting on you.

And maybe the invitation was never to work harder, sacrifice more, build bigger, or become someone else.

Maybe the invitation was simply this.

Come in.

Welcome Home.

I’ll write you next Sunday.

Gold,

P.s. stop trying to prove your worth to people who are still trying to discover their own worth.

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Today marks 7 years since I retired… I still can’t believe I made that announcement on father’s day in 2019. During men’s mental health month.

So many thoughts and emotions have been running through me this week… but I decided to process everything I was feeling by just… “people watch”.

Everyone I saw this week was heading somewhere.

I did not know where.

I just knew they were heading somewhere.

Strangers, most of them. Some were walking. Some were running. Some were driving. Some were on motorbikes weaving through traffic. Some were on public transit, looking at their phones. Some were lying on the grass and they were heading somewhere too … I could tell by their faces. The body was still. The mind was already ahead.

I watched them for a while.

I did not ask any of them where they were going. I did not have the courage. Or the urgency. Or whatever it is that gives a stranger permission to ask another stranger an honest question in public.

I just watched.

Each of them on a route I could not see, walking a path I had no map for, living inside a head I would never enter.

And I thought, for the first time in a long time, about Ecclesiastes.

The Preacher noticed the same thing I noticed. Three thousand years ago.

He sat somewhere … probably a window, probably warm and looked out at his own version of the city. And he wrote this:

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rose.

The wind goes toward the south, and turns about unto the north; it whirls about continually.

All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from which the rivers come, there they return again.

He was watching routines.

The sun has one. The wind has one. The rivers have one. The generations have one. The eye, the ear, the body … each running their assigned circuit routine, day after day, century after century, while the man at the window watches and tries to find one thing that is actually new.

He could not find one.

I think about that line a lot lately.

I used to be against routines. Totally, against them!

I thought I was too restless for them. Too ambitious. Too alive. I thought routines were what other people did … people who had given up, people who had settled, people who were boring, people who had stopped asking for more from their lives than the cycle they were inside.

So I broke mine.

And I left.

And I built a new life in another country.

And it took me about two years to realize I had not actually escaped anything. I had just replaced one routine I was tired of with another routine I would eventually become tired of. The setting was different. The rhythm was the same.

You may be reading this letter thinking you need a big change in your life right now. But I want you to know that:

The next city becomes a routine.

The new job becomes a routine.

The marriage becomes a routine.

The business becomes a routine.

Even freedom becomes a routine if you live in it long enough.

The thing so many of us are running from is not repetition.

It is disappointment.

You think a new chapter will eliminate the feeling that something is missing. You think a different environment will produce a different internal world.

But Ecclesiastes is brutally honest.

The sun still rises.

The wind still blows.

The rivers still run.

And somehow, despite all that repetition, creation does not complain.

We are the only part of creation constantly trying to escape the very thing that makes life possible.

Rhythm.

Maybe the goal is not to break the cycle.

Maybe the goal is to become conscious inside it.

This thought stayed with me as I watched strangers this week.

Each person heading somewhere.

Chasing something.

Building something.

Recovering from something.

Trying to become someone.

And for a moment, I felt connected to all of them.

Because beneath all our different destinations, most of us are asking the same questions.

Maybe you are asking one of those questions today. Maybe you are lying in bed right now wondering why the thing you prayed for no longer feels the way you thought it would.

If that is you, I want to leave you with something that has helped me.

Do not judge your life only by what is changing. Judge it by what is growing.

Growth often looks repetitive.

Growth looks like showing up again.

Making another call.

Having another conversation.

Being present for another ordinary day.

The oak tree and the river both look repetitive until you measure them over time. Then you realize they were becoming something the entire time.

Seven years after retiring, I am no longer trying to escape every routine.

I pay more attention to what the routine is producing.

Because the question is not whether you are in a cycle.

You are.

We all are.

The question is whether the cycle is slowly shaping you into the person you were meant to become.

And if you are not sure today, give yourself some grace. Because the Preacher in Ecclesiastes would laugh, kindly, if he was here.

***

I am writing this letter on a balcony.
I will probably write the next one from somewhere else.
I will tell you where I am each time. Not for content.

Not for brand.

But because I want you to know there was a man in a body in a place when these letters were written. A man who looked up, breathed in the air, and noticed what the Preacher noticed.

And here’s the last thing I want you to take with you:

You are allowed to watch.
You are allowed to be still.
You are allowed to see the world without rushing to be part of it.

The city moves fast. The world moves fast. And everyone else is always heading somewhere.

But for a moment, just this moment, you can sit. You can notice.
You can rest in the recognition that your mind can wander, your body can pause, and your soul can breathe.

Because that pause … that quiet space … is where the new understanding begins.

It’s where you meet yourself again.

And that is enough for now.

I will write you next Sunday.

Gold,

p.s. if you haven’t read my manifesto yet, run over to my house and read it quietly.

Until then, there's nothing to do but leave your email and let my letters find you.

— Gold