What I’d Do Differently If I Were Starting Ministry (and Life) All Over Again

Lessons I'm still learning about slowness, limits, and grace

This, my first essay of 2026, is longer than usual. I hope the extra few minutes are worth it—and that something here helps you on your journey. Wishing you a meaningful year ahead, wherever it may lead.

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Looking back is a strange gift.

It tempts us either to romanticize the past or to rewrite it. To turn it into nostalgia or into indictment. I want to resist both. I don’t want to trade my story away. And I don’t want to repeat it unexamined.

There’s something fitting about reflecting this way at the start of a new year. The calendar turns, and with it comes the impulse to assess where we’ve been and where we’re headed. For many of us somewhere in midlife, that assessment carries a particular weight. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, in his book From Strength to Strength, describes a transition that happens to most people somewhere in their forties or fifties. We move from what he calls “fluid intelligence” to “crystallized intelligence.” In our younger years, we excel at innovation, speed, and solving new problems. We build. We grow. We achieve. But as we age, our strengths shift toward wisdom, synthesis, and teaching. The task of the second half of life is not to keep building the same way but to discover what all that building was for. To move from accumulation to meaning. From performance to formation.

Time has a way of chipping away at our bravado and sharpening our clarity. It exposes what was mixed up, what was hurried, and what was sincere but immature. It also reveals God’s grace, often in places where I could not see it at the time. If I were starting ministry, and life, over again, I would not want to aim higher. I would want to aim truer.

Untangling Calling from Compulsion

I wish I had learned sooner what Eugene Peterson discovered only after decades of pastoral work: that calling and drivenness are not the same thing.

Peterson spent thirty years building Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. By most measures, he was “successful.” The church grew. People were discipled and formed. The work bore good fruit. But something underneath was quietly crumbling. In the early 1990s, Peterson took an extended sabbatical. What he discovered during that time away was unsettling. Much of what he had called faithfulness was actually compulsion. Much of what looked like obedience was really a craving to be needed. He had confused his calling with his performance.

In The Pastor, Peterson writes:

“I didn’t go into the pastorate to be a religious professional... But somewhere along the way, that is exactly what I became. I found myself treating the reading of Scripture in workday, professional ways, reading it for what it would do for others. I read it as a kind of fix-it book. I read it for ideas and help and direction and comfort for others. But I didn’t read it for me. I didn’t read it to let God shape me, to let God form community among the people I was living with. The sheer word-of-Godness of it, reading it for no other reason than that God was speaking to me, personally, got shunted aside.”

I understand that in ways I wish I didn’t.

Early in life, calling often comes wrapped in urgency. A sense that something must be done, now. That faithfulness means saying yes quickly and often. That significance is measured by momentum. Some of that urgency is holy and pure. Much of it is not. It took me too long to see how easily calling can be confused with compulsion. How often I said yes not because God was leading, but because I was afraid of missing out. Afraid of becoming irrelevant. Afraid that if I slowed down, I might disappear.

The Apostle Paul knew this tension. He writes in Galatians 1:10:

“Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

The either/or here is stark. We cannot serve both our calling and our need to prove ourselves. Calling, I have learned ever so slowly, is not confirmed by speed. It is confirmed by time. It grows clearer not through intensity but through endurance. And it rarely announces itself with the kind of certainty we crave.

This is not only true in ministry. It is true in careers, relationships, parenting, and leadership of every kind.

Taking the Interior Life Seriously

I also hope I would attend to my interior life much earlier, the way Henri Nouwen did.

Nouwen was one of the most celebrated spiritual writers of the twentieth century. He taught at Yale and Harvard. His books sold and continue to sell millions. He was invited to speak around the world. By every external measure, he had arrived. But Nouwen knew something was deeply wrong. In 1986, at the peak of his career, he left academia and moved to L’Arche Daybreak, a community for people with intellectual disabilities in Toronto. There he served as pastor. He bathed the residents. He helped with meals. He lived what most would call a hidden, ordinary, unspectacular life.

When asked why, Nouwen said he had grown exhausted trying to be someone he was not. The academic world rewarded rigor, productivity, acclaim, and intellectual achievement. But it left his soul depleted. Nouwen wrote candidly:

“I am beginning to see that much of my life has been lived as if the world around me gave me my identity. The fact is that I am nothing but what I think I am in other people’s eyes. When I am praised, I can live. When I am criticized, I feel I’m dying. But these feelings are not rooted in who I am. I am not what I do, I am not what people say about me, I am not what I have. I am a beloved child of God. That is the core truth. That is the anchor, the home to which I must return when I am praised and when I am rejected.”

As for me, I once assumed that good theology would naturally produce emotional health. That orthodoxy would eventually translate into wholeness. That if the work was fruitful and producing life-giving outcomes for the church and other people, the soul must be fine. That assumption was wrong.

What we ignore internally does not disappear. It waits. It surfaces sideways. Through exhaustion. Through irritability. Through defensiveness. Through a quiet hardening of heart. Shame, anger, fear, and grief do not resolve themselves simply because we are busy doing good or even “God” things. Ministry as we know it can even reward us for seeking to gain the world, even as we lose touch with our souls. Output can mask sickness for a long time.

Eventually, though, the soul demands to be heard.

Jesus himself modeled this kind of attention to interior life. In Mark 1:35, it says, “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” This was not an occasional practice. It was Jesus’ pattern. Before spending himself in ministry, he attended to his relationship with the Father. If I were starting again, I hope would start following that rhythm sooner. Not in a self-absorbed or means-to-an-end way, but with a humble and honest heart.

Formation precedes fruit. Always.

Building Sustainable Boundaries

I hope I would also build stronger boundaries, and would see those boundaries as expressions of faithfulness, not selfishness.

For years, I let myself believe that boundaries were a sign of weakness, laziness, or lack of love for others. Faithfulness meant availability. Sacrifice meant saying yes and outworking everyone around me. Living and working within limits felt unspiritual, like selling out. Over time, for me that kind of thinking did real damage. It blurred responsibility. It bred resentment and self-pity. It distorted some relationships.

Eugene Peterson learned this lesson through an existential crisis of his own. During his sabbatical, he realized he had become enslaved to the expectations of others. He had allowed the church’s needs to define his rhythms. He had mistaken his exhaustion for sacrifice, and his work addiction for faithfulness.

Peterson came to see that setting boundaries was not a sign of personal failure or decline. It was a form of wisdom. He also writes in The Pastor:

“The word ‘no’ is going to be a major ingredient in the biblical script that develops in the life of Christian disciples. Saying no is not a negative, but a positive, a way of protecting and maintaining the holiness of the life to which we have been called... I discovered that if I don’t say no, I will be unable to say yes. I will wake up in the morning filled with anxiety: Who am I today? What makes me of value? How can I please them? I learned early that to be a pastor in a congregation is to live mostly in close quarters with people who require relational and emotional competence on my part. If I am not attending to who I am—if I have an undifferentiated identity, not knowing who I am—I don’t have anything to offer them. The reason I can say yes to God and the people I love is because I can say no.”

Even Jesus did not heal everyone. He did not meet every demand. He withdrew. He rested. He was content to let people misunderstand him and to not explain himself. None of this diminished his love for others. It helped define it. In Luke 5:15-16, we are told that great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.” Jesus said no to legitimate needs in order to protect what was needed most.

Boundaries are not barriers to love. They are one of the ways love stays authentic and sustainable. This lesson applies far beyond ministry. Parents, caregivers, leaders, and helpers of every kind learn it sooner or later. And if they don’t, they pay a high price from which many do not recover.

If I were starting again, I hope would stop equating faithfulness with other people’s approval.

Early leadership is especially fueled by affirmation. We tell ourselves we want to serve, but we also want to be liked. We call it peacemaking. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is fear wearing a virtue costume. It is painful to discover that integrity and popularity do not always travel together. That doing your best can still cost you relationships. That truthfulness and integrity sometimes disappoints people you care about. I wish I had learned earlier that being misunderstood is not the same as being unfaithful. And that displeasing others is sometimes the cost of staying true to God, our calling, and our own health and sustainability.

People’s approval is fickle and therefore fragile. Faithfulness is sturdier.

I hope would also change how I measured success.

For a long time, success to me meant growth, reach, and measurable impact. These are not bad things. They can even be gifts. But they are incomplete measures. Time has taught me to value different things. Staying. Repenting. Repairing. Beginning again. Enduring seasons when nothing seems to be happening on the surface. Some of the most important work God does is invisible. Some of the truest fruit matures slowly. Endurance itself, or what Nietzsche—not Peterson ;-)—called “a long obedience in the same direction,” is a form of obedience.

Peterson discovered this during his years at Christ Our King. The work that mattered most was often the work no one saw. The conversations in parking lots. The prayers at hospital bedsides. The quiet formation happening beneath the surface. In 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Paul writes:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Long obedience rarely looks impressive up close. It looks basic and mundane. But that is often where God is most at work.

If I were starting again, I hope would trust and lean upon grace more, especially when things fell apart or didn’t go as I had planned and hoped.

Less seasoned faith often carries an unspoken assumption. If I am faithful, things will hold together. If I do my part, God will bless the outcome. Then life happens. Plans unravel. Certainty erodes. Reputation suffers. The story does not go as expected. And we discover how much of our faith was quietly tethered to control. It took time, and loss, to learn that God’s faithfulness does not depend on my competence. Grace is not a theological concept alone. It is a lived rescue. Often clearest after a collapse, and not before.

Nouwen understood this deeply. In his book The Return of the Prodigal Son, he reflects on the famous Rembrandt painting:

“Whether I am the younger son or the elder son, I am the prodigal son... Both are lost. Both need to be found and brought home. The younger son’s flight is more spectacular; the anguish of the elder son, more subtle. But whether we are the younger son or the elder son, we are lost when we are not at home with the Father. We are the prodigal son who needs to come home and find the loving arms of the Father waiting for us.”

Grace meets us in our failures. Not as a reward for getting it right, but as mercy when we do not.

If I could speak to my younger self, I would not offer many instructions. Instead, I would offer reassurance. The road ahead will include joy and sorrow, meaning and loss. None of it will be wasted. Slowness is not failure. Hiddenness is not abandonment. Obscurity is not the opposite of faithfulness. God is more committed to our formation than our performance. He is patient in ways we are not. And he remains faithful even when our stories take turns we never planned.

If I were starting over, I hope I would trust that sooner.

And I hope you can trust it now.

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