The Assignment Without a Name

Thirty-Eight Years and Still Looking

I have lived multiple lives in thirty-eight years.

I have been an athlete, a student who stayed in college for years longer than expected, an entrepreneur, a consultant, a marketer, a trainer, a gambler, an addict, a husband, a father, a man in the headlines, a man hiding from the headlines, and a man finally learning how to tell the truth about all of it.

I have lived through seasons of blessing and seasons created by my own errors.

I have experienced trials and triumphs, lawsuits and settlements, sickness and healing, addiction and sobriety, public wins and private collapse. I have made money, lost money, helped people, hurt people, solved problems, created problems, taken risks that multiplied what was in my hands, and taken risks that endangered what I had been trusted to protect.

I have felt physically attacked, mentally trapped, and spiritually surrounded.

I have watched situations move through resolution, consequence, restoration, and forms of redemption I could not have manufactured.

I have gone from being visible to becoming almost completely silent. I have spent years in what I called a mental jail while wondering whether an actual prison cell might still be waiting somewhere in my future.

After all of that, I would like to say the purpose is obvious.

I would like to point to one moment, one calling, one role, one business, one ministry, one book, or one assignment and say, “There it is. That is the reason God made me.”

I can't honestly say that "yet".

Through all the lives, lessons, miracles, mistakes, battles, and blessings, I still have not reached a season that felt like the complete revelation of God’s purpose for my life.

That is difficult to admit because purpose has become another measurement people use to prove that they are progressing spiritually. We hear testimonies from people who say they found their calling, stepped into their assignment, and suddenly understood why every previous chapter happened. Their life appears to form a clean line from pain to preparation to platform.

Mine has rarely looked that clean.

The line doubles back. It passes through places I entered because of obedience and places I entered because of ego. It includes doors God opened, doors I forced, and doors I still cannot confidently explain. It includes skills that became useful years later and damage that required repentance long before it could become a testimony.

So I am still looking.

But I am beginning to realize I may have been looking for the wrong kind of answer.

Waiting for the Title

When I think about purpose, my mind naturally wants a title.

Builder. Leader. Consultant. Provider. Protector. Author. Speaker. Entrepreneur. Problem-solver. Teacher. Witness. Husband. Father.

Each title contains something true. None feels large enough to hold the entire assignment.

A title is attractive because it makes purpose sound settled. Once I have the right noun, I can build around it. I can put it on a website, explain it in a sentence, create a plan, measure progress, and know whether I am winning.

That approach works well in business. If the role is defined, the responsibilities can be organized. If the destination is known, the route can be planned. If the score is visible, effort can be adjusted.

But God has rarely handed me the complete organization chart for my life.

More often, He has given me a verb.

Go.

Give.

Build.

Stop.

Repay.

Apologize.

Leave it where people can see it.

Tell the truth.

Help this person.

Protect what is in front of you.

Write the story.

Wait.

Move.

Surrender.

Obey.

I kept asking for the title of my life while God kept giving me the next verb.

Perhaps the assignment has felt unnamed because I wanted God to define the entire future while He was asking me to become faithful inside the next instruction.

Three Questions

The question I am carrying now has three parts:

What has God repeatedly placed in my hands, who has He repeatedly placed in my path, and what kind of obedience does He keep asking from me?

The question does not demand that I predict the future. It asks me to examine the pattern.

Purpose may include a dramatic future assignment, but it should leave evidence in the present. If God has been preparing me, there should be something He repeatedly trusts me to carry. There should be people I repeatedly find myself able to serve. There should be a form of obedience that keeps returning even when the setting changes.

When I answer honestly, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

What He Keeps Placing in My Hands

God repeatedly places problems in my hands.

Not theoretical problems. Messy ones. Businesses that need to be built, repaired, simplified, or scaled. Leaders who can see the destination but cannot organize the road. Systems that are scattered. Teams that need clarity. Opportunities that require someone to look at what appears complicated and find the next move.

That pattern appeared long before I had language for calling. Athletics taught me how to read a field, anticipate movement, accept pressure, and make decisions while other people were still reacting. Entrepreneurship gave those instincts another arena. Consulting turned them into service. Negotiation taught me how to slow an argument down, discover what actually mattered, and find a path through competing interests.

The settings changed, but the assignment inside the setting often remained the same: enter confusion, identify the problem, create movement, and help people act.

God has also repeatedly placed risk in my hands.

Risk is not automatically obedience. Some of my risks were faithful. Some were reckless. Some multiplied what I had been entrusted. Others placed the people and resources I was supposed to protect in danger. My appetite for risk is not proof of calling. It is a capacity that requires government.

That may be part of why Risk Is Required (potentially the 11th book in the series) belongs in the series.

The parable of the talents does not celebrate motion for the sake of motion. It confronts fearful burial and requires faithful stewardship.

A willingness to risk can serve the Kingdom when it is surrendered. The same willingness can create wreckage when ego, addiction, urgency, or the need to prove something takes control.

God has repeatedly placed people’s problems in my hands, but He has also placed my own failures there.

The lawsuits. The damaged relationships. The financial consequences. The addiction. The decisions I defended for too long. The parts of my name and story I wanted buried. Those were not gifts in the same sense as leadership or communication. God was not the author of my sin, and redemption does not require calling destruction good.

But once those consequences existed, He placed responsibility in my hands.

Tell the truth.

Make right what can be made right.

Repay what is owed.

Accept what cannot be rewritten.

Stop using intent to erase impact.

Walk somebody else around the land mine after admitting that I was the one who stepped on it.

The ability to help others through trials did not come only from studying success.

Some of it came from surviving failure without being permitted to hide the lesson.

The Battles Were Not the People

When I first answered the question, “Who has God repeatedly placed in my path?” I did not name people.

I named physical, mental, and spiritual attacks. I named resolution, retribution, restoration, and the process of becoming raw and real enough to reach an end goal.

Those are experiences.

They are not people.

That distinction stopped me.

The battles have occupied so much space in my vision that I can sometimes see them before I see the person standing on the other side. I remember the accusation, the threat, the pressure, the illness, the email, the judgment, the fear, and the sleepless night. I remember what had to be survived.

But perhaps the battles were preparation while the people were the assignment.

Who keeps appearing?

Business owners with a real problem and too many disconnected answers.

Leaders who need someone to see the system, say the difficult thing, and help them move.

Men who are ashamed of what their worst decisions say about them.

People trapped in addiction, regret, fear, or isolation who need evidence that truth and responsibility do not have to be the end of hope.

Families carrying the consequences of a father’s decisions.

And before every audience, client, reader, stranger, or future person I might help, God keeps placing Danielle and our children in my path.

They are not an obstacle between me and a larger purpose.

They are not a supporting cast for a public assignment.

They are the first people affected by whether my faith becomes faithful action.

Providing and protecting begins with them, but provision is more than income and protection is more than control. They need truth, presence, repentance, patience, wisdom, discipline, tenderness, and a man whose private life does not contradict his public message.

The people may be the answer I missed because I was staring at the battles.

The Pattern Across the Field Notes

When I lay the Field Notes beside one another, they do not reveal a man who has reached one perfect destination. They reveal recurring instructions.

The Time Is Now and Today keep returning me to present-tense obedience.

When Nobody Applauded removes the audience.

Silence and the hidden years behind Covert confront the difference between solitude that prepares and isolation that conceals.

My Name Is a Headline requires transparency when reputation management would be easier.

Provide & Protect brings every public ambition back to the people in my home.

The Talent I Could Not Bury connects ability to stewardship.

Mastery Without the Medal proves that training can remain when the expected result disappears.

Feathers reminds me that the battlefield does not determine whether God is present.

The stories are different, but the verbs repeat.

Tell the truth.

Take responsibility.

Use what is in your hand.

Serve the person in front of you.

Move before fear leaves.

Release the applause.

Protect what has been entrusted.

Do not bury the lesson.

Obey the next instruction without demanding the entire map.

Maybe the purpose has not arrived as a single event because it has been forming as a pattern.

Fight Like Heaven

When I ask what kind of obedience God repeatedly requires from me, the phrase that comes back is:

Fight like heaven.

That phrase needs a definition because I have spent enough of my life fighting in ways that looked nothing like heaven.

I know how to fight for vindication. I know how to assemble facts, build an argument, identify leverage, expose weakness, take a position, and refuse to move. I know how to use intensity as a weapon. I know how to call control protection and call pride courage.

Fighting like heaven is different.

Heaven fights with truth rather than image.

Heaven fights with obedience rather than impulse.

Heaven fights with repentance rather than self-justification.

Heaven fights with prayer, endurance, mercy, courage, sacrifice, and love.

Jesus did not conquer by protecting Himself from every cost.

The cross looked like defeat to people who measured victory only through power, visibility, and immediate outcome. The resurrection revealed that surrender in obedience was not weakness.

To fight like heaven is not to become passive. It is to become governed.

Sometimes the fight requires resistance. Sometimes it requires endurance. Sometimes it requires confession. Sometimes it requires making restitution. Sometimes it requires a boundary. Sometimes it requires remaining quiet when ego wants a public answer. Sometimes it requires speaking after shame has kept the truth buried for years.

The method changes.

The allegiance does not.

Fighting like heaven means I no longer get to choose a sinful weapon merely because I believe the cause is righteous.

Obedience Before Explanation

I have described the obedience required from me as following directions no matter how crazy they may seem and acting without needing the facts to support the action.

I understand what I mean.

There have been moments when I believed an instruction was clear even though I could not prove the outcome would work. Give the money away. Host the gathering without charging. Leave the result visible. Stop fighting. Take the trip. Say yes. Write the story. Trust God before the evidence explains why.

Faith often moves before certainty arrives.

But faith is not contempt for facts, counsel, safety, responsibility, or discernment.

I do not need enough facts to guarantee the outcome. I do need enough truth to know the next step does not contradict God’s character, God’s Word, or the responsibilities He has already placed in my hands.

First Thessalonians tells believers not to quench the Spirit, but it also tells them to test what is spoken, hold on to what is good, and reject evil. Proverbs tells me not to lean only on my own understanding; it does not tell me to stop thinking.

God may ask me to move without seeing the whole road.

He does not need me to become careless in order to become faithful.

The distinction is simple but demanding: Obedience may precede explanation. It should not bypass discernment.

Silent Victory

One of the questions that exposed my motives was this:

If no one ever knew my name, what would faithfulness still require of me?

Silent victory.

Silent results.

Solitude.

Following the plan and path even when nobody knew what was happening.

That answer reaches deeper than I want it to because I have spent much of my life measuring significance through visibility. Athletics had scoreboards. Business had revenue. Marketing had reach. Speaking had audiences. Social media had followers.

Even failure had headlines.

Silence can feel like disappearance when noise has been the evidence that my life matters.

But some of the most important assignments God has given me produced no immediate applause. A payment made quietly. A person helped without a case study. A family decision that protected peace but reduced visibility. A story written before anyone read it. A temptation resisted in a room where nobody would have known if I surrendered.

Silent victory is not hiding.

Hiding avoids truth because exposure feels dangerous. Silent faithfulness does the right thing without requiring exposure to become reward.

Solitude can be where a man prays, prepares, heals, and hears again. Isolation can be where he rehearses fear, protects shame, and slowly disappears. Both are quiet. Only one produces obedience.

If no one knew my name, faithfulness would still require me to love Danielle, father our children, tell the truth, make restitution, honor commitments, serve the person within reach, use my gifts, and complete what God places in my hands.

The assignment would become quieter.

It would not become smaller to God.

The Fear Under the Question

The hardest part of this search is not wondering whether I will become a speaker, writer, consultant, or leader.

The hardest part is wondering whether my physical freedom could be taken.

I have spent years living inside a mental jail built from fear, shame, legal pressure, regret, and imagined futures.

Now I face the possibility that consequences from past decisions could place me inside a real cell.

That thought is rough.

Part of the fear is obvious.

I do not want to lose freedom.

I do not want to be separated from Danielle or our children.

I do not want my family carrying more consequences from decisions they did not make.

I want to be an earthly provider and protector.

I want to be present when our seventh child arrives, present at the table, present for the ordinary moments that never become Field Notes but make a family a family.

There is also another fear underneath it.

What if I finally understand that part of my purpose is standing in front of people and helping them avoid the land mines I walked through—then lose the freedom to stand in front of them?

What if the lessons remain but the platform disappears?

What if transparency arrives at the same time confinement does?

What if I am finally willing to speak and no longer free to go where the people are?

Or even yet... what if the people I am suppose to speak to are in the confinement of the future?

That question reveals how easily I still connect purpose to location, access, and control.

Purpose Is Not a Place

A prison sentence would create real loss.

It would limit movement, touch, presence, work, access, and choices.

Faith does not require pretending those losses would be small. It would affect Danielle, our children, our finances, our routines, and the ways I currently provide and protect.

I will not call those consequences imaginary, and I will not predict a legal outcome as though faith gives me information God has not given.

But walls cannot place God outside the room.

Scripture contains people who served God while confined.

Joseph, Jeremiah, Paul, and others discovered that physical restriction did not remove God’s ability to form, speak, use, or send truth through them.

Their circumstances were not identical to mine, and some suffered unjustly. I cannot use their innocence to erase my responsibility.

Their stories establish a narrower truth: God is not limited by the walls that limit a person.

If my freedom were taken, the form of the assignment would change.

My responsibility as Danielle’s husband and our children’s father would remain, even when my ability to fulfill it looked painfully different.

A court can create physical separation; it cannot redefine the covenant or excuse me from loving faithfully inside every lawful opportunity still available.

Jesus said that what God has joined together should not be separated. That command establishes the seriousness of covenant. It is not a promise that hardship, illness, deployment, persecution, or incarceration can never create physical distance. Unity would have to be practiced through truth, communication, sacrifice, prayer, endurance, and the refusal to let forced distance become chosen abandonment.

Providing would also have to change definitions.

I want to provide materially, and that responsibility matters. But I am not my family’s savior. Surrender may require trusting that God can provide through Danielle, family, friends, the church, work already built, opportunities I cannot yet see, and people other than me.

That surrender hurts because being the provider can quietly become believing I am the source... which I am not.

I am responsible to prepare wisely, tell the truth, receive counsel, meet obligations, protect what I can, and avoid leaving disorder for everyone else to carry. I am not able to guarantee the future by force.

If freedom remains, I must use it faithfully.

If freedom is restricted, I must find the obedience still available.

Purpose is not permission to escape consequences.

Consequences are not powerful enough to cancel every purpose.

The Purpose Scripture Already Names

Part of my struggle may come from asking Scripture to promise a single customized assignment when it repeatedly gives believers a shared purpose and then calls each person to live it through specific gifts, relationships, places, and seasons.

Jeremiah 29:11 is often used as a personal purpose slogan.

The verse was spoken to God’s people in exile, inside a promise that included seventy years of waiting. The hope was real. So was the captivity. God’s good plan did not mean every person immediately received a comfortable outcome.

Jeremiah 1:5 describes Jeremiah’s specific appointment as a prophet to the nations. It reveals that God knew and set Jeremiah apart before birth. It should not be flattened into proof that every believer has Jeremiah’s office or will receive a dramatic prophetic job description.

Ephesians gives me a foundation I can stand on without inventing details:

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” — Ephesians 2:10

Romans 8 says God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. The next verse gives that good a shape: being conformed to the image of His Son.

That means my purpose is not merely to become influential.

It is to become more like Christ.

It is not merely to discover the perfect platform.

It is to do the good work already placed within reach.

It is not merely to decode my future.

It is to serve Christ wholeheartedly in whatever work is in front of me.

Before I know the specific title of my life, Scripture has already made several responsibilities clear: belong to Christ, love God, love people, become more like Jesus, use my gifts to serve, care for my family, tell the truth, make wrongs right where possible, remain faithful with what is entrusted, and obey what God makes clear.

That is not a consolation prize for people who failed to discover a more exciting purpose.

That is the purpose from which every legitimate assignment must grow.

The Surrender Still Required

The part of my life that still needs surrender is the future of my family if I am not physically available to control it.

I can surrender a business because another business can be built. I can surrender money because money can be earned again. I can surrender reputation because I have already learned that a headline is not the entire story.

Surrendering proximity to Danielle and the children is different.

I do not want to spiritualize that fear. I do not want to cover it with a verse and pretend the thought does not break something inside me.

I want to hold my children and wife.

I want to support Danielle.

I want to be in the room.

I want to solve the problem.

But surrender is not calling separation good.

It is doing everything faithful and lawful that belongs to me while refusing to make fear of the outcome my master. It is preparing rather than panicking, repenting rather than bargaining, accepting wise counsel rather than isolating, and trusting that the Father loves my family more perfectly than I ever could.

That may be the most difficult assignment currently in my hands.

Not building a platform.

Not naming a ministry.

Not proving that every trial had a purpose.

Trusting God with the people I most want to protect while I continue doing today’s work.

What Faithfulness Requires Today

I asked where I am already responsible to obey—not someday, but today.

The answer is everywhere I have already been given light.

Today I can tell the truth without using transparency to manipulate sympathy.

Today I can accept responsibility without treating failure as my permanent identity.

Today I can love Danielle, be present with our children, prepare wisely, honor counsel, work diligently, and protect peace instead of feeding fear.

Today I can solve the problem in front of me.

Today I can serve the person already within reach.

Today I can write the lesson while it is still unfinished.

Today I can follow the direction I have discerned without demanding that God reveal the final legal, financial, public, or personal outcome.

Today I can remain willing for the assignment to look smaller, slower, quieter, or entirely different from what I imagined.

The entire plan is not my responsibility, but The next faithful step is.

Prayer

Father, I surrender every purpose I have written for myself. Keep what came from You and remove what came from my ego, fear, pain, or need to prove myself.

Show me what faithfulness requires in this season.

Continue to teach me to recognize Your voice, obey the next instruction, and trust You without needing the entire plan.

Give me discernment so I do not confuse impulse with obedience, recklessness with faith, control with protection, or ambition with anointing.

I surrender Danielle, our children, my freedom, my work, my name, my future, and the outcomes I cannot control. Help me fulfill every responsibility that still belongs to me and trust You with everything that does not.

Use the problems, risks, trials, failures, skills, stories, and lessons already in my hands.

Show me the people standing behind the battles.

Make me willing to serve them without needing recognition.

I want Your will more than I want my preferred version of it.

Amen.