Let Goodness ride within your life

Humanity seems to be moving rapidly towards war. Those in leadership are seeming to revel in the possibility. I don’t know of agendas – whether the release of financial debt, or people reduction, or changing the face of civilization – but it seems the cycle is never far from repeating. It has now reached the next generation, as it always does.

There seems to be no one earnestly seeking for peace; even in my thoughts I have not reached out within Power to seek Peace. Am I falling into the place of disillusionment, where I can’t even muster faith to overcome? Do I sense an inevitability and so do not even try? Am I content to hide within, or within the cave of God, and feel no responsibility in opposing evil? Perhaps just the questions are a beginning – of that within, that Creation force that I am sensing to rise.

Can I stand alone? I know there are others, and I know there is You. Is this something I should be observing, preparing for strategically? For then I shall, even if I feel alone, for I know to do nothing is to give the enemy all he is seeking. But I would be strategic: is it not always the supply lines?

What enables the enemy to continue to wage oppression? What gives him the strength, the means, the power to overcome? There lies his weakness – that which gives him life. Drain his force of life and he is no more. Would I find such insight within the cave of light? Within the journey? Within the wall illustrations upon Your heart? I would look there first, as that is where I am with You at the moment. And I would be where You are now.

I would have you be with Me always; for I am your great protection, your great Wisdom, your great Power. The enemy knows this and will try to move you from this place to his own place, where you are open to defeat, if that were possible. It can certainly put your heart at risk.

So look to be with Me, your place of safety, even if it appears this place is in the midst of battle. For with Me there is no defeat. Know that you may not understand your role outside of striving to remain with Me, and that will be the test: will you remain with Me or seek ‘to do something’, even if well intentioned?

In that way of purpose it might seem as if you are isolating yourself with Me in a cave – where else should you be if I am there? Seek for Me and the enemy has no foothold upon your heart. Concern yourself with your place, and the place of your family and friends, that where I Am you – and they – would be also.

War will indeed come; will you take a side? Or will you discover a place that is the side of the Kingdom of God, that place where war has ceased and Peace reigns without recourse? It is indeed a different focus for you, yet I would have you here upon the side of a mountain, within a cave, rather than on the plains fleeing an enemy that seeks to destroy. One seems to be important, yet only one is needed.

Men’s hearts will be desperate, their words will express fear, a resignation will reign for a lack of power, even strength, to the opposition of evil. If their words are your only vision then you too will be drawn into their place of futility, their lack of hope.

But you are not without hope, nor Might, nor faith, nor Creation. These are set within, and without; you ride with them, for they are within, they are you. Therefore, seek your alignment with them alone, and not in the desperate hope of another – for they move in fear and hopelessness. You bring Light, Prosperity, Wisdom, Goodness, and Freedom. It is time you lead with them and not from a place of reliance upon others you feel might move in these in a greater measure. They do not – for in the greatest measure you are with Me; who can overcome?

Spear, and set into the ground, the lion’s mouth as you have seen. He then is powerless to defeat, and open to defeat himself, for he is truly exposed without his words. Your spear is the lance of Goodness – use it to touch everyone you meet, those that look to you, those that want what you possess. Freely you received, now freely give. Measure not, but give all, that in giving all you might receive all. The abundance you have and give away will set the enemy’s mouth closed and anchored into the ground. He will not rise for he will have no words to rise upon – for he is silent. With silence there is no creation, no power expressed. Let Goodness ride within your life.

THE PARABLE

"The Man Who Stopped Running"

His name was Sawyer, and he was not a remarkable man.

He was not the kind of man whose name appeared in the trades, or whose face was known at conferences, or whose opinion was sought in the rooms where decisions were made. He was a craftsman of modest reputation who built things with his hands - cabinetry, mostly - and who had, for twenty-three years, done his work without complaint and without great recognition, and who had believed, in the quiet way of men who do not speak of such things, that this was enough.

Then came the season when it was not enough.

The contracts dried first. Then the referrals. Then a larger firm moved into the county, and men who had once called Sawyer called them instead, because their prices were lower and their turnarounds faster, and the world, it seemed, had decided that faster and cheaper were the same as better.

Sawyer did not argue with the world. He had never been a man who argued.

But he began to run.

—  ✦  —

He ran the way frightened men run - not with his legs, but with his mind.

He attended seminars on digital marketing. He built a website he did not understand. He purchased tools he did not need because a man at a seminar told him that men who did not have such tools would not survive. He made calls to people who did not call back. He lowered his prices. Then lowered them again. He watched other craftsmen on the internet and compared their work to his and found his wanting, though any honest eye would have seen the opposite.

He ran and ran and did not seem to get anywhere.

At night he would sit at his workbench after his family was asleep, not building, only sitting, surrounded by the smell of cedar and linseed oil, and he would feel the particular exhaustion of a man who has spent everything and arrived nowhere.

It was in one such night that he found the letter.

—  ✦  —

It was tucked inside an old toolbox he had inherited from his grandfather - a man who had built furniture for fifty years in a small town in the mountains and who had never, to Sawyer’s knowledge, run from anything.

The letter was not long. It was written in his grandfather’s slow, careful hand, the hand of a man who believed that words deserved the same care as joinery.

There will come a season when everything moves and nothing holds. When the men around you raise their voices because they have lost their footing. When the noise of the world tells you that you must act, and act quickly, or be left behind.

In that season, do not run to the noise.

Come instead to the bench.

The bench does not lie. It does not fear. It does not measure you against other men or ask how many years you have left or whether your name is known. It only asks: are you here? Are you present? Are you bringing what you were given?

If you are - then work.

The enemy of good work is not competition. It is not the market, nor the economy, nor the men who undercut your price. The enemy of good work is the man who leaves his bench to chase what the frightened men are chasing.

Stay at the bench, Daniel. It is the only ground that holds.

Sawyer read the letter three times. Then he set it on the bench before him and sat with it in the silence.

—  ✦  —

He did not become a different man overnight. That is not how men change.

But slowly, across the weeks that followed, he stopped running.

He stopped attending seminars. He stopped watching other craftsmen on the internet. He stopped lowering his prices. He returned to the bench each morning as a man returns to prayer - not because it felt productive, but because it was the one place where he knew who he was.

He built a set of shelves for a woman who could not pay him much. He built them as though she had paid him everything.

He repaired a rocking chair for an old man whose wife had died, a chair she had sat in every evening for forty years, and Daniel worked on the joints of that chair with the kind of attention that borders on love, fitting each piece until there was no wobble, no give, no uncertainty anywhere in the frame.

He did not advertise these things. He simply did them.

—  ✦  —

It was the woman with the shelves who told her neighbor. The neighbor told her contractor. The contractor called Sawyer on a Tuesday morning and offered him more work than he had seen in three years, work that suited him, work that asked for exactly what he had always given.

Sawyer accepted.

He did not celebrate. He did not declare that the strategy had worked, because there had been no strategy. He simply went back to the bench.

But that evening, sitting again in the cedar-and-linseed silence, he understood something his grandfather had known and had tried, in one careful letter, to pass on.

The plains are full of men running.

They run toward opportunity and away from threat and toward each other and away from each other and they make great noise and great movement and they are always, always afraid.

The man who stops - who finds his ground, his bench, his particular and irreplaceable way of meeting the world - that man is not idle.

He is positioned.

And when the frightened men have exhausted themselves on the plains, they will look up, and they will see him on the mountain, still working, still present, and they will climb toward the light he did not know he was carrying.

—  ✦  —

Freely he had received the hands, the eye, the patience.

Freely he gave them now - to the woman’s shelves, to the old man’s chair, to anyone who came and asked and needed what he had been given.

He measured nothing. He withheld nothing. He gave as men give who have learned that the well does not empty when you draw from it faithfully.

And the running - the long, exhausting, undignified running - stopped.

Not because the world changed.

But because Sawyer finally came home.

—  ✦  —

He still builds cabinets. His name is still not known in the large rooms.

But there is a peace in his workshop that visitors remark on without knowing why.

It is the peace of a man who has found his ground and will not leave it.

It is the peace, his grandfather would have said, of a man who has stopped looking for safety - and discovered he was standing in it.

A WISDOM THREAD

On the one move that changes everything — and why you keep almost making it.

There's a moment in every hard season

when you feel the pull to do something.

Anything.

Just to feel less helpless.

Most people never question that pull.

They should.

/1

The enemy of clear thinking isn't confusion.

It's urgency.

Urgency moves you off your ground

before you've decided if your ground was worth keeping.

/2

The cave on the mountain looks like nothing.

The plains look like action.

But the man on the plains is running.

The man in the cave is positioned.

These are not the same thing.

/3

Men whose hearts are desperate speak desperate words.

And desperate words, heard long enough, become your vision.

Be careful whose fear you're listening to. It has a way of becoming yours.

/4

You are not without hope.

You are not without Might.

These aren't things you find. They are things you align with.

The difference between those two sentences

is the difference between a person who waits

and a person who moves with authority.

/5

The lion's power is its roar.

Close the mouth - you've ended the reign.

Not with force.

With Goodness.

Planted. Anchored. Immovable.

Silence is the collapse of every false thing.

/6

Freely you received.

So give without measuring.

Give past the point where it feels wise.

Abundance held closes the mouth of nothing.

Abundance released closes the mouth of everything that was trying to speak against you.

The greatest threat to your clarity

isn't the opposition outside.

It's the moment you decide someone else carries this more powerfully than you do.

They don't.

You just haven't stopped looking outward long enough to find out what's carried inside.

/7

The question in every war - market, spiritual, or otherwise - is never:

Which side are you on?

It's:

Have you found the place where the war no longer reaches?

That place exists.

It is not retreat.

It is the highest ground there is.

/8

You don't have to flee what you've already transcended.

Stay with what is true.

Let everyone else run the plains.

You know where the mountain is.

9/9

THE PRACTICE

Five invitations. No prerequisites.

I.

Find the bench.

The one place, the one work, the one practice that tells you who you are when the noise stops.

Return to it this week. Not to produce. Not to perform.

Just to remember.

II.

The next time urgency rises in you - that pull to move, to act, to do something -

pause there.

Ask one question:

Is this my ground? Or am I about to run onto someone else's plains?

The answer will come quickly

if you're honest enough to wait for it.

III.

Give something away that you have been measuring.

Your time. Your knowledge. Your craft.

An introduction. An hour. An honest word.

Give it without tracking the return.

Notice what happens to the hand that opens.

IV.

Name the voice whose fear has become your vision.

You know the one.

You've been reading their words, watching their moves, borrowing their dread.

Write the name down if you need to.

Then, once -

just once today -

look somewhere else.

V.

Find your cave.

Not where you go to rest. Where you go to be repositioned.

The place where the noise doesn't reach, where you remember what you actually know, where something in you goes quiet in a way that feels less like emptiness and more like clarity.

Go there before the week is out.

Stay longer than feels practical. Leave knowing something you didn't know when you arrived.

These are not instructions.

They are doors.

You only need to walk through one.

“In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”

Isaiah 30.15 · ESV