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