The Man on the Mat

There is a detail in John 5 I had read past for twenty years.

A man has been lying by the pool at Bethesda for thirty-eight years. Jesus walks up and asks him a question that sounds almost rude: “Would you like to get well?”

The man does not say yes.

He explains. He says he has no one to put him in the water, and somebody else always gets there first. That is not an answer. That is a status report on why the situation is not his fault.

Jesus does not put him in the pool. He does not fix the water. He says, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk.”

The one thing the man could not do was get himself in. That turned out to be the exact condition the healing arrived in.

I have spent my life making sure I would never be that man. This is week one of finding out what that cost me.

The assignment was thirty minutes of silence and five questions. I am putting the answers here because every hard thing in my life has been handled in the quiet, and quiet is what I inherited and what I have been handing down.

What I Am Afraid To Lose

I am afraid God will call me away from the thing I am already doing and already succeeding at in His name, and make me start over.

Twenty years sits under that. The certifications. A master’s degree and an MBA in progress. The company. Competence I can prove on paper to anyone who asks. If He moves me, I am a beginner again, and a beginner has no move. He cannot act in his own power. He has to be carried.

That is the fear, and it is the same fear that put fifty-three thousand dollars on my books. It was never about money. It is about having nothing in my hands and waiting on someone else to act. The debt was just the shape the fear took when I had a checkbook. Here it takes the shape of a calling.

Paul asked three times to have his weakness removed. He got an answer he was not looking for. “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” Not despite weakness. In it. That is 2 Corinthians 12:9 and I have quoted it in front of people and never once applied it to my resume.

And notice how I phrased the fear. Called away from what I am doing in His name. I put His name on the one thing I do not want Him to touch. If it is really His, He is allowed to move it. The fact that I flinch when I say that out loud tells me whose it actually is.

Where I Have Been Passive

Everywhere. It took me a while to see it, because I am not a passive man by temperament. I work. I drive. I build plans. I fix things.

The pattern is not laziness. The pattern is that I am active where action is comfortable and passive at the exact points where action would expose me.

I will take a loan. I will not make the sales call. Waypoint has been a real company since July of last year. SDVOSB approved. CAGE code assigned. Insurance paid every month. The storefront is built and the door has not opened, and the only thing standing between the two is me asking a stranger for money.

I will pay a bill at three hundred percent interest. I will not let something be late and take the phone call.

I put a foundation for veterans, widows, and orphans on paper. I proposed a service tithe months ago. One pro bono assessment a quarter. I have not done one. That is the pillar with the least under it and I am the reason.

James does not leave room to negotiate on this one. “Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.” I have been reading that verse as a warning about the future. It is a description of my last six months.

I am present as a father but I am not always leading. I let the day happen, then react to it well, and I have been calling that fatherhood.

Motion has been my avoidance. It looks like the opposite of passivity. That is exactly why I have gotten away with it for twenty years.

Courage That Looks Like Competence

Courage is standing in the face of fear knowing I will probably fail without God’s help, and stepping forward anyway. Arrogance is thinking I can do it on my own, in my own power.

I wrote that definition and then had to sit with the fact that I had already failed my own test. On July 13 I took out a payday loan.

I was not reckless about it. We deliberated for three days. I knew exactly what it would cost. I signed anyway, because I decided I had to be the one to solve it, in my power, on my timing. Waiting was unbearable.

Saul waited seven days at Gilgal. Samuel was late. The army was scattering. So Saul offered the sacrifice himself, and when Samuel finally showed up, Saul’s defense was that he felt compelled. Not rebellious. Compelled. The situation demanded a leader and no one else was leading, so he stepped up. That is the most reasonable sentence in the chapter and it cost him the kingdom.

Proverbs 22:7 says the borrower is servant to the lender. I know that verse. I have taught that verse. I signed the paper anyway, seven days into my own Gilgal.

By my own definition that is arrogance, and it did not look like arrogance at all. It looked like responsibility. It looked like a man taking care of his family.

That is the part worth writing down. My arrogance is not loud. It does not look like pride. It looks like competence, and it charges three hundred percent.

There was another decision that same season where I prayed, pushed, and walked into a room where I might have gotten nothing. I did not know it would work. That one was courage. I could not tell the two apart in the moment. From the inside they feel identical.

Psalm 27:14 puts both words in the same breath. Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently. Courage and waiting are not opposites in that verse. They are the same instruction said twice, because David knew which half I would skip.

The difference is not the amount of force. It is whether I am claiming something already given to me or reaching for something not yet mine. And whether I did it in the open or in the quiet.

What the Silence Said

First, a confession about the silence itself. I did not sit still for thirty minutes. I did it at home, standing, working iaido kata, because that is the only place my head gets quiet enough to hear anything.

The kata is not the failure. That is real prayer and I am keeping it. The failure is that I have built a prayer life that requires my hands to be occupied. Being still with empty hands is the exact condition I have organized my entire life to avoid, and when I go looking for stillness, I reach for the practice where there is a sword in my hands. Same helplessness as the first question. I told myself I need it that way so I am not in a void.

I cannot tolerate the void. That is the whole thing, right there, in my own words.

Exodus 14:14 is the verse for that, and it has two halves. The Lord will fight for you. Just stay calm. I have preached the first half of my life. I have never once obeyed the second.

Here is what He showed me. I outrun my own prayers.

Abram was promised a son and then handed a decade of nothing. Sarai did the math and proposed a workaround, and Abram agreed, and Ishmael was born. It was not rebellion. It was project management. God had made a promise and had not moved on the schedule, so they built the bridge themselves. The promise still came. Isaac still arrived. But the workaround is still in the news four thousand years later.

I have been asking God for a thing and then moving before the answer, and I have never once been able to tell whether He answered or whether I just got there first.

“Be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10. The stillness is not the reward for knowing. It is the condition for it.

The Two Moves

I thought about announcing this and calling that the bold step. Announcing a journey gets admired. That is not bold. That is a press release, and Matthew 6:1 has a word for good deeds performed to be admired by others. If I write, it has to be the confession and not the plan. The real number. The payday loan. Not the strategy.

So the writing comes third, behind two things that actually cost me something.

The first was saying the number out loud. Not on a spreadsheet. Out loud, to people who can look at me while I say it, including our financial counselor. That part is done. What is new today is that it is no longer only said in rooms I control. It is here, where anyone can read it.

James 5:16 does not say confess your sins to God and feel better. It says confess to each other, so that you may be healed. The healing is attached to the part where somebody else knows.

The second is the sales call. It is on the calendar for Wednesday. A name and a date. One human being, one scheduled time, where I have to ask for money and might be told no. That is the exact place I have been passive for years, and it fits my own definition of courage, because I will probably fail at it without His help.

I will write what happens after Wednesday. Whether it goes well or it does not.

Lord, I have spent my life making sure I would never be the man on the mat. You healed the man on the mat. Teach me to be still long enough for You to be the one who moves, and give me the sense to know which is which.

Week one. Thirty-eight years is a long time to lie next to water you cannot get into. But the man was not healed by the water. He was healed by the voice that told him to stand up while he was still on the mat.

The void is not the absence of God. It is the room He works in.

Stand up. Pick up your mat. I have been carrying the mat for twenty years and calling it walking.

Update: July 30

I said I would write what happened after Wednesday. Here it is.

I made the call. I left a follow up email. I have not heard back.

That is not a no. That is nothing, and nothing is worse, because I know exactly why. I let the lead go stale. Twenty days of it. That is on me and nobody else. The passivity I spent two thousand words confessing on Monday had already done its work before I ever picked up the phone, and Wednesday was me trying to sprint the last ten feet of a race I skipped.

Here is the part I did not see coming. I was braced for rejection. I had made peace with a no. I never once prepared for silence.

Read that against everything above. I cannot tolerate the void. The first genuinely obedient thing I do, and the answer is the void. I do not think that is an accident. I think that is the curriculum.

So I am sitting in it, and I am telling the truth about it here instead of quietly doing something to make the feeling stop.

If this is the right path, God will provide. If it is not, He will shut the door. Revelation 3:7 says what He opens no one can close, and what He closes no one can open. That is a real comfort and it is also a verse I could abuse in about four seconds, because “waiting on the Lord to open the door” is a phrase that sounds holy and can mean I never send the second email.

That is the trap I have to name out loud. Stillness and avoidance feel identical from the inside, exactly like courage and arrogance did on July 13. I have now failed my own test in both directions in the same month.

The line I am drawing is this. Waiting on God does not mean waiting on my calendar. Trusting Him with the outcome is not the same as being passive about the effort. Galatians 6:9 says do not get tired of doing good, because the harvest comes at the right time if we do not give up. Giving up is available to me right now and it would look like patience.

So the door stays God’s to open or close. The follow up stays mine.

Week two starts with a lead I let go cold and a phone that is not ringing. That is fine. Thirty-eight years is a long time to wait by the water. One day is nothing.

I asked God to move. He answered with silence. I am learning that silence is not the same as no, and waiting is not the same as quitting.

Correction, August 13, 2026: this post originally read “two master’s degrees and an MBA in progress.” That was wrong when I wrote it. At the time I had one master’s degree and an MBA in progress. The MBA conferred on August 10, so it is two now, but the sentence was inaccurate on the day it published and I am not going to quietly fix it.