What Finished While I Waited

I said I would write what happened after Wednesday. I wrote the first half on July 30, when the answer was silence.

Here is the second half. The silence held.

I sent the follow up. I gave it time. Nothing came back. That lead is closed now, and I am the one closing it, which is a strange thing to have to do to a conversation that never really started. Nobody said no. It quietly stopped being a thing that was going to happen, the way most things do.

Three weeks ago I wrote that I could not tolerate the void. God did not test that theory gently.

The Part That Was Not About Me

There is a detail I owe you, because leaving it out would make me look worse than I am and I have decided the reporting here goes both directions.

That prospect sells into the defense supply chain. On July 13 the Department of Defense suspended CMMC Phase II, the third party certification requirement that was supposed to take effect on November 10 of this year. Phase I self assessments still stand. DFARS 252.204-7012 still stands. NIST 800-171 is still the baseline. But the deadline that made a whole market move, the one where you had to hire an outside assessor and prove it, just evaporated pending a sixty day review, and officials would not rule out killing the program outright.

So I was on the phone asking a small business to spend money getting ready for a date that had stopped existing eleven days after it stopped existing.

That is a real reason. It is not my reason.

I let that lead sit for twenty days before I called. Twenty days is where the loss happened. The policy change gave a man who was already not going to answer a very good excuse to not answer, and it gave me a very good excuse to feel better about it. I am declining the excuse. If I had called in June I would have had a relationship in place when the news hit, and a relationship in place when the news hits is the entire job.

Here is the part that stopped me cold when I put the dates side by side.

July 13. The DoD suspended Phase II on July 13. I signed the payday loan on July 13.

Same day. I was borrowing at three hundred percent to solve a problem in my own strength, and on that exact day the market I had bet my company on changed underneath me without asking my opinion. I do not want to make that mean more than it means. But I had just written two thousand words about outrunning my own prayers, and it turns out the thing I was outrunning was moving faster than I was in a direction I could not see.

The Thing That Did Finish

On August 10 the MBA posted. Done. Conferred. It is over.

There is a version of this paragraph that is a victory lap and I have already promised not to write those.

So here is the honest version. I finished a graduate degree during the exact stretch of weeks in which I had zero control over the one thing I actually wanted. I passed an exam on the retake in July that I had blown through and failed in June because I rushed it. Thirty nine minutes used out of two hundred. That is not a testing problem. That is the same man who could not sit still for thirty minutes of silence, and I paid for it twice before I learned it once.

Then the capstone. Then the wait on the process. Then it was just finished, on an ordinary Monday, with no phone call attached to it.

The degree has not opened one door. Not one. That is not bitterness, that is the ledger. Nobody has called because of it. No client appeared. The credential went on the wall and the week continued exactly as it had before.

I think that is the point, or at least the part I am supposed to be reading.

I have spent twenty years collecting things I could hold up as proof I did not need to be carried. Certifications. Degrees. A company with a CAGE code and insurance paid every month. Week one I wrote that my fear was standing in front of God with nothing in my hands. So I have kept my hands full. This is the first credential I have ever earned that did not make me feel one bit less helpless, and I am starting to suspect that is the first useful thing a credential has ever done for me.

Zechariah 4:10 asks who dares despise the day of small beginnings. I have been despising them for two decades by making sure I never had one.

The Number

In July I put the number in writing. Fifty three thousand dollars. I am not publishing a new figure this month. That one stands.

Here is what changed instead.

The payday loan is dead. Paid in full. Not settled, not rolled, not refinanced into something with a friendlier name. It was a hard requirement the moment I signed it and we met it, faster than it was structured to take, because Noelia and I decided it was not going to be allowed to live in our house.

I want to be careful how I write that, because there is a version of this paragraph where a self-inflicted wound becomes a testimony. On July 13 I borrowed at three hundred percent and then published two thousand words on why it looked like responsibility from the inside. Killing it is not a win. It is cleanup. Nobody gets credit for putting out a fire he set.

What I will take from it is the speed. When something was genuinely unacceptable to us, we moved on it in weeks. That capacity exists. It has existed the whole time. It shows up when I stop negotiating about whether the thing is actually that bad.

We are still working the plan with our financial counselor. The target is still my fiftieth birthday in February of 2028. Nothing about the plan is clever. It is a list of balances smallest to largest and the refusal to add a new one to the bottom of it, which I did anyway, in July, in writing, after years of teaching other people Proverbs 22:7.

Luke 16:10 has been sitting on me. Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much. July was me proving I could not be trusted with little. The last few weeks were me starting to pay that back. One of those is a character and the other is a Tuesday, and I do not get to decide yet which one I am.

The number is not the confession anymore. The number was the confession in July. Now it is arithmetic, and arithmetic is boring, and boring is what I needed.

Life, Around the Edges

The dojo continues. Kata twice a week at the dojo, forms at home, cutting on Friday nights. Noelia and my daughter train with me, which is still the thing I would defend hardest if I had to give something up.

The gym is where I have to eat it in public.

I am at 314. I started this at 401 in February of last year and I was at 289 in March, so that is twenty five pounds back on in five months.

I could give you reasons and some of them are true. Dental work has cost me sessions and put me on soft food, and soft food is a category that contains almost nothing I should be eating. I also switched from Ozempic to Zepbound, which meant restarting at a low dose and titrating back up, and regain during that transition is well documented. I am naming both because I am not going to hide behind a vague sentence about a medication change while asking you to trust the rest of this.

Those are real. Stacked together they make a very tidy explanation.

I have gotten good at tidy explanations. That is more or less what this whole series is about.

So here is the version without the packaging. I have been taking in more than I am burning for weeks and I have known it for weeks. The dental work is real and my response to it was mine. The dose change is real and what I did around it was mine.

And now look at the two sections next to each other. Same season. The money went where I aimed it and the scale did not.

That is worse than if both had gone wrong, not better. If both had failed I could call it a hard month. Instead I have proof that when a thing becomes genuinely unacceptable to me I can move on it in weeks, and proof that I have not made this one unacceptable yet. The capacity is not the problem. The aim is. I spent it on the loan and I have not spent it here.

In September it will be one year since I stopped gaming. I mention it because I know exactly what pulls me back, and it is not boredom. It is the feeling that nothing I am doing counts. Three weeks of an unringing phone is that feeling in its purest form. It did not get me this time. I am not going to pretend it did not knock.

My daughter is homeschooled and I am home for more of her day than most fathers get, and week one I confessed that being present is not the same as leading. That has not fixed itself in three weeks. I have been trying to make one deliberate decision a day about our household instead of reacting well to whatever the day hands me. Some days I get it. Most days I notice at nine at night that I did not.

Church is still where the accountability lives. I have a mentor who asks the questions I would not volunteer answers to. That arrangement has cost me more comfort than any spreadsheet ever has.

One Housekeeping Note

You will see a line on the front page of this site and in the footer from here forward. This blog is written by me and processed through Claude. The thinking, the confessions, the numbers, and the theology are mine. The drafting, the editing, and a fair amount of the arguing happen with an AI in the loop.

I am putting that in writing for the same reason I put the number in writing. If a thing is true and I would rather you not notice it, that is exactly the thing to say out loud.

Week four. The phone did not ring. The market moved without me. The degree landed. The loan died. The scale went the other way and I know exactly why.

Thirty eight years is a long time to lie next to water you cannot get into. Three weeks is nothing. I am learning to count in the right units.

I keep asking God to open a door. He keeps handing me an ordinary Monday and asking whether that is enough.