The Morning After
Some dreams you bury in a single afternoon. Others you bury slowly, one small realization at a time, until you wake up one morning and the thing you built your identity around simply isn’t there anymore.
After I wrote about the wrecking-ball call and the church plant that had to close, I heard from many of you. Not people telling me my story mattered, people telling me their own. A marriage. A business. A ministry that never got off the ground. Different details, same sentence underneath all of them: I’m at the door right now. I don’t have thirteen years of hindsight yet. What am I supposed to do this morning?
That’s a fair question, and I owe you a better answer than the one hindsight makes easy.
I wrote to you from the other side of both of those closed doors. That’s an easier place to stand. From there you can see the whole arc. The wrecking ball became a backbone. The closed plant became a scar I’ve learned to live with instead of a wound I’m still bleeding from. Years later you can say the building was the point. But nobody standing in the rubble the day it happens can see that yet. It would be dishonest of me to write as if the view is the same from both sides of the door.
So let me try to write to you from where you might actually be.
The grief is not the detour from faith. It’s part of it.
Somewhere along the way a lot of us picked up the idea that a strong faith skips the grieving and jumps straight to the lesson. News flash friends! It doesn’t. Half the Psalms are somebody standing in front of a closed door asking God where He went. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? That’s not a crisis of faith. That’s what faith sounds like when it’s honest. You’re allowed to be exactly as sad as you are before anyone asks you what you learned from it.
You don’t have to know what it means yet.
I didn’t know what the wrecking-ball conversation meant while I was living through nearly three years of it. I definitely didn’t know what closing that church plant meant on the day we made the call. I only knew what it cost. Meaning is usually something you find later, looking backward, not something you’re handed in the moment so you can feel better about it now. If you can’t see the purpose yet, that’s not a sign you’re doing this wrong. That’s just where you are on the timeline.
Find the next right thing, not the whole next plan.
When the dream dies, your mind wants to immediately solve for the next ten years. Don’t. The morning after a closed door, you don’t need a five-year plan. You need to get up, do the next faithful thing in front of you, and let tomorrow worry about itself. That’s not a lack of ambition. That’s how you actually survive long enough to see what God builds next.
Let someone else carry it with you.
Both times, I tried to hold more of it alone than I should have. especially the church plant closing. It was then that I felt like I had to be the steady one for everybody else’s grief before I’d let myself feel my own. Don’t do that longer than you have to. Let your spouse, a friend, an elder, a counselor, somebody, actually see what this is costing you. Life and faith genuinely works best when you’re not carrying it solo.
Here’s what I won’t do. I won’t tell you that you’ll look back on this the way I now look back on those two closed doors. You might. You might not, not fully. Maybe not for a long time. That’s not for me to promise you.
What I can tell you is the God who was already at work in the wrecking-ball conversation before I could see it, and already at work in the rubble of that church plant before I could see it, is the same God standing in the room with you this morning. You don’t have to see the ending to trust that He’s already writing one.
The door closing isn’t the end of your story either.
Just the part you can’t see past yet.