Is there a better way of doing it? These are the questions I'm asking across faith, business, and life.
God gave Esau everything. He just never came for his heart.
Paul Washer asks a question about Jacob and Esau that I have not been able to put down. Not did God say he hated Esau, but how did he do it. The answer is that God gave Esau wealth, power, a nation, and mercy, and never once came for his heart. Run the scoreboard most of us actually use and Esau wins the book of Genesis.
I cannot see your heart. Neither can you. But something can.
There are men who have been in church for decades who have never surrendered anything to Jesus they did not already want to give Him. I am not the one who can tell you whether you are one of them, and neither are you. So I am going to put the Word in front of you and get out of the way.
We have to quit assuming and start challenging.
We have men in our congregations who are not saved and who fully expect to go to heaven, and almost nothing we currently do will ever find them. This is not a character failure. It is a design failure, and it is ours to fix.
We keep asking God for the thing. He was always the thing.
God told Ezekiel that the people who loved his preaching were treating him like a good song. They came, they listened, they enjoyed it, and they did not do one word of it. Twenty-six hundred years later we forward the clip. Then my daughter texted me the sentence that broke the whole thing open.
A soft heart is a gift you cannot give yourself
My daughter texted me one morning about Jeremiah — soft clay can be reshaped, but a hardened jar can only be broken. I have been chewing on it ever since, because the difference between the two is most of the Christian life, and the part that matters most is not finally up to me.
Why Whole People Make Whole Marriages
I gave my two youngest a sixty-day challenge this morning — physical, emotional, spiritual. Halfway through I realized I wasn't really talking about my kids. I was talking about the missing piece in almost every struggling marriage I've sat across from as an elder.
Have you ever felt like something essential is missing from your walk with Christ? I have. For years, I believed in God. I prayed. I showed up on Sundays. But there was a gap between what I read about in Scripture and what I actually experienced.
How a Baptism Prayer Became My Daily Posture
At Summit Church, when someone steps into the baptismal waters, they are asked two questions. Those questions were never meant to be answered just once.
What Pulling Weeds Taught Me About the Human Heart
It was early spring in North Carolina, and I was on my knees in the front yard pulling weeds. Nothing spiritual about the moment — at least, that's what I thought. And then God showed up.
What We're Actually Trying to Build
A friend called me the other day and asked how I handle it when someone close to me says something hard. I told him the truth — I'm bad at it — and then I told him the one thing I've learned: the Holy Spirit is a much better AI than anything we've built. We've had it the whole time.
Ephesians 5, the Morning I Wake Up, and What Actually Changes Something
Ephesians 5 says love your wife as Christ loved the church. That's a terrifying standard. I've been a Christian my whole adult life and I still don't know how to do it. Here's the prayer I say in the morning when I don't know how to do it — and what started to change when I stopped praying it politely.
The reframe that became ITABWODI — and the operating posture behind every company I've run since.
I was 22, halfway through my MBA, running a $2.5M food services operation for a university that didn't really want to be in the food business. Somewhere in the middle of that, I realized Campbell wasn't a food system at all — it was an education system that happened to run food. That reframe is the reason I'm a CEO today.
I was recruited by Tower Engineering's President to rescue an in-process acquisition that was drowning. Here's what it actually took.
The books hadn't been closed in over a year. There were forty-plus divisions across the US and Canada, four subsidiaries, and a DBA. The private equity acquirer was circling, and every week of delay was bleeding leverage. Then the president called me.
What happens when a non-technical CEO gets his hands on Claude — and why the old rules about building software are dead.
I run a $70M+ construction company. I'm not a software engineer. In a weekend I built two live SaaS platforms — operationalcfo.ai and cfoos.ai — with more than 130 routes, 22 tools, and 4 Academy courses between them. Here's what actually happened, what I got right, what I got wrong, and why the gate around building software is gone.
And What the Holy Spirit Did About It
Easter Sunday should have been glorious. Instead, I snapped at Jen with that cold, sharp tone that cuts deeper than shouting. No love, no patience, no kindness. Then the conviction came.
How ITABWODI Applies to Parenting
Each kid is different. Tate is finding his way. Finlay is making college decisions. Parlyn hates attention but God could use her. The question stays the same: is there a better way?
16 Blind Spots That Kept Me Stuck
I'm a bad dad. I'll never be successful. Others see me wrongly. I need more. For years I carried these lies like luggage I forgot I was holding. Here's what it took to set them down.
What 'Don't Make Me Count to Three' Taught Us About Parenting — and Why It's the Same Fight at Work
Jen and I were in our first year as parents — Tate was our first — when we found Ginger Plowman's Don't Make Me Count to Three. We both dove in. Read it, marked it up, talked about it constantly. The more we talked, the more we realized the book wasn't really about parenting. It was about authority, consistency, and whether the home you build will say the same thing tomorrow that it said yesterday.
The Weekly Question — one email a week, one idea worth chewing on, from someone living it across faith, business, marriage, and parenting. No theory. No spam.