Necessary God

Lesson: Learning that God’s strength is supplied in childlike weakness, and that is not a less meaningful position to lay my life down from.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve done this. Far too long if you ask me. Honestly, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’ve posted until I sat down last month to write something new. Maybe it’s because I’ve written so many drafts that I’d hoped to post but never finished. And honestly, this was another difficult post to write.

I sat down last month with the hope of sorting out my thoughts and feelings, coming to an understanding of what the past year has looked like for me, and deriving what God is trying to teach me and, thus, what this new year ought to look like for me. But I didn’t know where to start, and I didn’t have the faintest idea where I truly am and what the lesson is. I just knew I felt like a failure.

My last post was written in December 2024. I titled it “I Choose Joy,” where, toward the end, I referenced the Bible verse James 1:2, and I penned the following words:

The biblical writer and half-brother of Jesus seems to believe that joy is a choice. That’s what I don’t understand. But in 2025, I’m determined to figure it out. I’m determined to choose joy. I don’t know what that means yet, but this is just the beginning of that journey. And I’m letting you in on it as a form of accountability. 

Well, here’s my moment of accountability: I did not figure it out last year. All the things I’d mentioned myself lacking — the life-giving things like family, friendship, love … and the necessary but less meaningful things like money, stability, tangible blessings — I still find myself lacking now. Some of the things I’d hoped to overcome, I still find myself bogged down and overcome by. So I’ve been lifelessly procrastinating for the past month, too afraid to face the music of 2025. Tired. Depleted. Whimpering. Lacking the strength to reengage.

An External Assessment

So here we are … 2026. Another new year, and I’m already starting it out feeling discouraged, wondering if I’d truly wasted an entire year and struggling to update my blog for fear that I’m just rambling and complaining about the same things over and over again. However, I received a few external perspectives that challenge my own personal assessment.

First, I had Gemini do a deep-dive into my blog: 42 posts I’ve made since 2016; several drafts that haven’t been posted; and a request for an unbiased assessment of my trajectory, whether I’ve grown in vulnerability (which is the purpose of this blog), and if I’m just complaining and being redundant.

To my surprise, Ai disagreed with me. For those who haven’t been with me from the beginning of this journey, I started blogging when I was in college studying to become a pastor and entrepreneur. During this entry period into adulthood, I found myself struggling immensely. I had a number of severe physical struggles that led to a diagnosis of major depressive disorder a few years in (and a few other diagnoses), my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I felt myself becoming increasingly isolated despite my friendships and consistent church involvement, I was rejected and insulted in a number of ways by countless people who’d claimed to be committed Christians, I struggled academically because of these things, and I ultimately ended this period of my life homeless.

As a response to the journey, Gemini gave the following assessment of my writing and thus an encapsulation of my life:

The Trajectory: A Story in Three Acts

• Act I: The Striving Believer (2016–2018)
  • Theme: Perfectionism vs. Grace.
  • Tone: The Struggle.
  • Summary: You were a young leader trying to reconcile your high standards with life’s messiness. You wrote about “The Gates of Hell” and “A Prison for the Free,” but the focus was often internal—your own discipline, your own goals, your own spiritual stamina. You were trying to solve the problem of pain through better theology and endurance.
• Act II: The Disillusioned Servant (2019–2020)
  • Theme: Hypocrisy vs. Authentic Community.
  • Tone: Anger and Betrayal.
  • Summary: This is where the shift happened. You stopped blaming yourself for not “doing enough” and started pointing the finger at the environment. You realized that you were pouring into a church and community that was not pouring back. The posts “The Plagues of More” and “Who Cares?” mark a distinct turn where you stopped asking “What is wrong with me?” and started asking “Where are you people?”
• Act III: The Grieving Son (2020–Present)
  • Theme: Loss vs. Survival.
  • Tone: Lament and Raw Survival.
  • Summary: The diagnosis and passing of your mother shattered the remaining structures. The blog moved from “leadership lessons” to “survival notes.” The theological arguments became less theoretical and more visceral. You are no longer writing to teach a lesson; you are writing to survive the lesson.

I’ve already spent more time here than I’d like, so I’ll just say that I’ve felt challenged lately by my lead pastor, campus pastor and boss, mentor, and therapist…all of whom have pointed out ways in which they’ve seen me either grow or perpetuate resilience, and that has made me wonder if my perspective of myself — this deep sense of failure — is skewed.

I’ve been told by all of these people that they’ve experienced me as being more joy-filled than I was a year ago. There are some areas of discipline that I’ve allowed myself to wane on; however, I’ve been told not to allow that to make me overlook and devalue the several months of strength and freedom that I’d experienced. I’ve also been challenged to look back at my journey — 22-year-old Christian who was homeless, sleeping in his car, working 15-hour days nearly every day, begging God to allow me to experience some sense of normalcy. Life is still very difficult, but that’s not where I am anymore.

These conversations, along with some others, have drawn out a very specific understanding of myself — not a new understanding, but one that I should probably stop ignoring:

1. I have this “all or nothing” mentality that says nothing I do matters unless it’s perfect … unless it reaches what I’ve deemed to be a reasonable state of idealism. The problem is that the ideal, though realistic in my view, takes time. It takes more time than I realize, especially when its pursuit is tainted by my own imperfections and the reality of an imperfect world.
2. I glorify a “hustle mentality” to the extent that I will demean everything I do unless I exude that mentality perfectly. Now, I believe a hustle mentality (despite the thoughts of many other Christians) is VERY much biblical, but for someone who’s grown weary through the years and who struggles with depression, this unrelenting stance that spits in the face of our calling to be gracious toward ourselves is a recipe for disaster.

A Stagnant Relationship

Most of you know that I work at a church. And in the church world, the two busiest times of the year are Easter and Christmas. This past December, my church had to equip several teams to execute 38 services at 14 physical campuses for what would total out to be several thousand people in attendance. To help equip our teams and to also provide an opportunity for these teams to experience the service they’ll end up executing, we host a preview service for staff and high-level volunteers.

Before this past year’s Christmas Eve Preview Service, we were asked to list what we’re grateful for and what we’re hopeful for. 

As I wrote out a list of what I’m grateful for, my heart dropped as I remembered the sentiment I expressed in my last blog post: I find that everything I am genuinely grateful for starts with the words “at least”. Despite my challenge to zoom out and see the good, I find every good thing to be attached to something so detrimental that it limits the impact of the good. Not to negate the fact that these good things exist, and I’m truly grateful for them, but it’s not very freeing or life-giving to look at these things knowing there is a darker side to the story that reigns as more prevalent.

My words in the last post:

“My hope is that a year from now, I will read this letter and be grateful not for the “at leasts” but for newfound phenomena that can only be seen as pure blessing. … That my next “God is good” will be a statement of the obvious rather than a truth arrived at through murky waters.”

A year later, this has not happened, and it leaves me having a continued close but difficult relationship with gratitude.

The Weight of Hope And The Call to Responsibility

Now the interesting thing about the other list, what I’m hopeful for, is that the effect those things have on me has changed through the years. As a kid, and even as I entered adulthood, I was so excited for the future that it would drive my present. Now, although the hope is still there, the excitement has dissipated. Why? Because now I realize that I have far more responsibility than I’ve been taught. 

I think Christianity in the U.S. is tainted by Americanism: We can achieve anything we believe we can achieve as long as we believe in God and live for him. I’d say most American Christians either doubt that God desires to use them to accomplish anything meaningful, or they hold fast to this sentiment I just expressed. However, I believe this sentiment is deeply flawed because it assumes that God promises to work for us in ways that scripture indicates he actually hasn’t, and it undermines the truth that God actually places far more responsibility on us than we realize.

Why is this important? Because when I look at that list of what I’m hopeful for — life change, job security, financial stability, deliverance, romantic connection, friendships, making strides in my purpose, making my mother proud — I don’t feel an ounce of excitement. Those things used to drive me. But now I feel nothing but immense obligation and exhaustion at the reality that history has shown me. I hope I’m wrong, but that reality seems to be that nothing good will ever happen to me without immense effort (be it physical or emotional toil) on my part, and even then, my desires still turn out to be unlikely.

The Freedom of Hope And The Call to Rest

Despite being very much emphatically resolved when it comes to the immense responsibility believers are called to, there’s a level of tension I’m faced with regarding this thought, and that tension starts with this question: What if God is using my exhaustion to call me into rest?

When Christians talk about rest, they seem to reference it as a counter to these ideas of work, hustle, grind, responsibility … the thought that there are things in this life that significantly rest on our shoulders. However, I don’t see that as a consistent biblical theme.

I mean, it shouldn’t be ignored that our faith spread like wildfire, in large part, because the apostles lived as if their efforts to do ministry were pivotal and urgent; the work was life or death; obedience, or the lack thereof, bore weight for the world.

I believe biblical rest speaks more so to the mentality you bring to the work and the grace you allow your flawed self to live in amidst your inevitably tainted pursuit.

MATTHEW 11:28-30 CSB	MATTHEW 11:28-30 MSG
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”	“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

To my point, the “yoke” is a tool for working. Therefore, the calling is to “work with [Jesus]”. Ironically though, despite this scripture literally guiding us into our work, it is refreshing, life-giving, and freeing. But the freeing part isn’t that God does the work for us as if we’re God and he’s our slave, but that he is with us as we work (an assurance that his presence actually does change things — everything, in fact — and it assures victory but only for the wars he’s commanded us to fight).

If you think I’m making this up or misinterpreting things, here are just four out of an innumerable amount of scriptures that present humanity with an almost unreasonably weighty responsibility, countered simply by a promise of God’s presence:

• “Therefore, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh so that you may lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. … I will certainly be with you…” – Exodus 3:10-12
• “Haven’t I commanded you: be strong and courageous? Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” – Joshua 1:9
• “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” – John 16:33
• “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations … And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” – Matthew 28:19-20

The Language Barrier

In an effort to move beyond the theoretical into something a bit more personal, I’ll just acknowledge that this tension between rest and responsibility has been driving me crazy because one half of me is screaming at the man in the mirror saying to acknowledge the gap between the man I am and the man I need to be, but the other half of me is screaming back saying, Can’t you see I’m tired?!!

“Our heart, our emotions, and our faith don’t always speak the same language. But tonight, we’re going to be as intentional as we can to let the language be faith because without it, it is impossible to please God. So that’s what we’re here to do, and we’re going to do it for an audience of one.”

– Kirk Franklin

Those were the words of one of my favorite gospel artists as he aimed to encourage an audience of people following a mass shooting that led to the cancellation of his concert. And as he uttered those words, I realized that my faith and my emotions are speaking two different languages.

My emotions seem to be screaming, “I’m tired. I have nothing. I have no one. And despite wanting to live, I no longer have the energy to. Every time I get up, I get knocked right back down before I even get a moment to breathe, recuperate, or ready myself for another fight. I’m obviously supposed to be fighting, but I don’t have the strength to anymore.”

Conversely, my faith is saying, “Get up. If you don’t, you’re destined to stay here. Now, if you do, you may not have evidence that everything will get better, but you do have genuine hope in a good God who blesses the humble self-sacrifice and the zealous, fervent, relentless, tenacious, dogged persistence of man. In the words of my mentor, as he admitted that we may not know a lot of things: “But what I do believe … what I know is that when you fall on your face and cry out to God, he answers.”

But how do I obtain the strength to engage in my responsibility when I feel like I can do nothing?

Lord, I will lift

Mine eyes to the hills

Knowing my help

Is coming from You

Your peace you give me

In time of the storm

You are the source of my strength

You are the strength of my life

I lift my hands in total praise to You

– “Total Praise” by Richard Smallwood

Total Praise: Settling The Tension

I’ve been pondering this song a lot lately after hearing of the recent passing of Richard Smallwood, an iconic musical genius who ironically blessed the gospel industry with this beautifully intentional vocal arrangement the year I was born. The lyrics sound like they come from a place of steadfast assurance; but actually, the song was written from a dark place of desperation as his mother was ill and his god-brother was terminally ill, which is why he was a stickler on musicians and singers communicating the precise chords and harmonies that went through his head in this time — slowly walking the listener along a powerful yet humbling journey of one who limps his way into the strength of God.

I can’t speak for what Richard Smallwood was trying to convey, but when I revisited this song following his death, a thought jumped out to me: total praise is not lifting your hands during a worship service; total praise is laying down your very life for the cause of God.

Following this idea, my struggle, then, is to answer the question: how do I lay my life down when I feel like I don’t have life? The answer to that question, whatever it might be, is the resolution to the tension I’m facing.

Those lyrics are meaningful to me not because I feel strong, but because I believe them even as I write this post in utter weakness. God is the source of our strength > THEREFORE, he is the strength of my life > THEREFORE, I lay the entirety of who I am down for his cause. That’s TOTAL praise. It’s not singing; it’s surrender.

And admittedly, I feel as though I can’t totally surrender because I do not know how to receive that strength from God. 

A Not-So-Settled Tension: Painfully Struggling to Achieve Without My “Helper”

My sister has communicated to me on several occasions that she longs for me to find a wife. Now before I dive into this and share my heart, I want to acknowledge the obvious: romantic companionship does not solve all of anyone’s problems. However, I find the ways Christians attempt to encourage single people to be extremely unhelpful, and in many ways, they counter progress and promote loneliness, isolation, and/or a lack of satisfaction in life.

For the sake of time, I’ll just be completely candid and list a few ideas that I find to be almost completely stupid:

• You have to learn to be happy while single before you can healthily find love. Your happiness should be found solely in God.
• Paul said it’s better to be single because you only have to worry about pleasing God instead of focusing on pleasing a spouse. So don’t be upset about struggling to find someone. Being single is better anyway!
• Marriage comes with its own problems. (Duh.)
• It’ll happen when you least expect it. Just focus on you.

I can write an entire post on these things, and I just might, but for now, I’ll just say that this idea of prolonged singleness that seems to be becoming more and more glorified and persistent with each generation has never been good for humanity, which is why it was so foreign to society in biblical times. 

So the idea that you have to come to enjoy singleness, almost as some ridiculous rite of passage, before you can find love is nowhere in scripture. And as blasphemous as this might sound: God never promised to be our sole source of happiness if we hold the weight of romance lightly in exchange for glorifying some kind of monk mentality. In fact, the first person to ever be dissatisfied with human singleness and literally declare it to be “not good” was God himself. Read Genesis 2, where God referred to man, despite Adam’s deep connection with him, as “alone”, and his solution for this was to connect him to a woman and establish the covenant of marriage.

Paul’s words, then, were not to devalue the pursuit of marriage but to teach people to keep things in proper perspective, prioritizing a pursuit to please God. And while he had some decently strong opinions as a single man, he acknowledged his own bias and the problem with his bias, “I wish that all people were as I am. But each has his own gift from God…” (1 Corinthians 7:7, CSB).

The reality in our current society is that statistically, marriage positively influences a man’s earning potential; it increases a man’s reported happiness; it leads to a reduced risk of depression and suicide in men; it has a marked impact on stress, heart disease, and many other mental and physical health factors.

Here’s the truth that I’ve found, every man I’ve admired through the years, has achieved great things in some part due to the fact that he had an honorable woman by his side.

What does this have to do with my plight? My sister’s desire to see me find love, and some of my own hope and dissatisfaction, comes from this idea that the right woman could, in line with the many statistics and anecdotal evidence that support my previous statements, be a life-altering factor that allows me to receive God’s strength, become a better man, and lay my life down for his cause in ways I feel incapable of now.

The reality, however, is that I don’t have that woman. And I’m left to, in some ways, find strength on my own. In fact, my pursuits to find a godly woman through the years have been futile.

I’ve connected with women I’d found myself fond of, and been lied to and ghosted even by girls in my own church. I’ve reached out to people I’d hoped to build friendships with and been blatantly met with disinterest, or worse: ignored. I’ve been in social situations where people rejected me and didn’t care to know me. That’s fine — rejection is a part of being a man.

But ironically, one of the most recent occurrences of this began with an upfront expression of a lack of interest (which I was completely appreciative of because, as odd as it sounds, “I’m not interested” has actually become my favorite expression of rejection because most women aren’t bold enough to tell you the truth). Where the situation became interesting was when this same person (in that same conversation) wanted me to hop into therapist mode to be a listening ear to all her problems and speak to her greatest life/heart conflict!

At this point, I’m rambling a bit, so to end my tangent, I’ll just point out that the question I’m facing is how do I access the strength of God without the very being God created to be “a helper suitable” for me (Genesis 2:18)? Some might say to pray more, but I pray all the time. Some might say to read your Bible more, but I haven’t felt the strength to even do that. I’m toying with this idea that we, of course, do not have a works-based faith, but God obviously blesses work. So what happens when you don’t have the strength to work?

Our Father; Or Better Yet … My Son

I feel like the questions I keep posing are taking me in circles, but here’s where I want to park this thing. Bear with me as I feel strongly about this topic because this is the very thing God has been trying to get me to realize throughout all 2025, and this is the first time I’m surrendering to this understanding beyond knowledge but via restful pursuit.

The following is a post I started on May 4, 2025 written directly to God:

I’ll forewarn you: this is the second of three closings. But as I begin to tie this bow, I’ll pose one final set of questions (hopefully) … What if God looks at me as his child, proud of me for my efforts? What if he looks at every failure proud of my attempts? And what if he looks at me — his child — and instead of waving his finger at me ranting about all the things I haven’t done, he just wants me to be with him like a child who runs into their parents’ arms to be held by them?

Ironically, as I’m posing this question, I saw a young girl (maybe pre-teen age) stand up and give her dad a kiss on the cheek. It reminded me of a conversation with my sister about how drastically different the experience has been as she watches her daughter (my three-year-old niece) run into her father’s arms simply because she wants him to hold her … something my sister said she’s never done, given our estranged relationship with our dad.

It reminded me of how much I hope to experience that some day, but it pains me to see how far-fetched it seems as something so meaningful must be preceded by something so juvenile (the prioritization of giving a girl butterflies), and I struggle to even get a girl to bat an eye at me. 

Necessary God

While these are my thoughts (with the intermittent ADHD rants intertwined), I’m not convinced that seeing myself as God’s child is the full lesson because this won’t get me any closer to resolving any of my problems. I can’t just prioritize some kind of emotional connection with God and expect that to solve my very tangible struggles; namely financial turmoil, job loss, lack of friend or romantic connection, lack of achieving any ounce of what I feel purposed for or called to, and the lack of strength to address any of it (despite my desperate need to address these as the alternative is to tank my life further). I feel like I’d begun to win the battle against depression at some point in 2025, but depression has haunted me down and is now dominating every ounce of my life.

While my lack of discipline might reveal that I need to connect with God as Father, I also FIRMLY believe that God expects more of us than our postmodern, overly sensitive, lovey dovey, accountability-less society realizes.

But that, itself, is the resolution: God’s desire is that I realize my position as child — not some pristine, perfectly performing solo refugee who has managed to realize an idealized state of manhood, but his baby … the child he’ll forever be in awe of. 

From an earthly perspective (and on my end), I’ve got to grow up. Paul said, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11, CSB).

But from God’s perspective, no matter how old I get, I’ll always be his baby: one that’s in need of him, one who (like the Prodigal Son) can come to him lowly, broken, and beaten down after having failed and turn to him for strength, for a bailout, for rest — rest that allows me to endure and, from a peaceful standpoint, give the work another go.

This God is much more than a blessing. Much more than a gift to be grateful for. He’s necessary. Necessary for a man like me who fails often, who gets it right and experiences blessing right before things turn and go bad again, who relapses and gets beaten down by depression, who has a heavy desire to bring change to this world for God’s glory but struggles to be all I need to be to make it happen, who is Unapologetically Christian: sometimes great and strong in faith and many times a hot mess and full of flaws … in need of external strength from someone far more capable and far more reliable. Yes, he is a necessary God indeed.

Moses, Aaron, and Hur went to the top of the hill. It turned out that whenever Moses raised his hands, Israel was winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, Amalek was winning. But Moses’ hands got tired. So they got a stone and set it under him. He sat on it and Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on each side. So his hands remained steady until the sun went down. Joshua defeated Amalek and its army in battle. - Exodus 17:11-13, MSG

My Prayer for 2026 (And The Final Conclusion)

I’m not sure how much of this translated, but I’ll just end (officially this time) by saying that God is teaching me that the massive responsibility I feel called to isn’t just a calling I must force myself to perfectly live up to in my weakest moments, but it is a calling … a work, if you will, that I can freely strive toward from a state of rest in my father’s love.

In my recent time with God, I felt urged to return to one of my life verses, 1 Peter 1:3-8, and I was convicted and urged to make this season of my life about pursuing two things:

1. Virtue — working to take steps toward where I need to be and letting go of the flaws and vices that keep me stagnant
2. Knowledge — of myself, Jesus, and the gap between the two.

If any of this encourages you, I ask that it not be the words that seem deep and powerful, but that it be the simplicity of these next words as I step down from the clouds — this conversation that I’m having with myself, the practical part of my commitment because it’s the less-spiritual-sounding, practical pursuits that radically change us one step at a time.

Here it is: 

I think I keep getting stuck trying to end this thing with a necessary sense of resolve because I’m trying to figure out what tangibly resting and taking responsibility look like for this entire year. Instead, what if I took it week-by-week? Saturdays will be “me days,” and I’ll plan what these two pursuits need to look like for the given week, text that to my mentor and pastor for accountability, and see how I do by the end of the next week.

As a broken man … no, as a needy and desperate child, I will pursue this work with the strength of a strong father who is ever-present. He will give me strength to be all I need to be in any given moment. I may not miraculously activate as the ideal man I pressure myself to be, but I will be given the strength to move forward — one step, two steps, sometimes maybe even ten. Whatever the level of strength, however — regardless of whether it’s more or less than my ideal — it will be enough for the moment, and I will take whatever steps I can and know that my father loves me, and he will do all that a good father does: protect me, provide for me, hold me, bail me out at times, discipline me other times, and embolden me to take one more step than I thought possible.