Michael Jackson was the biggest artist in history, and the night before he died he was preparing for fifty sold-out concerts for his comeback tour. Hours later, the King of Pop was given propofol, a powerful surgical anesthetic, because he could not sleep. He never woke up. His life ended at 50 years old, in his bedroom, roughly half a billion dollars in debt. The performer who could commmand an arena of screaming fans spent his final hours begging for something painfully ordinary. A night of sleep.
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.
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.
No matter how big you get, no matter how much you obtain, there is something you are privately carrying. We often spend our lives using visible achievements to satisfy invisible needs… and discover too late that success was never designed to carry that weight.
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.
There are only three questions left in that room.
Who is here?
What was true?
And whose am I?
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.
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.
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