I remember praying one afternoon, four years into planting a church, genuinely trying to listen and not just perform listening, when something settled in my chest that I did not want to receive.
It’s either your life or the church.
Not audible. But unmistakable. And with a weight that made it impossible to dismiss.
I spent the next several weeks trying to unhear it and trying to make sense of it.
What I Was Protecting
The church had been alive. Real things had happened. People had come to faith in the Tower District of Fresno, one of the most unchurched corners of the city. I had given four years and my full self to what we were building, and I was not willing to walk away from something God had built just because I was tired.
That is what I told myself. But underneath the theological reasoning was something more personal. The church had become the thing I was known for. It was where my friendships were. It was how I measured whether my life was worth anything. Letting go of the church meant letting go of the version of myself I had been constructing for four years.
And I genuinely did not know who I was without it.
The Cost of Holding On
I kept going. Longer than I should have. I preached through depletion. I led through bitterness. I sat with people in their pain while I was drowning in mine, and I called it perseverance because I didn’t have better language for what it actually was.
The body keeps score. At some point it stops sending warnings and starts sending consequences.
So I stepped down as lead pastor. And what followed was one of the harder chapters of my life. I stopped reading my Bible. Stopped going to church. Withdrew from every godly friendship that had anchored me. I drank wine every day and slid into the deepest and darkest depression I had known up to that point. I felt like I had let down God, my church, my wife, and every person who had ever prayed for what we were building.
I did not just feel like a failure. I felt like I had the receipts to prove it.
The Passage That Rescued Me
After about eighteen months of that, I opened my Bible. I am not entirely sure what made me open it that particular day. But when I did, I found my way to Psalm 40.
I waited patiently for the Lord. He turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire. He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth.
That passage has become my life passage. It has rescued me more than once, including years later when my wife had an affair and left me after twenty years of marriage and three kids. But the first time I read it as a broken, empty, ashamed former church planter who had been running from God for a year and a half, it broke something loose in me.
The pit is real. But so is the rock. And the rock has nothing to do with whether your church is growing.
What Letting Go Actually Gave Me
I finally read Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud. The church planting organization had told me to read it before I launched. They knew my tendency. I nodded and ignored them and didn’t read it for three years. After I stepped down, I read it. It changed my life.
I have spent the twenty-plus years since then working on myself. Doing the inner work I refused to do before everything fell apart. And what I found on the other side of all of it is that I am more myself now than I ever was when I was leading the church. More human. More present. More free.
The loss stripped away a version of me that had been performing rather than living. What came back was quieter and more solid. I understand now that I can be a person first and a pastor second, that those two things are not in competition, that God’s love for me is not mediated by my productivity.
If You’re Hearing Something Similar
I don’t know what the invitation looks like for you. Maybe it’s not about leaving a church. Maybe it’s about finally getting help. Maybe it’s about telling someone the truth about how you’re actually doing. Maybe it’s about stopping on a Saturday night and just resting.
But if you are hearing something that you keep trying to unhear, I’d take that seriously. In my experience, those quiet moments of clarity don’t get louder. They just get more costly to ignore.
The God who stayed with me through eighteen months of running is the same God who is staying with you right now. That has never been in question.
If you’re at a moment like this, I’d like to be a conversation partner. You don’t have to have it figured out before you reach out. That’s what the first call is for.
Your first conversation with me is free. Book a time here.
