How I Got Here
Danny —
You keep trying to explain your journey, and it always comes out too long, too layered, too much. So here it is simple. The version you can say out loud.
When you were young, you knew you were a pretty good kid. There wasn’t much you would change about your behavior. You prayed. You meant it. You were close to the Lord.
Until one day you realized what you were actually saying in the Lord’s Prayer — forgive me as I forgive others. And you weren’t forgiving others. Not really.
So you did what any pretty good kid would do. You just stopped praying that part. Problem solved. Still a pretty good kid. Still close to the Lord.
Then one day you said it. The real thing. Lord, I surrender my life to you.
And the funniest thing happened — you fell apart. Addictions you didn’t know you had. Standards you’d been keeping just fine suddenly impossible. Not just unable to live up to them. You didn’t even want to. The pretty good kid was gone.
But somebody you cared about wanted you to change. She said if you didn’t, she didn’t want to be your friend anymore.
So you went to the Lord — in tears, broken — and you told Him the truth. I know I need to change. But I don’t even want to. If I’m going to change, You are going to have to change my heart.
And He did.
You kept your friend. You learned something you didn’t expect. But what followed wasn’t clarity. It was absolute confusion. Because this was not the God you thought you knew. The pretty good kid’s God made sense. This God didn’t.
So you started seeking the True God.
And God blessed you. You were a producer. You built things — good things — and He multiplied the work of your hands. And you gave it back to Him. Life was good.
Until God told you something you didn’t want to hear. You are not a producer. He is the producer. You are not the source. He is the source.
Not in those words. And not with immediate changes. It took decades. Decades of still operating as the source. Still producing. Still thinking the blessing was about the work of your hands.
But here is where you are now.
The rest you have — your Sabbath rest, the one you actually live — is because you finally know. You are not a producer. You are a receiver. Totally dependent on your Lord, who has done it all.
That is the source of the peace and joy that flows through you. Not effort. Not production. Not being a pretty good kid.
Just a man who ran out of his own strength and found that God had been the source all along.
Don’t forget that either.