Equanimity

I have never been very good at halfway.

For as long as I can remember, I have taken the risk, swung for the fence, and gone all in. I did not want to play unless I believed there was a championship on the other side.

I was either all in or all out.

Nothing in between.

In hindsight, that is a great and terrible quality all at once.

Why not drive the McLaren more than 200 miles per hour?

Why not risk $100,000 on a single hand of blackjack?

Why not take an idea out of my head at breakfast and have an entire business running by lunch?

Why not have one delicious drink at the end of a good day to celebrate—or at the end of a bad day to make it disappear?

Why not build an amazing friendship—or burn the bridge so completely that there is no possibility left on the other side?

Why not?

Why not?

Why not?

Underneath all of it was a belief I still carry today:

God’s got me.

So why not?

It took years—and some very expensive lessons—to understand that “God’s got me” can be either a confession of faith or an excuse for recklessness.

The difference is who chose the direction.

When I decide what I want, run at it full speed, ignore wisdom, and expect God to protect me from every consequence, that is not obedience.

That is presumption wearing a Christian T-shirt.

But when God gives the direction and I move before fear leaves, trusting Him with the outcome—that is faith.

I had to learn the difference between moving fast because I could and moving boldly because He said to.

One of the lessons came with a $12 million price tag.

The Match.com of Private Equity

Years ago, I attended a networking event in Chicago for a business I was building called Deal Exchange.

The idea was simple—at least it sounded simple in my head.

There were people with investment funds and lending departments. They had money that needed somewhere productive to go. On the other side were business owners and ventures that needed capital to grow, acquire another company, complete a transaction, or sell.

Deal Exchange would connect them.

We would become the Match.com of private equity.

From early in life, I have felt naturally—or supernaturally—pulled into rooms filled with influential people. I believed God had given me the ability to connect people, recognize opportunities, and make introductions that could change the direction of a business.

So when I felt the direction to build Deal Exchange, I thought:

What a perfect way to multiply my time, use my relationships, and steward God’s blessing. Connect the right people. Help a deal happen. Create value. Share in the upside.

Could it really be that simple?

It turns out it was not.

I did what I usually did: I ran at full speed.

Ready. Fire. Aim.

Sometimes I joked that I did not need to aim if what I was firing was big enough. Because I had made my living in technology and systems, I would also joke that between God and automation, I barely had to aim anymore.

That line is funny right up until you hit something you never intended to hit.

In a very short time, Deal Exchange had relationships with around twelve private equity groups and five debt lenders. We had identified roughly $3 billion in possible opportunities.

There was no time to go slowly—or at least that was what I told myself.

If even a fraction of the opportunities closed under the agreements being discussed, the fees could have reached eight figures.

For every attorney reading this, I now understand why several words in that sentence should make you nervous.

Back then, I did not.

Everything was going great.

Until it was not.

The Foundation Under the Speed

Sometimes when you build too fast, you do not realize the foundation was never finished.

I had relationships. I had opportunities. I had systems. I had momentum.

What I did not have was a healthy respect for the laws, licenses, documentation, contracts, disclosures, and boundaries surrounding securities, investments, lending, and transaction-based compensation.

The SEC, FTC, FBI, FINRA, and all those other inconvenient acronyms do not disappear because your intentions feel good.

Some resistance may be spiritual attack.

Some hardship is the natural consequence of moving faster than wisdom.

Sometimes both arrive at the same time.

Calling every consequence an attack can keep us from learning what the consequence came to teach.

I was pursuing the home run and treating foundational safeguards like little things. But foundations are made of little things. Skip enough of them and eventually the weight above you finds the weakness below you.

Faith does not eliminate due diligence.

God’s protection is not permission to ignore wisdom.

And “God told me” should never become a shortcut around accountability.

One Introduction

In the middle of all that connecting, I introduced two parties.

One company needed money. One person presented himself as a lender with access to money. I allowed the strength of the relationships to substitute for the depth of the diligence.

I was focused on connecting people and moving on to the next opportunity. I did not stay involved in the transaction, the terms, the players, or what happened afterward.

As I remember it, I had no commission agreement on that specific deal. There was no payment coming to me from either side. I had nothing to gain financially.

It was simply an introduction born from the world I had built.

Four months later, I learned that the parties had entered a different investment opportunity without my knowledge. It sounded too good to be true, but it also sounded like it could solve major problems if it worked.

Only Jesus can do that.

The investment failed. The money was gone. What had been presented as an opportunity was later alleged to be a fraudulent Ponzi scheme.

The pressure became unbearable for one of the central men involved, and he died by suicide.

I will not reduce his death to a slogan. I will not pretend to know everything happening in his mind, and I will not use his death as proof that he lacked faith or God’s love.

I only know that darkness convinced him there was no way forward.

I wish I could have reached him before that decision. I wish I could have told him that a situation can feel final without actually being the end of the story.

I know that because I have been there too.

I would be lying if I said I had never been suicidal, depressed, or isolated. I have been placed under suicide watch. I have been involuntarily committed to mental hospitals. I have spent hours—and entire nights—crying in front of Danielle because I could not see a way through what was happening around me or inside me.

But I have learned that the smallest amount of light can begin pushing back an enormous amount of darkness.

Sometimes that light is a prayer.

Sometimes it is your wife sitting with you while you fall apart.

Sometimes it is finally telling someone the truth.

Sometimes it is simply believing that because God is still present, the story cannot be over.

I have been in bad places physically, mentally, legally, financially, and spiritually. If one of the land mines I stepped on helps someone else move with more wisdom, I count that as a win. If this story gives one person hope, that is a win. If even a little light enters someone’s darkness, that is a major victory.

The $12 Million Weight

The investor wanted his money back, and rightfully so.

The primary alleged wrongdoer was gone, so the investor sued practically everyone and everything that had touched the transaction.

That included me.

It included Deal Exchange.

I was served with a lawsuit seeking approximately $4 million.

I took it hard.

I shut Deal Exchange down. I stopped connecting people. I walked away from the marketplace role I believed I had been given because the liability of dealing with human beings suddenly felt larger than the blessing of helping them.

As I prayed, I kept hearing the same direction:

Do not fight.

Do not let this consume you.

I have it.

The not-fighting part was difficult.

The not-stressing part was nearly impossible.

I did not mount a defense, and the roughly $4 million civil claim eventually became an enforceable judgment of approximately $12 million.

To be precise, I did not “plead guilty.” This was a civil matter. I defaulted.

I understand the difference now.

The judgment followed me for years.

Every time I searched my name online and saw the lawsuit, I thought:

God, You said You wanted me to have an influential life. How am I supposed to influence anyone with this hanging over my name?

It felt like a cloud over my future and an anchor tied to my past.

God’s answer stayed consistent:

I have it.

Do you trust Me?

Some days, “yes” came easily.

Other days, it came through clenched teeth.

What Equanimity Is Not

Equanimity means emotional calmness and balance, especially in difficult circumstances.

That does not describe how I felt through much of this story.

I was not calm. I was a ball of stress, fear, frustration, anger, and negativity. I believed God had me, but I kept checking whether He had dropped me.

Equanimity is not pretending the lawsuit does not exist.

It is not emotional numbness.

It is not passivity, denial, or spiritual language used to avoid responsibility.

Biblical peace tells the truth about the fire while refusing to let the fire become God.

It is the ability to say:

This is serious.

This may hurt.

I may have contributed to it.

I do not yet know how it ends.

But God is still God, and I can take the next faithful step without surrendering my mind to fear.

That is the balance I was learning.

Not the balance of a man who had everything under control.

The balance of a man learning to trust the One who did.

It Is Time to Fight

In July 2026, after years of carrying the judgment, I felt prompted to begin connecting people in the marketplace again.

The instruction was simple: stop allowing fear and liability to bury the gift. Use the Rolodex. Make the introduction. Help people. Serve with a cheerful heart.

So I did.

I attacked the fear by returning to the assignment.

I stopped letting one painful experience determine whether God could use the influence He had given me.

Forty-eight hours after I started making connections again, my attention returned to Deal Exchange and the lawsuit.

This time, the direction was different:

It is time to fight.

Adrenaline surged through me. My mind immediately produced visions of arguments, attacks, and pummeling people.

Then God corrected me:

Let Me rephrase that.

It is time for Me to fight for you.

Cue the wide-eyed, mouth-shut emoji.

That was the moment the old version of me had to sit down.

My version of fighting was force.

God’s version began with peace.

The next direction was to find an attorney.

Because of my previous legal experiences, I had a long list of lawyers to work with—and a few to run from.

I knew counsel could require a $5,000 to $10,000 retainer just to begin. Then I felt another direction: offer $5,000 to make the judgment go away.

I leaned back in my chair and laughed.

In what world does an opposing party accept $5,000 to resolve a $12 million judgment?

I had built much of my life around sales and negotiation. Even to me, this sounded crazy.

But while I was trying to calculate whether the anchor could possibly hold, God had already gone ahead of me.

Through counsel, the offer was made.

The other attorney responded that if the $5,000 was sent that day, they would consider the matter closed.

I nearly fell out of my chair.

I was speechless.

In what world does a $12 million judgment close for $5,000?

In what world do you receive what feels like a $12 million voucher—a get-out-of-jail-free card that, frankly, would have been useful a few times earlier in my life?

I do not call that profit.

I call it freedom.

After several minutes of dumbfounded silence, I walked into our bedroom to tell Danielle.

I can honestly say I walked in like a different person.

The judgment had weighed on my name, my future, my calling, and my nervous system for years. Suddenly the weight was gone.

The amount changed in a day.

The man carrying it changed too.

Walking in the Light

First John 1:7 says that if we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin.

All sin.

The intentional sin.

The accidental sin.

The reckless decision.

The missed warning.

The foundation we failed to build.

The thing we did and the thing we left undone.

Walking in the light does not mean rewriting the story to make ourselves look innocent.

It means telling the truth.

I moved too fast.

I did not understand the boundaries of the business I was building.

I trusted relationships where diligence was required.

I allowed fear to shut down a gift God still intended to use.

I spent years saying I trusted God while carrying the stress as though the outcome still depended entirely on me.

The blood of Jesus does not merely cover the polished version of our testimony. It purifies what we finally bring into the light.

“All” does not mean consequences never come. It does not mean wisdom, repentance, restitution, accountability, or changed behavior no longer matter.

It means our worst chapter does not outrank the cross.

We can tell the truth without being destroyed by shame.

We can face what happened without allowing it to name us forever.

We can receive forgiveness, learn the lesson, and walk in a new direction.

Risk Is Not the Virtue

I am still a risk taker.

I still believe God has me.

I still believe faith will ask us to do things that look foolish to people who cannot see the direction we received.

But over time, I have realized that risk is not the virtue.

Obedience is.

Driving fast is not faith because it is dangerous.

Betting big is not faith because the outcome is uncertain.

Building quickly is not faith because everyone else thinks it cannot be done.

The dangerous life is not doing whatever you want because God can rescue you.

The dangerous life is doing what God asks because you trust Him with the outcome.

Sometimes He will say go.

Sometimes He will say stop.

Sometimes He will say do not fight.

And sometimes, years later, He will say:

Now it is time for Me to fight for you.

Equanimity is the peace to obey all four instructions.

It is not confidence in my ability to land every punch, close every deal, or negotiate every outcome.

It is confidence that I do not have to manufacture the ending.

My responsibility is to walk in the light, tell the truth, build with wisdom, listen for direction, and take the next faithful step.

God is responsible for being God.

For years, the judgment looked like evidence that my assignment was over.

Instead, it became the place where God taught me how to carry the assignment differently.

Slower when wisdom requires it.

Faster when obedience demands it.

Calm enough to hear the difference.

Tell the truth.

Name the next faithful step.

Move before fear leaves.

And when God says He will fight for you, stop swinging long enough to let Him.

That is equanimity.

That is walking in the light.

That is what it means to feel dangerous without being ruled by danger.

Scripture to Carry

“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light … the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” — 1 John 1:7

“The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” — Exodus 14:14

“Desire without knowledge is not good—how much more will hasty feet miss the way!” — Proverbs 19:2

A Short Prayer

Jesus, bring every hidden thing in me into Your light. Forgive the ways I have confused confidence with obedience, speed with faith, and consequences with attacks. Give me the humility to build with wisdom, the courage to move when You speak, and the peace to be still when You say You will fight for me. Purify what I cannot repair by myself, redeem what I thought had disqualified me, and teach me to trust You with the outcome. Amen.

Listen

“Nothing but the Blood of Jesus” — Robert Lowry
Theme: Nothing we achieve, negotiate, hide, or repair can make us whole. Cleansing and restoration begin with Jesus.

A Necessary Note

If this story touches a place where you are considering suicide or believe there is no way forward, do not stay alone with it. Tell someone you trust immediately and seek urgent professional or emergency support. A situation can feel final without being the end of your story.