Stop waiting for rock bottom to let God lead.
Let me ask you something, honestly.
When is the last time you truly let God lead?
Not just in the hard moments. Not just when everything fell apart, and you had nowhere else to turn. But in the good times too. When the money was flowing. When the job was solid. When the family looked good from the outside, and life felt like it was finally working.
Because that’s exactly when most of us stop trusting God.
When things are going well, we stop praying as we mean it. We stop leaning. We stop surrendering. We look at what we’ve built, what we’ve accumulated, what we’ve accomplished — and somewhere deep down, quietly, we start believing we did this.
Not God.
Us.
And that’s where the danger begins.
I know because I lived it.
More than once.
And if I’m being completely honest, after the first time it all fell apart, you would think I would have learned my lesson. But I didn’t. I went right back to the same patterns. The same pride. The same self-reliance. The same independence from God. I guess at the time, I liked failure and punishment more than I liked true success. Looking back, I can’t explain it any other way.
Some lessons apparently have to be learned more than once before they finally stick.
For years, I chased the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Nice homes. Nice vehicles. The right image. The right appearance. I wanted people to look at my life and be impressed. I wanted to walk into a room and have what I owned speak before I ever opened my mouth.
And I told myself it was for my family. That I was providing. That I was building something.
But if I’m being honest, a lot of it was for me.
It was pride dressed up as ambition.
It was insecurity dressed up as success.
It was self-rule dressed up as leadership.
Materialism has a way of doing that. It creeps in quietly. It doesn’t announce itself. It just slowly becomes the thing you chase, the thing you measure yourself by, the thing you use to prove your worth to a world that honestly doesn’t care nearly as much as you think it does.
And independence from God? That one is even more subtle.
Because it doesn’t always look like rebellion. Sometimes it just looks like confidence. Capability. Self-sufficiency. You’re paying your bills. You’re handling your business. You’re taking care of your people. And God is still somewhere in the picture — just not at the center of it.
You’re not walking away from Him. You’re just not walking with Him either.
You’ve essentially told God — I got this.
And in my experience, those three words have led more men into more trouble than almost anything else.
I got this.
No. You don’t.
None of us do.
Proverbs 16:18 says it plainly:
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
That’s not a warning for other people. That’s a warning for every man who has ever looked at his own life and decided he was the one holding it together.
Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way.
The big home doesn’t make you a man. The nice vehicle doesn’t define your worth. The image you project to the world is not your identity. And at the end of the day, after all the chasing and proving and accumulating, it’s all meaningless if the people sitting in that big home don’t feel loved, led, and pointed toward God.
“But as I looked at everything I had worked so hard to accomplish, it was all so meaningless. It was like chasing the wind. There was nothing really worthwhile anywhere.”
Solomon had everything. More than any of us will ever have. And he called it all vapor.
Because home is not an address.
Home is where your heart is. And your heart belongs with your family — your wife, your children, your grandchildren. Not your net worth. Not your reputation. Not the image you spent years constructing.
The greatest thing you can give the people you love is not a bigger house or a better vehicle.
It’s a man who has surrendered his life to God and actually shows them what that looks like every single day.
That’s the example that matters.
That’s the legacy that lasts.
That’s the leadership that changes generations.
The Angel God Placed Right in Front of Me
I want to tell you about my wife.
Because God has been trying to get my attention for a long time. And one of the biggest ways He did it — one of the clearest ways He showed me what real faith looks like — was through the woman He placed right beside me.
She didn’t need me when we met. Let me be clear about that. She wasn’t looking for someone to pay her bills or carry her through life. She was already strong. Already independent. Already rooted in her faith in a way I honestly wasn’t. She depended on God daily through her faith, her strength, and her prayers. And she didn’t make a big production out of it. She just lived it.
Quietly. Humbly. Consistently.
She puts others before herself without thinking twice about it. She leads by example without trying to lead. She carries more humility in her daily life than I have managed to hold onto through years of trying.
And I was blind to it for far too long.
God was showing me the whole time. Putting the example right in front of my face. And I was too busy chasing the wrong things to see it.
There have been more moments than I can count where she could have walked away. Where most people would have said enough is enough. And she stayed. She fought. She prayed.
I still ask myself sometimes — why?
The only answer I keep coming back to is grace. God’s grace working through a woman who chose to reflect it, even when I gave her very little reason to.
I don’t deserve her. I’ll say that plainly and without hesitation.
But God gave her to me anyway.
And because of God and because of her — I’m still here. Still standing. Still learning. Still growing.
If that’s not evidence of God’s grace, I don’t know what is.
What I Want for My Children and Grandchildren
Here’s why all of this matters beyond just my own story.
I don’t want my children and grandchildren to live the way I did. I don’t want them to waste years chasing things that don’t last, carrying pride that will only hurt them, or pushing God to the side because life feels manageable right now.
I want them to be a million times better than I ever thought I could be.
I want God in their lead. From the beginning. Not after the fall. Not after the rock bottom. Not after the repeated lessons that could have been avoided.
From the very start.
Because the greatest thing I can leave behind is not money or property or any material thing. It’s a legacy of faith. A family that knows how to surrender. Children and grandchildren who understand that real strength isn’t self-sufficiency — it’s dependence on God.
That’s the example I’m still learning to set. Every single day.
“Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”
That starts with us. The parents. The grandparents. The ones who go first.
Still Brewing
I want to be clear about something before I close this out.
I am nowhere near finished.
Not even close. The gap between where I am and where I need to be — it isn’t funny. I have so much left to do, so much left to learn, so many ways I still fall short every single day.
But here’s what I finally know.
I woke up.
God has been brewing something for me for a long time. Patient. Steady. Never giving up. And I finally stopped long enough to smell it. Only it isn’t just coffee He’s been brewing.
It’s grace.
And he’s still pouring it. Every single morning. Whether I deserve it or not. Whether I’ve earned it or not. Whether I’ve gotten it right or not.
That’s the nature of grace. You can’t manufacture it. You can’t buy it. You can’t achieve it. You can only receive it — and then spend the rest of your life trying to reflect it back to the people around you.
Because the last thing I need to be at this point in my life is selfish.
I don’t want this just for myself. I want it for my family. My friends. Their friends. The people I haven’t even met yet who are sitting somewhere right now running their own life straight into the ground the same way I did — more than once.
I can’t reach all of them. I know that. There may not be enough time left in my life to see everything I’m praying for come to pass.
But I can pray.
Every single day, I can get on my knees and ask God to move in the lives of the people I love and the people beyond them. I can ask Him to pour that same grace over a world that desperately needs it.
And wouldn’t the world be a much better place if more of us did exactly that?
Stopped leading ourselves.
Started following God.
And started wanting it not just for ourselves — but for everybody around us.
That’s the work.
And by the grace of God — I’m still in it.
The Challenge
So here it is. Plain and simple.
Stop waiting for rock bottom to give God the wheel.
You have been given something extraordinary — free will. God didn’t create robots. He created people with the freedom to choose. And every single day you wake up, you get to choose who leads your life.
You can choose yourself. You’ve probably already seen how that goes.
Or you can choose Him.
Not because life suddenly becomes perfect. Not because the hard times disappear. But because when God is in the lead, you are never walking alone, never carrying it all by yourself, and never without a purpose bigger than anything you could have mapped out on your own.
You don’t have to have it all figured out.
You don’t have to clean yourself up first.
You don’t have to earn your way to the starting line.
You just have to surrender.
Hand it over. All of it. The pride, the control, the image, the fear, the past, the failures, the things you’re still holding onto that are only weighing you down.
Give it to God and go with it.
That’s it.
That is the whole thing.
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
You were never meant to carry this life alone. So stop trying.
Get out of your own way — and let God lead.
Before I close, I need to say something personal…
A Note to My Nephew Brian
I started this blog to encourage Brian.
I wanted to walk alongside him, pour into him, and help him grow. And somewhere along the way — without either of us planning it — he started doing the exact same thing for me.
His courage to sit down and write about the hardest year of his life, to be that vulnerable and that honest in front of the world, pushed something in me. It made me look inward. It made me want to be better. It gave me the nudge I needed to put my own story on paper and stop sitting on the lessons God has been teaching me.
Brian — I am so proud of you. More than you know.
And what we are doing together — two ordinary men, no theology degrees, just faith and honesty and a desire to grow — that is exactly what family is supposed to look like when God is at the center of it.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
That’s us nephew. That’s exactly what this is.
You sharpened me. And I pray I do the same for you. Let’s keep going.
A Prayer for Every Person Reading This
Father God,
I come before You right now on behalf of every single person whose eyes have touched these words today.
For the ones who are running on empty, trying to hold it all together on their own strength — Lord, meet them right where they are. Let them feel the weight lift the moment they surrender it to You.
For the ones who have been here before, who have learned this lesson and forgotten it, who keep finding themselves back at the same crossroads — Father, extend Your grace one more time. You are the God of second chances and third chances and every chance after that. Remind them of that today.
For the ones who have never truly surrendered — who have kept You at arm’s length while trying to manage life on their own terms — stir something in their heart right now. Let today be the day it changes.
You gave every one of us free will. The freedom to choose. And today Lord, I pray that every person reading this chooses You. Not out of desperation. Not out of obligation. But out of the deep understanding that You are better. Your plans are better. Your leadership is better. Your grace is more than enough.
All they have to do is surrender.
Just give it to You and go with it.
Father bless their families. Bless their marriages. Bless their children and grandchildren. Let the legacy of faith start or continue right here, right now, in this moment.
Let Your grace flow freely over every life represented in this prayer today.
We are all works in progress. Every last one of us. But we are Yours.
In the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ —
Amen.