71 notes
The Few in the Room
Restoration has taught me to value a few trusted people who pray, keep confidence, and love me enough to hold me accountable for change.
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The Walk Before the Words
My children join me when I start walking. That simple observation challenged how I use authority, earn trust, and help other people lead.
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The Risk Wasn’t Mine to Take
Someone else’s breakthrough was never my assignment. Comparing my story to his did not give me permission to gamble money entrusted to me.
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Slow Enough to See
Constant decisions can quietly exhaust us. I am learning to pause with a plan, reduce needless choices, and move with wisdom instead of pressure.
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What Not to Inherit
My children do not need to inherit my mistakes. They need honest lessons, a better example, and the freedom to build wisely beyond where I began.
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Good for Whom?
I used to measure opportunity by what it could produce. Galatians 6:10 asks a harder question: who does it serve, and what does faithfulness require today?
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Use the Gate
I kept trying to secure a full life by controlling it. Jesus offers another way: come through the gate, follow the Shepherd, and learn to live with open hands.
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The Rock and The Cross
Some burdens belong to my responsibility. Others belong to my need for control. Christ teaches me the difference between faithful work and saving myself.
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Needed, but Not Known
I could solve a problem and still disappear from my own home. The hidden years exposed how being useful had become a substitute for being known.
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The Last Entry
One day there will be a last Field Note. Until then, I want to stop postponing love, truth, and the faithful choices available today.
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Before the First Invoice
Before my first consulting invoice, I learned to stack sod, read maps, repair cars, and carry the weight of another person’s trust.
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Three Questions Before Forever
Three honest questions turned a snowy Wyoming season into the beginning of a covenant neither of us could yet see.
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The Inheritance That Can’t Be Spent
A bank account can be spent and a business can be sold. The faith and grit to do hard things can become a generational inheritance. I do not want to leave my children a life without friction. I want to leave them the faith, judgment, and holy grit to face it.
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The Permission I Was Praying For.
The first drink did not prove I was free. It taught the addiction how to knock politely.
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The Meeting After the Meeting
If the truth changes after the meeting, there was never agreement in the meeting. The boardroom was filled with nodding heads. That should have been my first warning.
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Don’t Offer the Intruder Tea
Not every thought deserves a seat at your table. Some of the most dangerous battles I have ever fought never made a sound.
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The Rules That Raise Us
The rules we repeat to our children become the mirror God uses to keep raising us.
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The God Complex on Payday
Payroll made me responsible to people. It never made me their provider.
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The Pillars of Forever
God brought us together in 58 days. Day 59 began the work of building a house strong enough to carry generations.
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I Never Missed Office Hours
I started showing up to God’s office hours for a better grade. I stayed because knowing the Teacher became the greater win.
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The Armor Was Made for Walking
The armor of God does not promise an easy road. It keeps the road from deciding who you become while you walk it.
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Two Boats, a Helicopter, and a Frog
The signs were ordinary... a frog, hummingbirds, and dragonflies. Their timing taught me to keep my eyes open.
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Your Before Picture Is Complete
I won nearly $10,000 and still lost the day. The drive home showed me the before picture was complete.
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The Breath We Waited For
Before Titus ever took a breath, words had already been spoken over his life. Some had to be broken. Others helped us believe until his first cry finally filled the room.
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Don’t Touch Me in Jesus’ Name
Prayer should never require someone to surrender the boundaries that wisdom, experience, or healing taught them to protect.
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Before You Call It Obedience
Conviction can sound holy while hiding fear, greed, or pride. Before I call it obedience, I must test the voice and own the outcome.
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The Man I Kept Punishing
I called it future Waldon’s problem, but Danielle paid immediately. I bought today’s comfort with tomorrow’s peace and her trust.
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The Pit That Agreed With Me
I can tell the truth about what happened to me without giving it the authority to tell me who I am. Pain may explain me, but it cannot own me
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The Wrong Hand Raise
I never lost the ability to visualize victory. I spent years training to win the wrong match—and had to give God the picture.
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The War Was Never the Trophy
The war was never the trophy. The trophy was becoming the kind of man who could walk through war and still bring life and peace home with him.
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The Wreck
I believed speed could straighten almost anything until a cornfield taught me that protection is not permission to keep creating danger.
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Ambassador Fenster
Every fear-driven no drew a border around my life. The territory did not disappear... I simply refused to walk into it.
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The Mistress I Never Touched
Fifty-eight days got us to an altar. The years since have taught me that covenant is choosing the same person again after every mistress has asked to be chosen first.
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The Rock That Held Me
I thought “The Time Is Now” meant build faster. In a dark cave years later, I finally understood the word that had awakened me.
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The Dynamite in My Hands
There were times I could have stopped digging by asking for help. Instead, pride handed me dynamite and convinced me I could blast my way out.
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The Weight I Didn’t Need
My routine failed hours before a federal ruling. I thought I lacked discipline. Then I realized I had been adding weight God never asked me to carry.
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The Rope I Refused
The first risk I remember taking was not starting a business. It was disappointing my father and refusing the future he imagined.
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The Superpower I Had to Surrender
The extra burst I learned to use for work, athletics, conflict, and survival until Danielle exposed what it was actually costing.
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For The One
I began writing to find freedom. Now I write for the one who feels lost and unseen because one life is enough to make the truth worth telling.
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The Second Arrow, the First Yes
Charlotte was our second arrow, but she became the child of many firsts: our first home birth, the first baby I delivered with my own hands, and now the first of our children to choose baptism. As she stepped into the water, I saw the newborn I once held in a snowy Illinois home, the little girl who used to gather her siblings around the fireplace and lead church with a Bible in her hands, and the daughter now making a decision I could never make for her. The best present I can give my children is my presence but even my presence has a purpose.
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The Cell Without Walls
Growing up, we had a horse who would remain inside the barn or corral even when the gates were left open. We also had dogs that stayed close even after the chain was removed. The physical restraints were no longer holding them, but their familiar boundaries remained. For approximately four years, I have done something similar: long before any court imposed a sentence, I built a cell in my mind and began serving the worst outcome I could imagine.
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The Problem With Being the Solution
I have been solving problems for as long as I can remember. What began as resourcefulness on a ranch eventually became part of my identity, my business value, and the reason people trusted me with increasingly difficult situations. The gift was real. So was the danger. My desire to help mixed with speed, ambition, money, and the need to remain the man with the answer. I eventually learned that a good intention cannot make a bad method righteous—and that I was never supposed to become anyone’s savior.
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The Assignment Without a Name
I have lived multiple lives in thirty-eight years and still cannot give God’s specific purpose for my life a perfect name. But when I stopped searching only for a title and looked at what He repeatedly placed in my hands, the people He repeatedly placed within reach, and the obedience He kept requiring, the assignment was no longer absent. It was already happening.
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Mastery Without the Medal
I never brought home the bear. The partnership never became the empire we imagined. But I carried the mastery out of both pursuits. We may not know why an outcome was withheld, but we can recognize that God did not waste the preparation.
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Today
Regret keeps trying to pull me backward. Worry keeps trying to drag me into a future that has not happened. I am learning that peace does not require me to understand every attack or trial. I have repented for the past and surrendered the future. Today is what remains to obey.
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Feathers
For weeks, white feathers appeared in my right pocket—inside shorts, golf pants, swim trunks, and clothes that had never been worn in our current home. I had asked God to let me know that His protection surrounded my family, but eventually I wondered whether I was imagining the answer. Then my seven-year-old son walked into the dining room.
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Sheepdog
Hours after hearing a message about sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, I watched a police chase end in a violent interstate crash. The driver climbed from a wrecked van and ran toward a fence. I drove into the ditch, tackled him, held him at gunpoint, and waited for law enforcement.
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Spank Butt, Spank Butt!
My oldest daughter stood up in the pool, looked me straight in the eyes, and splashed me again. In an instant, I remembered the toddler who once stood in the bathtub and announced, “Spank butt! Spank butt!” as though she were volunteering for the consequence. We laughed and gave her another chance. Years later, that memory taught me something I had missed about fatherhood, discipline, and the God who loves His children too much to leave them untrained.
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A Single Yes
Then one uncomfortable yes took me from Wyoming to Orlando, introduced me to a woman I thought had stolen my ticket money, put me in a van with seven women, and began a love story that led from hello to “I do” in 58 days. The best thing waiting outside my comfort zone was not personal growth. It was Danielle.
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The Talent I Could Not Bury
God did not give me those abilities so I could prove I was great. He entrusted them to me so I could become faithful.
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Exposing Snakes
A wildfire once burned tens of thousands of acres around our Wyoming ranch. The fire exposed: snakes that had once disappeared into the sagebrush suddenly shining against the burned ground. The fire did not create the threat. It removed its camouflage.
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Provide & Protect
The best decisions of my life have done two things at once: they provided for the people I love and protected what God entrusted to us. The worst decisions usually promised one while quietly destroying the other.
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When the Battle Comes Home
The battle came into our bodies, our sleep, our marriage, and our children’s bedrooms. I learned that spiritual authority is not panic with Christian vocabulary. It is standing in the victory of Jesus while refusing to surrender.
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When Nobody Applauded
Some of the most important assignments God gives us happen without a stage, headline, or audience. From giving away money and time to funding free masterminds, I learned that faithful completion carries a reward public recognition never could: hearing God say, “Well done.”
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Tomorrow
Tomorrow never arrives. Addiction offered relief today and promised freedom tomorrow. God reversed the arrangement. Freedom began when I stopped trying to win forever and learned to obey Him today.
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The High-Stakes Life
The first casino win did not feel like temptation. It felt like confirmation. I entered with $200, sat beside a man who appeared to be carrying thoughts of suicide, watched his entire posture change as he recovered his losses, and walked out with nearly $2,600. A year later, casino hosts knew my name, hundreds of thousands of dollars could move across a table in one night, and I was convinced I was always one good session away from getting back on top.
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Why [Not] Me?
“Why me?” can be an honest cry from pain or a prison built from comparison and self-pity. “Why not me?” can be ego chasing somebody else’s success or surrender making itself available to God. The words are similar. The direction is completely different.
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My Name Is a Headline
I built an early career learning how to control what people found when they searched a name. Then my own company failed, a lawsuit followed, and the results I wanted buried became impossible to escape. God did not tell me to erase the headline. He told me to make things right, leave the result where people could see it, and trust Him with the full story.
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The Black Sheep
I spent years changing colors to belong. What I once called being different, God eventually taught me to call being set apart. The goal is not to become different for attention or isolated by rejection. It is to belong so completely to the Shepherd that the flock’s approval no longer has veto power over your obedience.
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Happiness
Happiness becomes a moving goalpost when we attach it to the next relationship, achievement, purchase, or outcome. The picture will keep changing, but the Source does not. Happiness is not the picture. It is the posture of a heart that knows God is present and the story is not over.
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His Name Is James
I woke because of a presence in our bedroom. Duncan was already on full alert, staring into the corner. That was where I saw the warrior whose name God would later reveal through a verse: James 1:22.
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And Then the Lights Went Out (right after writing Dangerous to Darkness)
Earlier that day, I published Dangerous to Darkness. Then, while our church prayed against witchcraft and rebellion, there was a loud pop and every light went out. Darkness changed the conditions—but it could not stop the prayer, silence the message, or extinguish the Light.
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Two Is One
Two is one and one is none taught me to eliminate the failures I could foresee. Two destroyed tires taught me something deeper: preparation handles what I can see, but God’s providence carries me through what I never saw coming.
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Dangerous to Darkness
Darkness does not fear the loudest man in the room. It fears the man who has nothing left to prove, protect, purchase, hide, or control because everything in him has been surrendered and made available to God.
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The Time Is Now
I do not need sight to confirm what faith has already heard. I know the Shepherd’s voice. When He gives me the next step, I move—before fear, logic, consequences, or public opinion can negotiate me out of obedience.
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Silence
Every season of my life has contained silence. In the good ones, I invited God into it and found solitude. In the darkest ones, I locked the door, listened only to myself, and called it strength.
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The Wingprint
At 30, I thought the miracle meant I was bulletproof. Looking back, I know it meant our assignment was not finished.
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Equanimity
The old version of me thought faith meant God would protect me while I moved at full speed. The mature version knows that peace comes from moving when God says move—and letting Him determine the outcome.
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Hypocrite
The next generation does not need perfect parents. It needs honest parents who are willing to let Jesus expose the pattern, change their direction, and lead from the front.
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Forever Was Impossible. Today Was Enough.
I could not imagine never drinking again. I could imagine waiting until tomorrow. Then tomorrow became another decision.
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Why the First Book Had to Come First
A private promise leaves room to disappear. This book makes the promise public—and makes every story after it something I now have to face.
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