“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
- Isaiah 43:19

I think that we can forget that God is the original creator. And perhaps we often aren’t aware that He is still in the business of creating new things. The Garden of Eden wasn’t a stopping point for his creation. He loves to use the people He made to help bring those things into fruition.  

Remember when we were kids and we sat at the table with a wad of playdough? We carefully pulled it apart and crafted some interesting work of art, and then, perhaps out of dissatisfaction or the need to build something else, we wadded it up and began creating something new.

I think God sometimes does this with the things we are involved with and the seasons we are in. He wads it all up and begins something new.

Sometimes, I am resistant to change. I would just rather keep the traditions and not deal with the hassle it takes to implement change. And then there is part of me that wants to solve the problems, and I know that changes are needed in order to solve them.  

God wants to create new things, new creations, new starts to life. He is in the business of doing this everywhere. He is far from being a dead end and fanning broken-down systems. He really is the hope of the world, and life is flowing from Him.

I do not know where a new creation will end up—how it will feel, how it will look, or even its resting place. What I can do is take the risk of starting it and trust God to teach my heart something new through it.

Right now, my husband and I are at the beginning of something new. God has wadded up a past season and is now remodeling it into—I don’t even know what! I feel like a child walking along the bouncing diving board for the first time. The flecks of fear are there, and I am not sure about the rails being off and the deep water below me. But the Lord is standing on the side of the water, and He is cheering me on to take the risk and trust Him; He is telling me that I am ready to jump into the new thing.

Are you here with me on this? Are you in that place where you know God is reforming, starting over, and producing something new? It's both exciting and scary to trust Him fully. I would like to remind us all that the master creator has never stopped creating and loving the build-out of new things. It didn’t end at the Garden of Eden. He is still here, working in development, and boy, does He love building it out with us. Let's all relax and create with Him as He invites us to do so.

For four weeks we have been talking about ginóskō.

The knowing that is intimate. Relational. The kind that existed before you had a name.

We talked about the enemy's playbook. The lies. The disqualification list. The placement.

Today is where it all lands.

Because here is what I did not say in the first three emails.

Ginóskō was never designed to be a solo experience.

The Early Church Did Not Know God Alone

Read the book of Acts and you will notice something.

They were always together.

Not because they were social. Not because they were building an organization.

Because they needed each other.

Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor. (Ecclesiastes 4:9)

The early church did not just know God individually. They knew Him together. They carried each other's understanding. When one was slipping, another had the word. When one forgot who they were, someone else remembered.

That is not a small thing.

That is the design.

And the enemy has spent centuries trying to convince you that you can do this alone. Private faith. Solo pursuit. Just you and Jesus in your quiet time and you will figure it out.

And it works. To a point.

But what the early church understood, what most modern believers have mostly forgotten, is that there is a dimension of knowing God that only happens in real community with real people who are running the same direction.

The Lies Lose Their Power In Community

Here is something I have watched for years.

The voice that says not enough is loudest when you are alone.

Not because it gets quieter in community. But because in real community, someone else has the truth you need when the lie is loudest.

When you are isolated, the voice has no competition.

When you are with people who know the same Lord, who are doing the same work of understanding their design and living out of their identity, the lie walks into a room full of people who know it is lying.

And it loses.

That is why I built the God Designed Living Collective.

Not as a content platform. Not as another thing to consume.

As a community of people who are refusing to let this moment pass them by. Who have settled the knowing question and are now running together toward what God has put in front of them.

Here Is What Is Inside the Collective

Monthly teaching from me built specifically around your design, your assignment, and the season you are in. Not generic content. Targeted truth for the person God made you to be.

A real community of people who are doing the actual work. Not watching. Building.

The GOD Designed framework and NEXUS Profile tools so you know how God made you and how to operate out of that design instead of constantly fighting against your own wiring.

Regular access to Prudence and me. Not just as teachers. As people with skin in the same game.

Ongoing activation and application, because knowing the truth is the beginning, not the end. You have to do something with it.

This is for the person who read these four emails and felt something shift.

This is for the person who has been sensing it for a while and just needed to know there was somewhere real to land.

This is for the person who wants to run toward this moment instead of surviving it.

The door is open.

→ Join the God Designed Living Collective: https://www.goddesignedliving.com/god-designed-living

One Last Thing

If you have been holding something, a prayer need, something you are believing God for, something you have not told anyone, our team at Chris & Prudence Ministries would love to stand with you.

Prayer is one of the most important things we do.

Submit your request here:

→ https://chrisandprudence.com/prayer-request 
Available in the app on Apple and Android.

You were not designed to know Him alone.

You were designed to know Him together.

Onward, Chris Behnke

P.S. The Collective is open now. That link above is the door. The ones who wait for a better time are the ones who write about this season differently later. The ones who move while it is hot are the ones who look back and say that was the moment. This is the moment. Walk through the door. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

What I have noticed about folks is that there seems to be 2 camps when it comes to throwing parties. You either throw parties often and enjoy doing it, or you really resist throwing parties and don’t do it very often, if at all. And then there is maybe a 3rd camp: those that enjoy coming to the party but not throwing it.

I think the term “throwing a party” is kind of humorous. How in the world do you 'throw a party'?  Amelia Bedelia would be confused.

I have always been good at the preparation of events and parties. It's one of the ways God wired me: to notice the details and pay attention to planning.

 But even ahead of planning the celebration, one must first take notice of a reason to celebrate.

I would like to even propose that perhaps we don’t even need a logical reason to celebrate.
 This idea, of course, messes with my little logical-minded brain, and so I actively stick to looking for the reason why.

Looking for reasons to celebrate helps train our brains to be more thankful. How can it not?
You know, I actively keep a list that is dated in my notes app of the things that stood out to me during my days. Where I was wowed by God’s goodness, whether it was subtle or loud. It doesn’t matter; all the goodies God sends our way is worth recording, is it not?

This year, not just one, but two of our children are graduating high school. They both worked hard and passed their GED exam this last Fall and Winter. I sure am proud of them. That's hard work. One is right on time, and the other is early. 12-plus years of schooling deserves a little celebration!

But I am going a little further: I am giving myself a graduation party. I have been a conductor of sorts for the last 20 years—of 4 kids in total, in homeschool and raising goodhearted humans. And that season is now closing for me. A new one is opening, and while I am so thrilled to be done with this last season, the new one I am coming into feels a little daunting. Change is never easy for my type of person. Maybe I can start a trend for parents everywhere: “You deserve a party too!”

I actively look for ways to celebrate, even though it might just be tiny things. For a while, I was dragging home some sort of goodie all the time and telling the kids why it was there. “Well, your dad got a good contract for the next 6 months, your sister landed a new job, we started a new show, your brother got promoted!” The world is our oyster when it comes to finding reasons to celebrate.

Celebrations are important to the morale of our lives. They bring remembrance and gratefulness, and finality to chapters closing and new ones opening. They are meant to be a happy gathering where we are free to share with each other the sweet feelings of accomplishment from places of hard work and focus and achievements.

But don’t think you have to put blood, sweat, and tears into preparation every time. Maybe all we need is a stop in at a coffee shop (tell the barista why you’re here today), a new flower for the garden (tell the cashier why you’re buying), a pair of shoes we have been wanting (tell the salesman about it), or to just write it down for documentation purposes.

Testimony spreads new faith around. Tell each other about the goodness of God and how it has affected you this week.

There is always a reason to celebrate. And when logic gets in the way, celebrate anyway.

~ Prudence

You have heard the Esther line a hundred times.

For such a time as this.

It gets used as motivation. As pressure. As a challenge to step up and do something hard.

But when you read Mordecai's actual words again, something else is happening.

He is not pressuring Esther.

He is revealing her.

Read It Again Slowly

“And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14)

Not: You better step up.

Not: This is your only chance, do not blow it.

Who knows.

Meaning: What if the position you are already in is itself evidence of the knowing?

Esther did not earn her way into the palace through spiritual discipline or prophetic faith. She was placed there. By God. Before she knew what the moment would require.

That is the structure of the whole story.

The knowing came first.

Then the placement.

Then the moment.

And it is still the same structure today.

You did not stumble into this season of history. You were placed into it.

The technology emerging on your watch. The relationships you carry. The access you have. The things you have been through that you thought were just painful and are actually preparation.

None of it is random.

All of it is placement.

And the placement is itself evidence of the ginóskō we talked about in week one. He knew you. He placed you. And the season you are living in is not the thing you have to survive.

It is the thing you were built for.

The Pressure You Feel Is Actually Recognition

Here is what I have noticed.

The most common response to “for such a time as this” is pressure.

A heaviness. An urgency that feels less like invitation and more like accusation.

I think I know why.

Because most people have not settled the knowing question.

When you have not settled ginóskō, “for such a time as this” sounds like: you have not done enough, you are behind, you had better figure it out fast.

But when you know that you are known, the same phrase sounds completely different.

It sounds like: look what He already prepared.

Look where you already are.

Look who He already made you to be.

The pressure becomes recognition. And recognition creates movement instead of paralysis.

You Need People Who Know This With You

Here is what I want to say plainly this week.

You cannot hold this alone.

The pressure of the moment is real. The voice that says not enough is loud. You need people around you who know the same Lord, are running the same direction, and refuse to let the lies win unchallenged.

That is what the God Designed Living Collective is.

Not a course. Not a conference. A community of people who are doing the actual work of living out of their design in this specific season.

People who are asking the right questions. People who are taking ginóskō seriously. People who understand that the placement was on purpose and are not going to waste it.

Here is what you get inside the Collective:

Monthly teaching directly from me, built around your design and your assignment in this moment.

A community of people who are not watching from the sidelines.

The GOD Designed framework and NEXUS Profile tools so you know how God wired you and how to operate from that design.

Access to Prudence and me in ways that go deeper than a weekly email ever can.

This is the community that will hold the knowing with you when the voice gets loud.

The door is open now.

→ Join the God Designed Living Collective: https://www.goddesignedliving.com/god-designed-living

And take the Fear Compass if you have not yet. It is the first tool and it matters.

→ https://www.goddesignedliving.com/ravens-algorithms

Our team at Chris & Prudence Ministries would love to pray with you. Whatever you are believing God for right now, submit it here:

→ https://chrisandprudence.com/prayer-request

Available in the app on Apple and Android.

You were not placed here by accident.

Act like it.

Onward, Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week is the one this whole series has been building toward. Ginóskō is relational. God never designed you to know Him in isolation. What happens when you run with people who know the same Lord and are headed the same direction is something the enemy has been trying to prevent your whole life. Do not miss it. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

I find it interesting that many of us are constantly asking God to “open the doors” or say yes to the job, the thing, the move. We believe we know what we want and that what we are asking for is exactly the ticket to our happiness and health.

Life has delivered a lot of unfortunate consequences to me or my husband and I for squeezing ourselves into the decision that really was just our soulish selves who wanted it. We didn’t verify with God; we just said yes to it. And just like when we are wearing shoes that don’t fit properly, we get a few blisters from the choice, and it becomes painful.

Let me also point out that sometimes, when we are in the right place, we may get a few blisters! It's just more guaranteed to happen when we don’t consult God first.

Why should we not also ask God to shut the doors on the choices we should be saying no to? I can’t tell you how many times we have been presented with a new business idea, a new business partner, a trip, a move, ect. In my life experience, I do not think it is prudent to move into a new thing without first consulting the master consultant: God.

God will move us places when we are listening to Him.
 When—we are listening to Him…
 Are we listening to Him?

There are cases of the master thief and deceiver where he has robbed us of those things that are rightfully ours. The devil isn’t called a thief for no reason. This is why it is so important for us to not be ignorant of the devil's schemes. And it's also imperative that we know our Fathers voice. We can’t decide on which road to take if we can’t hear clearly.
Sometimes God doesn’t just shut doors; He slams them shut.

 And when He does, He is very serious about us not continuing to walk in a certain direction.

 He lifts the grace.

I think most of us have experienced this grace lifting but perhaps have not had the language to articulate it.

I have recently had the unfortunate encounter of grace lifting.
 
It was something that I had been participating in as a volunteer for many years. God said, “you’re done here.” And just like that, service felt like pulling a wagon of bricks uphill, tension was high, and I felt like I could barely go near the building. It was uncomfortable.

God slammed the door shut in this case.

I knew from previous dreams he had been speaking to me about what might be coming, so I had seen the door slowly closing—but then it was a loud bam!

We can ruminate for years on why something happened, why God did this or that, why someone did or didn’t do. Maybe we will never know the why behind the move of God. And we need to be ok with that. He doesn’t always give us the answers, and sometimes the answers don’t reveal themselves till years later.

God has His ways of preparing us for a new direction.

 He knows us better than we know ourselves.

 He knows how to settle us, to bring peace, and do the invisible surgery on our hearts in the quiet of the night or the bustle of the day.

Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV): “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Praise God we can trust Him completely, and especially on those days where God slams the door shut!

God is good—no matter what!

~ Prudence

Last week we talked about ginóskō.

The knowing that is intimate. Relational. The kind that existed before you had a name.

This week I want to talk about what the enemy does with that.

Because here is his playbook, and it has never changed.

God calls. You list your disqualifications. God says He already knew. You list more disqualifications.

Sound familiar?

Look at the Pattern

Moses at the burning bush: “Who am I to go to Pharaoh?” (Exodus 3:11)

Gideon is threshing wheat in a hole so the Midianites will not see him when an angel shows up and says: “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” And Gideon's response: “Pardon me, my lord, but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?” (Judges 6:12–13)

Jeremiah: “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.” (Jeremiah 1:6)

Every single time, God's response is the same thing.

I know.

I knew before I called you.

The calling was not issued before God checked the credentials. The credentials were built into the design before the call was placed. The assignment came first. Then He made the person to match it.

You are not the person who got called by accident and now God is hoping you figure it out.

You are the person God knew before the foundation of the world and then wired, on purpose, with the exact combination of design, experience, story, and access that this moment required.

The Enemy Is Not Attacking Your Performance

This is the part most people miss.

The enemy does not primarily attack your ability.

He attacks your identity.

Because if he can get you to believe you are not the right person, you will disqualify yourself before he even has to fight.

That is the whole strategy. Get you to do his work for him.

Not enough. Not qualified. Too old. Too young. Too many mistakes. Not educated enough. Not spiritual enough. Not whatever enough.

He has been running that same play since Genesis. It still works because most believers have never fully settled the question of who made them and why.

When that question is settled, ginóskō becomes your operating system.

You stop filtering every opportunity through the voice that says not enough and start filtering through the One who said before I formed you in the womb I knew you.

That changes everything.

What Getting There Actually Requires

I will be honest with you.

Settling this is not a one-time decision. It is a daily practice. It is a posture.

And it is something that gets reinforced when you are in community with people who are running the same direction, holding the same truth, and refusing to let the voice win unchallenged.

You were not designed to hold this alone. We will talk more about that next week. But I want you thinking about it now.

Because the God Designed Living Collective exists for exactly this reason. People who are doing the actual work of understanding how God wired them, why He placed them in this season, and how to show up for what is in front of them.

Not cheerleading. Not spiritual hype. Real community, real tools, real people running toward the same thing.

More on that next week. But if you have been feeling the pull already, that is worth paying attention to.

Start with the Fear Compass if you have not taken it. It shows you which fear has been bending you out of your design and handing the enemy an easy assist.

→ Take the free Fear Compass: https://www.goddesignedliving.com/ravens-algorithms 

Our team at Chris & Prudence Ministries would love to stand with you in prayer. Whatever you are carrying right now, submit it here:

→ https://chrisandprudence.com/prayer-request
Available in the app on Apple and Android.

You are not disqualified.

You were designed.

Onward, Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week might be the most important one in this series. We are going to look at Mordecai's words to Esther from an angle most people miss. He was not pressuring her. He was revealing something. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

There is a voice.

You know the one.

It shows up when the room gets quiet. When something big is in front of you. When you are finally close to stepping into what you have been sensing for years.

And it says: You are not enough.

Not qualified. Not prepared. Too old. Too broken. Too far behind. Too many mistakes. Not the right person for this moment.

You have heard it so many times it almost sounds like your own thoughts.

It is not.

That voice is not discernment. It is not humility. It is not the Holy Spirit keeping you grounded.

It is an attack. And it is aimed at one very specific thing.

Not your performance.

Your identity.

The Word the Enemy Does Not Want You to Understand

There is a Greek word used in the New Testament that changes everything when you actually sit with it.

Ginóskō.

It means to know. But not the kind of knowing you do with facts and information. This is experiential, relational, intimate knowing. The kind that existed before anything was broken or built or started.

Jesus uses it in John 10: “I know my sheep.” Ginóskō.

Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 13: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Ginóskō.

It is the word for a father who knows his child before the child knows what a name is.

It is the word for a shepherd who can identify every one of his sheep by sound, by movement, by the particular way they walk.

And it is the word God uses to describe how He knows you.

Not knows about you.

Knows you.

Before the calendar. Before the bad years. Before the thing you are most ashamed of. Before this season you cannot fully explain. Before your best day and your worst decision.

He knew you.

That is ginóskō.

Why the Voice Keeps Getting Louder

The enemy is not stupid.

He knows that if you fully settle the question of whether God knows you, whether you were placed here on purpose, whether your design was intentional and not accidental, the rest of his playbook falls apart.

Because a person who knows they are known is very hard to stop.

So he goes after it constantly. The voice that says you are not enough is not random. It is targeted. It is aimed at the one thing that, if you lose it, makes you easy to neutralize.

Your sense of being known.

Known before the foundation of the world. Known in your mother's womb. Known in this exact season of history by a God who does not lose track of His people.

That is the truth the enemy cannot afford for you to believe.

So he tells you that you are not enough.

And most people spend their whole lives believing him instead of the One who knit them together.

This Is Not a Devotional Thought for Tuesday

This is a foundational shift that changes how you walk into every room, every decision, every opportunity, and every season you are currently navigating.

The air is different right now. We talked about that in the last series. You can feel it.

And the question for the next four weeks is this:

Do you know, in your bones, that you were known before you were sent?

Because what is coming in the next season requires people who have settled that question.

I am going to take you through exactly what ginóskō means for your assignment, your identity, and why this moment in history required exactly you.

And I want to invite you into something.

A community of people who are not running from this moment. People who are running toward it. People who are doing the work of understanding how God made them, why He placed them here, and how to show up for the assignment.

It is called the God Designed Living Collective.

We will talk more about it over the next few weeks. But I want you thinking about it now.

Start by taking the Fear Compass if you have not yet. It is the first step out of the fog and into the moment.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE

One more thing. If you have something on your heart, something specific you are believing God for, a prayer request you have been carrying, our team would love to stand with you. You can submit a prayer request here:

→ https://chrisandprudence.com/prayer-request

Also available in our app on Apple and Android.

You were not an accident.

You were placed.

Onward, Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week we go after the enemy's actual playbook. Every lie he runs at you is a variation on one theme. Once you see it, the whole thing loses its grip. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

We have covered a lot of ground over five weeks.

You are in a story. You were made on purpose, for this moment. The truth you avoid keeps you bound. Correction is not the enemy. And the plan God changed might have been the rescue.

Here is where it all lands.

Do not bury what He carried you through. Build a monument out of it.

God Made Them Stop And Build

When Israel finally crossed the Jordan on dry ground, God did something that looks inefficient.

He made them stop and haul twelve stones out of the middle of the riverbed and stack them on the bank.

Why? Read His reasoning. In the future, when your children ask, what do these stones mean, you will tell them how the Lord brought you through. These stones are to be a memorial forever.

God knew something about us. We forget. We walk through a Red Sea on Monday and start complaining by Thursday. So He built the practice of the monument into His people on purpose.

Every place He switched your path and pulled you through is a stone. The illness that kept you off the boat. The door that closed and saved you. The season you were sure would end you, and did not.

Stack the stones. Do not walk past the riverbed like nothing happened.

Your Testimony Is A Weapon

This is not just for your own memory. Your story is an actual weapon in someone else's fight.

They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

Notice the two things. The blood of the Lamb is what Jesus did. The word of their testimony is what you say about what He did in you. Both are in the sentence. Your story is not decoration. It is ammunition, and somebody nearby is losing a battle you could help them win.

The person drowning in the exact thing God already pulled you out of does not need your polished version. They need your honest one. The one where you were scared. The one where the delivery came on the wrong bird. The one where you almost gave up the week before He showed up.

When you keep that story to yourself, you are not being humble. You are burying a talent someone else needed you to spend.

We Will Tell The Next Generation

The command runs through the whole Bible. We will not hide them from our descendants. We will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord.

The next generation is going to walk into a world that lies to them at a scale we cannot fully picture. Synthetic everything. Voices designed by systems that do not love them. They are going to be starving for something real.

You are something real. Your scars are real. Your rescue is real. The God who rerouted you is real.

Tell them. At the kitchen table. In the reply to this email. In the conversation you keep almost having. Make monuments of testimony wherever you go, because the world needs your stories of when God switched the paths on you in surprising ways and pulled you through.

Do Not Finish This Series As A Watcher

Here is the danger at the end of any series.

You read six emails. You underline half the lines. You feel something. And then Monday comes and you go right back to watching.

Do not do that.

Naming was never the point. Doing is. The story is being written right now, and you do not get to be the one who felt it deeply and still sat it out.

So finish where we started. Take the Fear Compass if you have not yet. It is the free first step out of the fog and into the moment God has you in. And if you took it in week one, go back and read your heading again with everything you now know.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE
 
You are in a story. The Author is good. The ending is already written.

Stack the stones. Tell the story. Get back to work.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. This is the end of the series, not the end of the walk. Everything we covered these six weeks lives inside Ravens and Algorithms, and the Fear Compass is your on-ramp into all of it. Take it, then do the next obedient thing this week while it is still hot. The ones who wait for a better time bury it again. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

There is power in your testimony.

 What you saw, what you were there for, what you experienced.

Our testimony, layered upon others' testimony, brings a thicker case for the truth.

In fact, is this not what history is based upon? We rely upon the testimonies from others that have been documented and often base our future decisions upon them.

When something is wrong or has gone wrong, if we stay silent—thinking that our voice doesn’t matter or because we’re afraid of causing trouble, we restrict justice from doing its job.

Our testimony can convict and set a foundation for things to be set right.

Sharing your testimony is like building another solid layer over another to solidify truth. Although a stack of lies can work to convict the innocent, truthful testimony—and several of them—bring about the revealing of truth.

My husband and I recently dared to be the first in sharing a testimony about an organization that we were involved with. God has used us multiple times as a battering ram to bring the truth to set people free. It is never pleasant. And truthfully, in these cases, we cannot see ahead to how we are helping anything. But when God asks you to share the truth, we believe in doing it, even if we stick out like a sore thumb. And we choose to do it, even if it means some relationships end because of it.

A very wise elder in our lives keeps reminding us that, in its first appearance of truth, it is not well liked and is often uncomfortable. He is very right. Some have not wanted to know anything in the name of maintaining their own bliss. The Truth is not wanted because it may distort the reality we so desperately want to believe in.

In another light, our testimony of God’s goodness brings in new layers of faith to those around us. In fact, scripture encourages us a lot to share with each other about what the Lord has done for us!

When I was younger, I desperately needed encouragement in many different areas: within my marriage, raising and homeschooling kids, in my own growth as a woman, and in being the wife of an entrepreneur. What I needed was to be heard, and then for me to hear that I was going to come through it from someone who had already done it. I needed the testimony of another to help ground me. I still feel the lonesomeness of that season of my life. Sometimes, I think the Lord has us cut our teeth on painful seasons so we establish the empathy we need and become passionate about helping those around us in a more fiery way.

Today, I know someone out there needs to hear me say, “I have been there and came through it. And you are going to come through it too!”

Our experience in life is a testimony. We are living, breathing testimonies!
We can not buy our life experience. It must be lived through. It has extreme value.
I believe our testimonies were designed to be shared with each other.

 The good and the bad.

We have secrets that need to come out to bring justice, healing, and righteousness.
We often live in isolated boxes because we are afraid of what people might think.
The devils like us to live in isolation, do they not?

God asks us to share about his goodness—and He is, by very definition, the Truth, the Way, and the Life. So, if He is the Truth, let it come out among us, no matter the discomfort. Let his goodness and light bring the healing that we all need. Let nothing be hidden among us except for His words that we have hid in our hearts.

~ Prudence

Last week we talked about loosening the grip.

This week I want to show you what God does with the hands you finally opened.

He reroutes you. And the rerouting is almost always a mercy you could not see at the time.

The Flu Bug And The Titanic

Prudence said something recently that I have not stopped thinking about.

Set up your plans. Be okay when the plans do not run their exact course. God may be allowing a flu bug to keep you from boarding the fatal Titanic. God does not lead you where His Spirit cannot stay right next to you.

Sit with that.

The thing that wrecked your plan this week. The delay. The closed door. The illness that knocked you off the schedule you built so carefully. The deal that fell through at the last second.

You called it a setback. You may have called it an attack. You prayed against it.

What if it was the flu bug that kept you off the boat.

God is not obligated to explain the redirect in real time. You are standing on the dock, furious that you missed the ship. He is watching the ship head toward the thing you could not see.

In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps. Make the plan. Hold it loosely. And when He establishes a different step than the one you drew up, trust the One doing the establishing.

He Will Not Lead You Where He Cannot Stay

This is the part I want you to build your life on.

God does not lead you anywhere His Spirit cannot go with you.

So when He blocks a path, closes a door, or reroutes you through a valley you did not choose, it is not abandonment. It is often the opposite. It is Him refusing to let you go somewhere He could not walk right beside you.

My thoughts are not your thoughts, He says. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways. That is not a brush-off. That is a comfort. His vantage point is higher than yours. He can see the boat.

The redirect you are resenting might be the clearest evidence that He is still holding the wheel.

You Can Disappoint Someone And Still Obey

Here is where the grip usually catches, though.

Following the redirect often means disappointing somebody. And a lot of us would rather stay on the sinking ship than let one person down.

Rachel Green Taylor said it in a sentence that needs to go on your wall. You can disappoint someone and still be walking in obedience.

Read that slowly, because it breaks a lie a lot of good people have organized their whole lives around.

We assume that if someone is upset with us, we must have done something wrong. So we keep the peace. We stay on the boat. We bury the talent. We come down off the wall for the meeting, because saying no would disappoint someone.

But Jesus disappointed people constantly. He disappointed the crowd that wanted a king. He disappointed the rich young ruler. He disappointed His own family for a season. He disappointed the religious leaders every single week.

He was not being unkind. He was being obedient. And obedience and universal approval have never once been the same thing.

If your obedience requires that no one is ever disappointed in you, you will never obey. You will just manage everyone's feelings until your calling runs out of daylight.

The Ravens Come In Surprising Ways

Do not miss how God actually delivers when He reroutes you.

He fed Elijah with ravens. Unclean birds. The wrong delivery system by every religious standard in Israel. A serious person would have refused the bread.

God has never once been bothered by His delivery method. Only we have.

When He changes your plans, the provision usually shows up on the wrong bird too. The unexpected person. The door you did not want. The city you did not pick. The tool you were suspicious of. The redirect itself.

If you have been waiting for the help to look the way you expected it to look, you have probably already walked past it.

Which Fear Is Fighting The Redirect

Here is the thing. You cannot receive a redirect you are too afraid to accept.

Fear of the unknown makes you cling to the old plan because at least you understand it. Fear of missing out makes you sprint back onto the boat because everyone else is boarding.

Naming the fear is how you finally open your hands.

The Fear Compass shows you, free, in three minutes, which fear has been making you fight the very redirect that was trying to rescue you.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE

Make your plans.

Then be okay when God spares you from the boat.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week is the last email in this series, and it might be the most important. When God reroutes you and carries you through, He is not just rescuing you. He is building a testimony the world is going to need. I do not want you to bury it. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

Last week I told you the truth you avoid keeps you bound.

Today I want to go one layer down, to the reason we avoid it in the first place.

Pride.

Not the loud, arrogant, chest-out kind. The quiet kind. The kind that lives in good, sincere, church-going people who would never call themselves prideful.

Here is how you spot it. Pride hates correction.

And it does not hate correction because correction hurts. It hates correction because correction threatens control.

Correction Is Not The Enemy Of Your Comfort

We tell ourselves we resist correction because it stings. That is not the real reason.

Correction stings for a second. What pride is actually protecting is not your feelings. It is your grip. Your sense that you are the one running the show, that your read on the situation is the final word, that you do not have to hand the wheel to anyone, including God.

Correction says, you might be wrong about this. And to a heart quietly built on control, being wrong does not feel like information. It feels like a threat to the throne.

Solomon did not soften it. Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates correction is stupid.

That is a hard word. He used it on purpose. Because the refusal to be corrected is not a personality style. It is the exact thing that keeps a person stuck for decades while they call it conviction.

Faithful Are The Wounds Of A Friend

The people who love you will tell you the truth. That is how you know they love you.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. A real friend will risk the relationship to hand you the truth. A flatterer will hand you whatever keeps you comfortable and calls it kindness.

We live in a world building tools designed to agree with us. A whole culture of mirrors that reflect back whatever we already believed and call it insight.

Do not build your life on a mirror. You cannot be sharpened by your own reflection. You can only be confirmed by it, and confirmation, when you are wrong, is not a gift. It is a trap with good lighting.

You need the people, and the God, who will tell you the hard thing across the table instead of the comfortable thing you came in hoping to hear.

The Peace That Is Actually Control

Here is where this gets close to home.

A lot of what we call peace is not peace. It is control wearing peace's clothes.

Dr. Caroline Leaf said it plainly, and I have not been able to shake it. If your peace depends on everything going your way, that is not actually peace. That is control. Learning to be stable in uncertainty is one of the most underrated skills you can have.

Read that again.

The person who only feels peace when the plan holds, when the people comply, when the outcome is guaranteed, does not have peace. They have a tight grip and a calm face.

Real peace can sit in the middle of uncertainty and not flinch, because it is anchored to a Person, not an outcome. Be still, and know that I am God. Not be still once everything is handled. Be still, and know, right in the middle of the part you cannot control.

Pride cannot do that. Pride has to manage the outcome. Which means pride can never actually rest.

The Grip You Cannot See

Here is the problem. You cannot loosen a grip you cannot feel.

Most people who are white-knuckling control have no idea they are doing it. It just feels like being responsible. It feels like caring. It feels like faithfulness. Fear disguises itself brilliantly, and control is one of its favorite costumes.

The Fear Compass surfaces it. In three minutes, it shows you where fear has quietly turned into control in your life, and what it is costing you. It is free, and it is one of the most clarifying three minutes you will spend this month.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE

Correction is not an attack on you.

It is God trying to hand you back the freedom that control has been quietly costing you.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week is one of my favorites in this whole series. I want to show you what happens when you finally loosen your grip and let God change your plans. Prudence said something recently that reframed the whole thing for me, and it involves a flu bug, a sinking ship, and the God who reroutes you on purpose. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

Everybody loves the first half of the verse.

The truth will set you free.

We put it on coffee mugs and church walls. We say it at graduations. We love it because freedom sounds like a gift with no bill attached.

But read it like it is the first time. If truth is the thing that sets you free, then it follows, plainly, that ignoring truth is the thing that keeps you bound.

There is no neutral. You do not get to hear the truth and set it on a shelf and stay exactly where you were.

You either move toward it and get freer.

Or you avoid it and get more bound.

Avoidance Is Not Safety

Here is the lie underneath most stuck lives.

We treat avoiding the truth like it is the safe option. Like if I just do not look at it, do not name it, do not deal with it, I get to stay comfortable.

That is not how it works. Avoidance is not a pause button. It is a direction.

Hosea named the mechanism almost three thousand years ago. My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. He was not talking about IQ. He was talking about the refusal to know what they already half-knew.

The truth you keep avoiding does not go quiet. It goes to work. Underground. In your body. In your sleep. In the low-grade dread you carry into every room and cannot explain.

You already know the thing. The conversation you keep not having. The number you keep not looking at. The relationship you keep excusing. The tool you keep refusing to understand because understanding it would require you to change.

The bondage is not the truth. The bondage is the avoiding.

The Prudent See It And Move

Solomon said the prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.

Notice he did not say the prudent avoid danger. He said they see it. They look straight at the thing. Then they act.

Prudence is not fear. Prudence is paying attention on purpose.

The simple keep going. Not because they are rebellious. Because looking felt harder than walking past it. And they pay the penalty every single time, usually with interest, usually years later.

The freest people I know are not the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones who refuse to lie to themselves about the problems they have.

Fear Is Why You Are Not Looking

Here is the part I need you to hear.

You are not avoiding the truth because you are lazy or faithless. You are avoiding it because of fear. Almost always one of two.

Fear of the unknown, which freezes you and tells you not to look because you might not be able to handle what you see.

Or fear of missing out, which flings you so fast into the next thing that you never sit still long enough for the truth to catch you.

You cannot deal with truth you are too afraid to face. And you cannot face a fear you have never named.

So name it. That is the whole first step.

The Fear Compass shows you, in three minutes, which fear has been keeping you from looking at the thing you already know you need to look at. It is free. It is honest. And it is the door out of the avoidance.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE
 
Truth sets you free.

Avoiding it just quietly locks the door from the inside.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week I want to talk about why we avoid the truth even when part of us wants it. There is one thing underneath it that most people will never admit, and it hates being corrected because correction threatens the one thing it is really protecting. Control. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

Last week I told you that you are in a story.

Today I want to tell you why you are in this one and not a different one.

You were not born in the 1400s. You were not born in 1862. You were born now. In this stretch of years. Inside this exact shift, with this technology emerging on your watch.

The Lord could have placed you in any century He wanted.

He placed you in this one.

That was not random.

Handiwork, Not Filler

There is a verse that has been sitting in front of us the whole time.

We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

The Greek word for handiwork is poiema. It is where we get the word poem. You are not a draft. You are not a placeholder. You are a composed work, written by an Author who does not write filler.

Read the order of that verse. He prepared the works first. Then He made the worker. He did not make you and then go looking for jobs to hand you. He laid out the assignments before you drew a breath, and then He wired you to match them.

Your design is not a personality quirk. Your design is a key cut to fit a specific lock.

And the cutting started earlier than you think. Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.

Stop Apologizing For Your Wiring

Here is what took me too many years to learn.

Your wiring is not the thing you have to overcome to do God's will. Your wiring is the thing God put in you to do His will.

A lot of believers have been quietly apologizing for the way they are made for a long time.

The one who feels everything in the room before anyone speaks has been told to toughen up. That sensitivity is not a defect. It is a sensor God installed on purpose.

The one who cannot let an idea go until it makes sense has been told they are too much. That instinct is not too much. It is wiring, installed because something somewhere needed a person who would not move on too fast.

Your design is not what makes you difficult to be around. It is what makes you difficult to replace.

Issachar Only Had One Job

There is a small verse buried in a list of King David's warriors that most people skip.

From Issachar, men who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.

Two hundred of them. Out of an army of hundreds of thousands. Almost nobody. Their entire credential was that they could read the moment and tell the rest of the room what to do about it.

That is the believer's job description for the next ten years.

You are not called to be the loudest voice in the room. You are called to be one of the few who understand the times. And you cannot understand the times if you do not first understand how God built you to move through them.

The next decade is going to produce a near-infinite supply of competent fakes. Output that looks right. Voices that sound like the right voices. The differentiator will not be the work. It will be the worker. The actual, specific, designed, called, wired-on-purpose worker.

That is you.

You Cannot Read The Moment Through Fear

Here is the catch. Your design gets hijacked when fear is running.

Fear of the unknown makes you shrink your wiring down until nobody, including you, can see it. Fear of missing out makes you abandon your wiring to chase everybody else's. Either way, the assignment gets buried.

You have to know which fear is on you before you can walk in who God made you to be.

That is what the Fear Compass is for. Twelve questions. Three minutes. Free. It shows you the fear pattern that has been quietly bending you out of your design, and it hands you a rhythm to get back to yourself.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE

You were not handed a personality.

You were handed an assignment in human form.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week gets sharper. If truth is what sets us free, then there is a name for what happens when we ignore it. I am going to say it plainly, because most people never do, and it is quietly costing them years. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

Something shifted. You have felt it for a while now.

You go to work. You answer the emails. You make the dinner. You laugh at the right moments. And then, somewhere around 10:47 at night, when the house is finally quiet, it shows up again.

That feeling. The one that says something has changed and you do not have a category for it yet.

Many people medicate that feeling with a podcast and a glass of wine. Do not do that. Do not silence it.

It is not anxiety. It is recognition.

Something In You Already Knows

You are not crazy. The air actually is different right now.

I have lived through a few of these hinge moments. The internet going from a curiosity to a utility. Phones absorbing every other object in the house. Every one of them had a feeling attached to it. This one is bigger, and something in your spirit already knows it.

That unease is not a defect. It is your design doing exactly what it was built to do. It is trying to get your attention before you scroll past the most important decade of your life.

Here is what it is saying, if you let it finish the sentence.

We are in a story. The good kind. The hard kind. The kind that requires actual people to actually show up.

Isaiah Looked Up

Isaiah got his vision in the year everybody thought was ending. The king died. The stability ended. The future got blurry. The headlines were doing whatever the ancient version of doomscrolling was.

And in the middle of all of it, Isaiah looked up.

That is the whole move.

He saw something he had probably walked past for years. Not because it was hidden. Because he had been looking at the wrong altitude.

The throne was still occupied. It is still occupied right now.

The God who knew about silicon before there was sand on the beach is not pacing in heaven trying to figure out what to do about a chatbot. He is not asking you to figure it all out. He is asking you to stay close enough to hear when He speaks.

Most People Miss The Story While They Are In It

Here is the part that should stop you cold.

Almost everyone in the great stories did not know they were in one until much later. That is part of why they almost missed their part.

Esther woke up in a palace and thought the assignment was the wardrobe. It took a man named Mordecai leaning in and saying, who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this.

You have the rare privilege of knowing while it is still happening.

The air is different. That is not the bad news.

That is the invitation.

You Do Not Have To Figure It All Out

Here is what fear will try to sell you in the next sentence.

If you cannot see the whole plan, you are not ready. If you do not understand the technology, the culture, the shift, then you have no business stepping into any of it. So sit down. Wait. Let the qualified people handle it.

That is a lie, and it is an old one.

God did not ask Isaiah to explain the throne room. He asked him to look up and stay in the room. He did not hand Esther a strategy memo. He handed her a moment and a choice. Noah got an instruction, not a forecast.

You are not being asked to master the moment. You are being asked to stay close enough to hear when He speaks. That is the whole job description. The rest of it gets handled one obedient step at a time, and not one step sooner.

Stop waiting to feel ready. Ready is not coming. Nearness is available right now.

Which Fear Is Actually Steering You

Here is the honest problem. You cannot recognize a moment clearly while a fear you have not named is quietly steering the wheel.

For most believers, one of two fears is driving right now. One freezes you. One flings you. Neither one is leading you, and most people cannot tell you on a Tuesday which one has them.

I built a short, free diagnostic to fix that. It is called the Fear Compass. Twelve honest questions. Three minutes. You get a personalized read on what has actually been moving you, and a one-page rhythm to interrupt it.

This is the first step of the whole series. Take it before we go any further.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE

The throne is still occupied.

You are not too late.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week I am going to show you why you were placed in this exact stretch of history and not any other one. It was not random. And once you see it, the fog you have been walking in starts to lift. Don't forget to look for the ravens.

We have covered a lot of ground in this series.

Deception that feels like conviction. Talents buried out of fear. Good invitations that pull you off the wall.

If you have been honest with yourself through all of it, some of you have already had the hard realization.

You buried something. You stepped off a wall a long time ago. You spent years in a room that never knew what to do with you.

Now you see it. And the first thing that shows up is not relief.

It is shame.

Shame Is The Second Trap

Waking up is painful.

The moment you see the buried talent or the abandoned wall, your instinct is to turn on yourself. How did I miss this. How did I waste that time. How was I so blind for so long.

That is a trap, and it is just as effective as the first one.

The enemy could not keep you asleep, so now he wants to keep you paralyzed with regret. Same result. You still are not building. You are just miserable about it now instead of comfortable.

God does not reveal these things to shame you. He reveals them to move you.

Conviction and shame feel similar for a second, so learn the difference. Conviction points forward and says, here is the next step. Shame points backward and says, look at what you wrecked. One gives you a direction. The other just gives you a weight.

Peter Buried His Talent Too

If anyone earned an apology tour, it was Peter.

He did not just bury a gift quietly. He denied Jesus out loud. Three times. To people's faces. On the worst night of his life, when it mattered most, he buried his calling out of raw fear.

Then Jesus died, and Peter had to live with it.

Watch what Peter does next. John 21. He goes back to fishing. Back to the old life. Back to the thing he did before Jesus ever called him off the boat.

That is what shame does. It sends you backward. It tells you that you blew your shot, so you might as well return to the version of you from before.

Jesus Did Not Ask For The Apology

Then Jesus shows up on the shore.

Here is the moment. This is the whole email.

He does not bring up the denials. He does not make Peter recount the failure. He does not demand a tearful confession or a probation period or a public apology tour to prove he is sorry.

He asks one question. Do you love me.

Three times. One for each denial. Not to rub Peter's nose in it, but to cover each one and put it behind them.

And every single time Peter answers, Jesus does not say, now go feel bad about what you did. He says, feed my sheep.

Get back to work. Here is your assignment. It is still yours. Go.

That is what grace actually does. It is not soft. It does not pretend the failure did not happen. It just refuses to leave you sitting in it. Grace covers the past and hands you the next assignment in the same breath.

Forgive Yourself And Get Back On The Wall

So here is what I want you to do with everything this series stirred up.

Have grace for the time you spent in the wrong room. Forgive yourself for the talent you buried and the wall you stepped off. Not because it did not matter. Because staying in regret keeps you off the wall just as surely as fear did.

Then make a decision. A firm one.

Walk it out in love, not bitterness. You can leave a room that never fit you without torching it on the way out. You can set a hard boundary without a speech. You can forgive the leader who never saw you and still refuse to bury your gift for them one more day.

Peter did not spend the rest of his life apologizing for the denials. He spent it feeding sheep. He built the church. The man who buried his calling out of fear became the rock, because grace pointed him forward and he obeyed it.

That is available to you. Not someday. This week.

One More Thing

This concept for this whole series lives inside Ravens and Algorithms. Recognizing what God sends. Refusing to bury what He gave you. Guarding the work. And getting back up when you realize you set it down.

If these four weeks moved something in you, the book is where it all comes together.

Click → RAVENS & ALGORITHMS 

Jesus did not ask Peter to grovel.

He said, feed my sheep.

Stop looking back. Get back to work.

Onward,

Chris Behnke

P.S. This is the end of the series, but it is the start of the part that counts. You have named a dead system, a buried talent, a wall you left, and now a decision. Naming was never the point. Doing is. Make the decision this week, while it is still hot. The ones who wait for a better time bury it again.

Last week you named the talent you have been burying.

Now let's say you dig it up. You stop playing safe. You start building the thing God actually put in you.

Here is what nobody warns you about.

The opposition does not stop. It changes clothes.

The Attack You Can See Is The Easy One

When Nehemiah started rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, his enemies came at him the way you would expect.

They mocked him. They threatened him. They tried to scare the workers off the wall with the promise of force.

He handled all of it. Open opposition is almost easy, because you can see it. You know it is against you. You post a guard, you keep building, you push through.

The dangerous attack is the one that does not look like an attack.

So when force failed, his enemies got smarter. They sent him an invitation.

Come Down And Let's Talk

Read it. Nehemiah 6. Sanballat and Geshem send word. Come, let us meet together in one of the villages on the plain of Ono.

Notice what that is.

It is not a threat. It is a meeting. It sounds reasonable. It sounds relational. Let's get together. Let's talk this out. Let's have a conversation on the plain.

Nehemiah saw straight through it. He knew they meant to harm him. But look at the mechanism, because this is the part that gets us.

They did not ask him to stop building. They just asked him to come down.

Come off the wall. Step away from the work. Just for a meeting. Just for a conversation. Just for a little while.

They knew if they could get him off the wall, the wall would stop. You cannot build and come down at the same time.

The Enemy Uses Good Things To Pull You Off The Wall

This is the trap, and it is more subtle than anything we have talked about so far.

The thing pulling you off the wall is rarely obvious sin. It is usually something good.

A good opportunity. A good relationship that needs more of you than it should. A good cause. A good meeting. A good conversation that could have waited. A dozen good things, each one reasonable on its own, all of them quietly asking you to come down.

You will not be tempted off your calling by something ugly. You will be invited off it by something that looks fine.

And you will call coming down the humble thing. The kind thing. The responsible thing. That is the deception from week one again. It never stops finding new clothes.

The wall does not fall because you quit. The wall falls because you kept saying yes to good invitations until you were never on the wall long enough to finish it.

Seven Words

Here is how Nehemiah answered. It is seven words, and it might be the most important thing you read this month.

Nehemiah 6:3. I am doing a great work and I cannot come down.

He did not argue. He did not explain himself four times. He did not schedule the meeting to be polite. He did not soften it into a maybe.

He named the work. He called it great. And he refused to come down.

They sent the same invitation four more times. He gave the same answer four more times.

That is not rudeness. That is clarity. He knew what he was building, so he knew what to say no to.

Most people cannot say no to good things because they were never clear on the great thing. When the main thing is fuzzy, everything looks equally worth your time. When the main thing is clear, most invitations answer themselves.

Guard The Wall

You do not need more discipline. You need to know what your wall is.

Name the great work God gave you to build. Write it down if you have to. Then hold it up next to every invitation that pulls you off it.

Some of those invitations are good. That is exactly why they are dangerous. Good is the most effective disguise the enemy has.

You can be honest, kind, and completely immovable at the same time. I am doing a great work and I cannot come down is not a wall against people. It is a wall around the work.

Build the wall. Guard the wall. Do not come down for a meeting that was designed to stop it.

One More Thing

Guarding the work God gave you is exactly what Ravens and Algorithms is about on the other side. Recognizing what He sends, then protecting what He put in your hands long enough to finish it.

If this one landed, the book goes deeper.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS 

You cannot build and come down at the same time.

Stay on the wall.

Onward,

Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week is the last email in the series, and it is the one I most want you to read. Some of you are going to finish this series and realize you buried a talent for years, or stepped off your wall a long time ago. The instinct will be shame. I want to show you what Jesus did with a man who did the exact same thing, and why He did not ask for a single apology. Do not miss it.

This is the last email in this series.

Over the past few weeks, I've walked you through something I believe is critical for every believer to understand right now.

You are alive in this moment because God decided you needed to be. (Acts 17:26)

He didn't just place you here. He wired you with a specific design for this exact season. (Ephesians 2:10)

The chaos around you is not the end of the story. It's the clearing of the stage. (Hebrews 12:27)

And like Esther, the question isn't whether God put you here. The question is whether you'll move. (Esther 4:14)

Today I want to close with this: your design is not just information. It's an assignment.

Information vs. Activation

One of the biggest traps I see in the body of Christ is this: people collect revelation but never act on it.

They go to conferences. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Take courses. They know a lot.

But knowing and doing are two very different things.

James 1:22 says, "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."

That's blunt. James basically says: if you hear truth and don't act on it, you're lying to yourself.

I don't say that to shame you. I say it because I've lived it.

I spent years understanding principles of identity, design, and purpose. And for a long time, I still wasn't fully walking in mine. I knew it in my head. But my life hadn't caught up to my theology.

That gap, the space between what you know and what you do, is where most people get stuck.

And I believe God is closing that gap right now. For a lot of people. Maybe for you.

Why This Season Is Different

I've been in ministry and business long enough to recognize seasons. Some are about learning. Some about waiting. Some about healing.

This one is about activation.

I keep hearing it. From the Lord. From the people I coach. From the conversations Prudence and I are having in our own living room.

Something is shifting. And it's not just cultural. It's spiritual.

God is mobilizing people. Not into religious activity. Into their actual assignments.

The ones they were wired for. The ones that match their design. The ones that require their specific gifts, perspectives, and capacities.

Not someone else's assignment. Theirs.

Joel 2:28-29 says, "And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days."

That's not selective. That's everybody. Sons. Daughters. Old. Young. Servants.

I believe we are living in a Joel 2 moment. Not on the horizon. Right now.

The Spirit is moving. The question is whether you're positioned to move with Him.

Your Design Is Your Strategy

Here's what I want you to take away from this entire series.

Your design is not a personality label. It's not a fun fact for your Instagram bio.

Your design is your strategy for this season.

It tells you how to lead. How to serve. How to communicate. How to navigate conflict. How to build. How to rest. How to love the people around you in a way that actually lands.

When you know your design, you stop wasting energy on things that aren't yours to carry. You stop striving in areas where you were never meant to perform. You stop comparing yourself to people who were wired completely differently than you.

And you start building from the blueprint God already drew.

That's not arrogance. That's stewardship.

What I Believe God Is Saying

I'll close with this.

I believe God is saying to His people right now: "Stop waiting. I already gave you everything you need."

Not everything you want. Everything you need.

The wiring. The calling. The season. The moment.

The world doesn't need another spectator. It needs people who know who they are and move accordingly.

Colossians 3:23-24 says, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving."

Whatever you do. Not just the spiritual stuff. Not just the Sunday stuff. All of it.

Your business. Your marriage. Your parenting. Your friendships. Your creativity. Your leadership. Your service.

All of it. Done from your design. Done for Him.

That's how you thrive. Not by doing more. By doing what you were made for.

The Invitation

If this series has stirred something in you, don't let it fade.

Stirring without action is just emotion. And emotion without direction dissipates fast.

My book, Your Divine Blueprint, is about understanding your design at the deepest level. Your wiring. Your calling. Your purpose. And it gives you a practical framework to start walking it out.

We're giving copies away free right now. You just cover shipping. I sign every one.

Get your free copy here → https://blueprint.goddesignedliving.com/free-book
 
Thank you for walking through this series with me. I don't take your time lightly. And I pray that something in these emails has planted a seed that grows into real, lasting fruit in your life.

You were made on purpose. For a purpose. For this moment. Now go walk it out.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

Last week I told you deception feels exactly like conviction.

Today I want to show you what it costs.

There is a specific kind of deception that does not just keep you stuck. It makes you bury the very thing God gave you to spend, and it convinces you that burying it is the faithful thing to do.

I know, because I almost did it.

The Sentence I Can't "Unhear"

I was in the middle of a transition I did not want.

I was fighting it. Making the reasonable case for staying where I was. Loyal. Comfortable. Telling myself that staying put was the humble, godly, responsible move.

Then God said something to me that I have not been able to shake since.

He said, "I take the spending of My five talents just as seriously as I expect you to take the spending of your five talents."

You may want to read that a couple more times, I did when God spoke it to me, I have been replaying in my head for weeks actually...

He was not asking me to protect what He gave me. He was asking me to spend it. And He was telling me He takes that spending as seriously as He expects me to.

That reframed everything. The gifts are not mine to guard. They are His capital, placed in my hands, with an expectation of return.

We Turned A Severe Warning Into A Cute Story

Most of us learned the Parable of the Talents as a nice lesson about using your skills.

It is not a nice lesson.

Read it again. Matthew 25. A master hands his servants his own money before a journey. One gets five talents, one gets two, one gets one. The first two put the money to work and double it. The third digs a hole and buries his.

When the master comes back, he does not gently coach the third man. He calls him wicked and lazy and takes the talent away from him.

Here is what we skip. The master was not angry that the servant lost the money. He never lost a dime. It was all still there, safe in the ground.

The master was angry that he buried it out of fear.

Safe was the sin. Buried was the sin. Protecting it instead of spending it was the sin.

Burying Has A Lot Of Respectable Names

This is where it gets uncomfortable, because burying your talent almost never looks like rebellion.

It looks responsible. It looks loyal. It looks like keeping the peace.

You bury it to stay comfortable, and you call it contentment.

You bury it to keep a leader happy who has never understood your design, and you call it submission.

You bury it to avoid the hard conversation or the risky move, and you call it patience.

You sit on the gift for years in an environment that has no idea what to do with it, and you tell yourself you are being faithful by staying.

That is the deception from last week wearing a work uniform. It feels like conviction. It is actually fear with a better vocabulary.

The servant who buried his talent had reasons too. Read his defense. He sounds careful. He sounds cautious. He sounds exactly like a lot of good people I know.

The master was not impressed by his reasons. He was grieved by his fear.

God Expects A Return

This is the part that should sit heavy, in a good way.

God placed real capital in you. Gifts. Wiring. Instincts. A specific way you see and build and lead that nobody else carries the same way.

He did not hand it to you so you could keep it safe until you die.

He handed it to you expecting a return. And He takes the spending of it just as seriously as He expects you to.

That cuts both ways, and that is the hope in it. If He takes your talents that seriously, then He is not going to leave you buried forever. He will keep pressing on the thing you keep protecting until you finally dig it up and put it to work.

The transition I was fighting? I stopped fighting it. Not because it got easy. Because I finally understood that staying safe was the one thing He would not bless.

One More Thing

This is the center of the whole series, and it runs right through Ravens and Algorithms. Recognizing what God sends is half of it. Refusing to bury what He already put in you is the other half.

If this one landed, the book goes deeper.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS

God gave you capital, not a keepsake.

Stop guarding it. Start spending it.

Onward,

Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week I want to warn you about what happens the moment you finally dig up the talent and start building. The opposition changes. It stops looking like an attack and starts looking like an invitation. I will show you how Nehemiah handled it in seven words. Do not miss it.

For four weeks I asked you one question in different clothes.

Will you receive what God sends, even when it comes on the wrong bird?

Ravens. A muddy river. New tools. A Savior an entire nation crucified for showing up wrong.

That series was about recognizing what God sends you.

This one is about stewarding what God already put in you. And before you can spend a single thing He gave you, you have to deal with the one force that keeps most believers frozen for years without ever knowing it.

Deception.

Deception Does Not Feel Like Deception

Here is the part that should stop you cold.

When you are deceived, you do not feel deceived. You feel certain. You feel loyal. You feel like you are doing the right thing.

That is the whole trap. Deception does not announce itself. It does not walk in wearing a costume and twirling a mustache. It shows up wearing the face of conviction.

It feels like duty. It feels like faithfulness. It feels like staying.

That is why people spend years in dead systems, draining relationships, and religious traps that quietly kill them. Not because they are rebellious. Because they are convinced they are being faithful.

You cannot fear something you cannot see. And by design, you cannot see this one from the inside.

The Most Devout People In History Missed It

You already know the example, because we ended the last series on it.

The Pharisees were not villains in their own minds. They were the most Scripture-literate, law-keeping, God-serving people on earth. They prayed. They fasted. They memorized the Word.

And they killed the Son of God, convinced the entire time that they were defending God.

They thought they were being faithful.

Their deception did not feel like sin. It felt like zeal. It felt like protecting the truth. The very thing they were most proud of was the thing blinding them.

If it could happen to them, drop the idea that it cannot happen to you.

Then How Do You Wake Up?

If deception feels like conviction, you cannot trust the feeling. So you stop looking at the feeling and you start looking at the fruit.

Jesus was direct about this. You will know them by their fruit.

Not by their intentions. Not by their sincerity. Not by how loyal they feel. By what is actually growing.

So look at your fruit. Honestly.

Is the thing you keep defending producing life, or is it producing exhaustion, bitterness, and a slow erosion of who God made you to be?

Is your loyalty building something, or is it just keeping you compliant and tired?

Are you at peace, or are you performing peace while everything under the surface quietly dies?

Good fruit does not lie. Neither does dead fruit. If the tree keeps producing exhaustion and stagnation, the problem is not that you need to try harder. The problem might be that you are convinced God wants you somewhere He never told you to stay.

This Is Not Comfortable. It Is Not Supposed To Be.

I am not writing this to make you doubt everything. Doubt is not the goal. Clarity is. TRUTH is.

But there is a certain kind of certainty that is not maturity. It is just a wall you built so you never have to look.

The mature move is to hold your own convictions up to the light and ask, honestly, is this God, or is this just what I have always done?

The Pharisees would not do that. They protected the picture instead of the truth. It cost them the Messiah standing right in front of them.

Do not protect the picture. Protect the truth. Even when the truth costs you the thing you have been defending.

One More Thing

This whole series comes out of the same place Ravens and Algorithms did. Recognizing what God sends is only half the walk. The other half is refusing to bury what He already gave you.

If the last series moved something in you, stay with this one. It goes to a harder place, and a better one.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS 

Deception feels like conviction.

That is exactly why you have to check the fruit.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week I am going to tell you about a sentence God spoke to me in the middle of a transition I was fighting. It reframed how I understand every gift He has ever placed in me, and it raised the stakes on what I do with them. I have not shared it before. Do not miss it.

For three weeks I have walked you through unlikely delivery systems. Ravens that fed a prophet. A river that healed a commander. The new tools God may be using in the season we are actually in.

Now I want to show you the most unlikely delivery system in all of human history.

God did not send a prophet this time. He did not send a king on a war horse. He did not split the sky and end the Roman occupation in an afternoon, which is exactly what most of Israel was waiting for.

He sent a baby. Born to a teenage girl. In a feeding trough. In a town nobody respected.

Nazareth. “Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46) That was the reputation. That was the return address on the package.

The most important delivery in the history of the universe, and God wrapped it in the one form an entire religious nation had already decided to reject.

They Were Not Faithless. They Were Waiting.

Here is what makes this the most sobering story in Scripture.

The people who missed Jesus were not pagans. They were not godless. They were the most devout, Bible-literate, Scripture-memorizing, law-keeping people on earth.

They had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. They prayed for Him. They taught their children about Him. They could quote the prophecies.

And they had built a very clear picture of how He would arrive.

A military deliverer. A political king. A man who would throw off Rome, restore the throne of David, and put Israel back on top. Power. Spectacle. Vindication. That was the delivery system they were expecting, and they were certain about it.

So when God showed up as a carpenter from Nazareth who ate with sinners, touched lepers, washed feet, and talked about a kingdom you could not see, they did not just miss Him.

They were offended by Him.

They Crucified The Answer

This is the part I cannot get past.

They did not reject God. They would have told you they loved God, served God, lived for God. They rejected the package God came in.

The delivery system did not match the expectation, so they concluded it could not be Him.

John 1:11. “He came to that which was his own, and his own did not receive him.”

Read that and let it land. His own. The ones who were waiting. The ones who should have recognized Him first. They looked straight at the fulfillment of everything they had prayed for, and because it did not look the way they had decided it should look, they nailed it to a cross.

The most unlikely delivery system in history was rejected by the most religious people in history, for the most understandable reason in history. He did not match the picture.

This Is The Whole Warning

Do you see why I spent four weeks here?

If the most devout people alive could miss God Himself because of the package He came in, then please hear me. You and I are not above that.

The same instinct that crucified the Messiah is alive in every one of us. It is the instinct that says, I already know what God's answer should look like, so anything that does not match must not be from Him.

That instinct feels like discernment. Sometimes it is the very thing that makes us reject what God is sending.

They wanted a war horse. He came on a donkey.

They wanted a throne. He took a cross.

They wanted Rome destroyed. He forgave the soldiers driving the nails.

Every expectation they had, He overturned. And the kingdom He actually delivered was greater than anything they had imagined. They just could not receive it, because they would not let go of the picture.

So Hold The Picture Loosely

This is where the whole series lands.

God is still sending. Provision through ravens. Healing through rivers. Direction through people you would not have chosen. Opportunity through tools that make you nervous. And the gospel itself, through a Savior the world still finds offensive.

The question is the same one it has always been.

Will you receive what He sends, or will you reject it because of the package it came in?

Hold your expectations loosely. Hold the One sending them tightly. Stay humble enough to bend down for a gift hidden in an offensive wrapper.

The religious crowd could not do it. Be different.

One More Thing

Everything across these four emails lives inside Ravens and Algorithms. The unlikely ways God delivers. The instinct that makes us reject the package. And how to recognize what He is sending in a world that is changing faster than most of us are ready for.

If the series stirred something, the book is where it all comes together.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS 

They were waiting for the Messiah.

He came exactly as God promised.

And they missed Him because He did not look like the version they had already built in their heads.

Do not make the same mistake with what God is sending you.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Two men hung next to Jesus that day. Same view. Same Savior. Same unlikely delivery system. One mocked Him for not looking like a king. The other looked past the blood and the shame and said, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (Luke 23:42) Both saw the exact same thing. Only one recognized it. That is the whole point of this series. Recognize it.

For two weeks I have been telling you old stories. Ravens feeding a prophet. A river healing a commander. Unlikely delivery systems from a God who refuses to deliver on our terms.

Now I want to bring it into the room you are sitting in.

Because the ravens are still flying. They just have new feathers.

The most disruptive delivery system of our lifetime is already at the door. New tools. New technology. Things that did not exist a few years ago that are now rewriting industries, jobs, and the way information moves through the world.

And the response I hear most often from believers is not curiosity. It is suspicion. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is a flat refusal to even look.

I understand the instinct. I want to gently challenge it.

We Have Done This Before

The church has a long, embarrassing history of being late to every major shift.

We were suspicious of the printing press, the same machine that put the Bible in the hands of ordinary people.

We were late to radio. Late to television. Late to the internet. Every time, we let the world build the platform first, then showed up years later trying to use a tool we had no hand in shaping.

Every single time, the same two groups emerged. The ones who hid from the shift and got left behind. And the ones who stayed anchored in something deeper than the shift and helped build what came next.

The difference was almost never intelligence. It was almost always identity.

I do not want us to be late again. Not this time. The stakes feel higher than they have ever felt.

Discernment Is NOT Suspicion

Let me be clear about something, because I am not telling you to swallow everything the world hands you.

Discernment is essential. Not everything new is good. Not every tool is neutral in how it gets used. There is real garbage out there, and there is real danger in handing your attention and your kids to systems built by people who do not love them.

But discernment and suspicion are not the same thing.

Discernment looks closely, tests the fruit, and asks what God might be doing here. Suspicion refuses to look at all and calls that refusal holiness.

Remember the ravens. They were unclean. By the letter of the law, Elijah had every religious reason to refuse them. If he had treated suspicion as obedience, he would have starved in the name of staying pure.

God did not send him a clean bird. God sent him a faithful one.

The question was never whether the raven was respectable. The question was whether it was carrying what Elijah needed.

Ask The Better Question

When the printing press arrived, most of the church asked, is this dangerous?

The better question was, what could God do with this?

Both can be true at the same time. The internet is dangerous and God has reached millions through it. Television is a wasteland and the gospel has gone around the world on it.

So here is the better question for whatever is unsettling you right now.

Not, can this be misused? Of course it can. Everything powerful can.

But, what is God planning to deliver through this, and do I want to be in front of it or behind it?

The people of God belong out ahead of this shift. Anchored. Awake. Shaping it instead of fearing it. Not naive, and not hiding.

The Anchor Holds

I keep coming back to something my flight instructor taught me. When you hit weather you do not understand, you do not yank the controls and panic. You trust the instruments, you make small corrections, and you fly the airplane.

The airplane is the thing in front of you. The weather is everything you cannot control.

You do not master the storm. You fly the thing in front of you, anchored to two things that do not move. Who God is. And who God made you to be.

If those two are settled, the new tools cannot shake you. You can examine them. You can use the good and refuse the harmful. You can stay curious without losing your footing, because your foundation was never made of the technology. It was made of the One who has always fed His people through whatever was available.

He used ravens once.

Do not be so sure He will not use an algorithm next.

One More Thing

I named the book Ravens and Algorithms on purpose. The raven is the ancient unlikely delivery system. The algorithm is the modern one. The principle has not changed in three thousand years. Only the feathers have.

If you want to stop fearing the shift and start discerning it, this is the book I wrote for exactly this moment.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS
 
The ravens are still flying.

Look up before you wave them off.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Next week is the last email in this series, and it is the one I most want you to read. I am going to tell you about the single most unlikely delivery system in human history. God sent it, an entire religious nation was waiting for it, and they killed it anyway. Because it did not match what they had already decided it should look like. Do not miss it.

Last week I told you about the ravens. This week I want to tell you about a man who almost walked away from his own healing because he did not like the instructions.

His name was Naaman. He was a commander. Powerful, decorated, used to being handled with respect. He also had leprosy, and in his world that was a slow death sentence with a clock on it.

He hears there is a prophet in Israel who can heal him. So he loads up his horses and chariots, brings silver and gold and royal letters, and shows up at Elisha's door expecting a moment worthy of his rank.

Elisha does not even come outside.

He sends a servant with a message. Go wash in the Jordan seven times and you will be clean. (2 Kings 5:10)

Naaman is furious.

2 Kings 5:11-12. “I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me.” Then he says it. Are not the rivers of Damascus better than any of the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?

He had the cure in front of him. And he almost went home still sick.

He Already Decided What It Should Look Like

Here is the thing about Naaman.

He was not refusing to be healed. He wanted to be healed more than anything. He had traveled for it. He had paid for it.

He was refusing the package.

He had a picture in his head of how a real miracle should arrive. A prophet on the porch. A dramatic wave of the hand. Words spoken over him with the proper amount of ceremony. He had pre-approved the delivery system before he ever left home.

And when God sent a muddy river and a servant with a sentence, it offended him.

That is most of us. We do not reject God. We reject the bird. We reject the river. We reject the messenger because the messenger did not come dressed the way we expected.

What It Almost Cost

Read what saved him. It was not his rank, his money, or his theology.

It was a servant with the courage to ask him a simple question. 2 Kings 5:13. “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, wash and be cleansed?”

In other words. You were ready to do something hard and impressive. Why are you refusing because it is small and simple and did not flatter you?

He went down. He washed. He came up clean.

The miracle was never in question. His willingness to receive it through an offensive delivery system was the entire test.

I think about how many believers are standing exactly where Naaman stood. Sick of something. Tired of carrying something. Praying for an answer. And the answer keeps showing up in a form they keep dismissing because it is too simple, too strange, too small, or coming from a source they do not respect.

The Pattern Is The Point

This is not about one man and a river. It is about a God who consistently refuses to deliver on our terms.

A teenage girl carried the Messiah.

A shepherd boy with a sling beat a giant.

A murderer named Moses led the rescue.

A persecutor named Paul wrote most of the New Testament.

A despised tax collector wrote a Gospel.

If you had been on the committee, you would have rejected almost every one of them at the door. Wrong resume. Wrong background. Wrong delivery system.

God keeps doing this on purpose. He hides the gift inside a package that filters out the proud. Only the humble bend down far enough to pick it up.

The Question For This Week

Here is what I want you to sit with.

What answer have you already prayed for, that may have already arrived, that you keep sending back because you do not approve of how it showed up?

The healing. The relationship repair. The new direction. The hard conversation. The unglamorous next step. The person you would never have chosen to learn from.

Be honest. You might be one act of humility away from your Jordan.

One More Thing

This is the whole reason I wrote Ravens and Algorithms. We are entering a season where God is going to deliver provision, direction, and opportunity through forms that will offend a lot of religious instincts. I do not want you standing at the river, arms crossed, while the cure waits.

The book walks through how to recognize the delivery when it does not look the way you expected.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS 

Stop sending back the answer because you do not like the envelope.

Go wash in the river.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Notice who spoke truth to Naaman. Not the king. Not the prophet. A servant nobody bothered to name. Sometimes the delivery system for your breakthrough is a person you have been ignoring. Pay attention to who God put close to you this week.

There was a drought in Israel, and God's plan to keep His prophet alive was a flock of ravens.

Read that again.

Not a wealthy patron. Not a kind neighbor with a full pantry. Not bread falling from the sky the way it did for Moses and an entire generation.

Ravens.

1 Kings 17:4-6. “You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there.” So Elijah did what the Lord told him. “The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.”

Here is what we skip when we read that story too fast.

Ravens were unclean. Under the law, a Jew could not eat one and was not supposed to touch one. (Leviticus 11:15) Ravens were scavengers. Thieves. The bird you chased away from your food, not the bird you trusted to bring it.

And that is exactly the delivery system God chose.

The Package Almost Always Offends

God could have used anything. He owns everything. He picked the one option guaranteed to make a religious man flinch.

That is not a one-time thing. It is a pattern.

He fed a nation with bread that showed up on the ground like dew.

He won a battle with trumpets and clay jars.

He provided tax money out of the mouth of a fish.

He saved the firstborn with blood smeared on a doorframe.

None of those are how a reasonable person would have designed it. Every one of them worked.

I call this an unlikely delivery system. It is the way God consistently sends what you need through a vessel you would never have chosen, in a package you might be tempted to reject.

The Seriousness Of The Time

I have been saying for a while now that the ground is moving. The pace of change is not slowing down. The tools are not getting simpler. The world your kids are stepping into is not the one you were trained for.

Here is what concerns me.

God is going to send provision and direction into this season the way He always has. Through unlikely delivery systems. Through ravens.

And I think a lot of good, faithful people are going to starve standing right next to their own miracle, because they could not get past the fact that it came in on the wrong bird.

They wanted clean. God sent a scavenger.

They wanted obvious. God sent strange.

They wanted the delivery system to look spiritual. God sent something that looked like the last thing they would trust.

This is the part most believers miss. The test is rarely whether God will provide. The test is whether you will recognize the provision when it lands in front of you wearing feathers you do not like.

Four Weeks

I want to spend the next four weeks on this with you.

Not because it is a clever idea. Because I think it is one of the most important things you can understand about the season we are actually in.

Over the next three emails I am going to walk through why we reject the delivery because of the package, what that costs us, why the most disruptive delivery system of our lifetime is already at the door, and finally the most unlikely delivery system in all of human history. The one God sent that an entire religious nation rejected and crucified, because He did not match what they were expecting.

Stay with me. This one matters.

One More Thing

This whole idea, ravens and algorithms and the unlikely ways God delivers what we need, is the heart of a book I just released.

It is called Ravens and Algorithms. It is the clearest thing I have written on how to recognize God's provision in a world that is changing faster than most of us are ready for.

If this email landed on something, the book goes much deeper.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS 

God has not stopped providing.

He has just never asked your permission about the packaging.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Notice what Elijah did not do. He did not argue with God about the menu. He did not refuse the meat because of who carried it. He ate, and he lived. The drought did not kill the prophet. Pride would have. Do not let yours.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a conversation with a guy named Daniel Priestley. Sharp thinker. Built businesses on three continents.

He said something that stopped me.

The fear most people have about new technology is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

Yes, things will change. Yes, jobs will shift. Yes, some industries will get rewritten. He was specifically talking about AI, but you could plug in almost any major shift in history and the principle would hold.

Then he made a point I have not stopped thinking about.

When YouTube arrived, people were terrified it would kill television and Hollywood. And it did disrupt them. Massively. But it also created an entire creator economy. Teams of five and ten people now build media businesses that used to require crews of one hundred and fifty. Hundreds of thousands of jobs that did not exist before showed up almost overnight.

The fear was real. The opportunity was bigger.

That same pattern, he argued, is about to play out again. Only this time at a scale most people have not emotionally prepared for. Small teams of two or three people will be able to build companies that used to require fifty employees and millions of dollars. New categories of work. New kinds of businesses. New kinds of leaders.

He said one line that has been sitting in me for weeks.

“Plumbers are going to make more than lawyers.”

Maybe yes, maybe no. That is not really the point.

The point is the ground is moving. And most people are still standing where the ground used to be.

This Is Not New To God

Every major shift in human history has felt the same to the people living through it.

The printing press terrified the church. The internet terrified parents. Cars terrified horse trainers. Electricity terrified almost everyone.

And every single time, two groups of people emerged.

The ones who hid from the shift and got left behind.

And the ones who stayed anchored in something deeper than the shift and helped build what came next.

The difference between those two groups was almost never intelligence. It was almost always identity.

The ones who got swept away had built their identity on the old way.

The ones who stayed anchored had built their identity on something the shift could not touch.

What An Anchor Actually Is

When I was learning to fly, my instructor taught me something I have never forgotten.

If you ever get caught in weather you do not understand, the very last thing you do is start making big movements with the yoke. You do not yank, you do not panic, you do not chase the instruments. You trust the instruments, you make small corrections, and you fly the airplane.

Flying the airplane is the anchor.

Not knowing where the storm is going. Not predicting the weather. Not eliminating the turbulence.

Flying the thing in front of you.

That is what an anchor does for a believer in a shifting world. It does not predict what is coming. It does not eliminate the turbulence. It gives you one thing that does not move while everything else does.

For me, that anchor is two things.

Who God is.

And who God made me to be.

If those two things are settled, the shift can come. I can adjust. I can pivot. I can learn new tools. I can release old work. I can pick up new assignments. None of it shakes me, because the foundation is not made of the work. The foundation is made of the One who assigned it.

The Two Anchors You Cannot Afford To Lose

There are a thousand things shifting around you right now. Most of them you cannot control.

There are two things you can.

Anchor One. Who God is.

Hebrews 13:8. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

That is not a sentimental verse. That is an economic, technological, cultural, generational anchor. The same God who walked with Abraham is the God walking with you. The same God who fed Elijah with ravens is the God who can feed you in a world you do not recognize anymore.

He is not a relic of a calmer century. He is the most relevant Being in the universe right now, today, in the middle of whatever you are walking into.

Anchor Two. Who God made you to be.

I have written and taught for years that every single person on this planet was designed on purpose for a purpose. Your wiring is not an accident. Your motivational drivers, your design, your unique blend, none of it is random.

The shift that is coming is going to demand that you operate more from your design than ever before. Not less.

The people who try to copy whoever is winning right now will burn out fast.

The people who lean into who God actually made them to be will find that the shift is not a threat. It is an opening.

What's Actually Coming

I want to be honest with you about something.

A lot of believers I respect are in a holding pattern right now. They feel the shift, they feel the pressure, and their response is to wait. Wait for clarity. Wait for the storm to pass. Wait for someone to tell them what to do.

I understand it. I have been there.

But waiting is not always faith. Sometimes it is fear wearing patience as a costume.

The body of Christ has a long history of being late to every shift. We were late to the printing press. We were late to radio. We were late to the internet. We let the world build the platforms, then we showed up and tried to use them without ever shaping them.

I do not want us to be late again.

The next shift, whatever you want to call it, is going to be one of the largest of our lifetime. And the people of God need to be in front of it, not behind it.

Anchored. Designed. Equipped. Awake.

That is the call.

What's Coming

Everything I have written across these last three emails (the fear of the unknown, the fear of missing out, and the call to stay anchored in a shifting world) lives inside the framework of my upcoming book.

Peace Not Pressure was written for exactly this season. For leaders, parents, builders, and believers who can feel the ground moving and want to walk forward without grinding themselves into dust.

Grab a free chapter before the book releases:

Click → Peace Not Pressure Book

And one more thing.

There is something else I have been quietly building behind the scenes for the last few years. Something that takes everything I teach about design, calling, peace, and clarity and puts it into a tool that can walk with you every single day. I am not ready to talk about it fully yet. But it is coming. And it was built for exactly the kind of world we are stepping into.

Stay close. You will hear more soon.

The world is going to move whether you are ready or not.

The good news is, your anchor does not.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — When Jesus and Peter were on the water, Peter walked just fine until he looked at the wind. (Matthew 14:30) Notice He did not sink because the wind got worse. He sank because he switched what he was looking at. The wind has not changed in two thousand years. Neither has the answer. Eyes up. Anchor in. Take the next step. He has not let go of your hand.

There is a fear most people will not name because it sounds shallow.

But it is not shallow. It is one of the most expensive emotions you will ever carry.

The fear of missing out.

FOMO got reduced to a meme. A joke about not wanting to skip the party. But the actual force underneath it is doing a tremendous amount of damage to good people who should be thriving.

It is the reason leaders say yes to opportunities they should have declined.

It is the reason parents fill calendars they secretly resent.

It is the reason entrepreneurs chase trends they do not believe in.

It is the reason believers grab for things God never told them to reach for.

Fear of missing out is just fear of the unknown wearing a nicer suit.

The Lie Underneath It

FOMO whispers the same lie in a hundred different accents.

“If you do not move now, you will be left behind.”

“If you do not buy in, you will regret it.”

“If you do not say yes, the door will close forever.”

“Everyone else is figuring it out. You are the one falling behind.”

It is a lie wrapped in just enough truth to be dangerous. Because yes, some doors do close. Yes, some moments matter. Yes, timing is real.

But here is the part nobody tells you.

Most of the doors you are afraid of missing were never yours to walk through in the first place.

That is not pessimism. That is freedom.

The Original FOMO

The first recorded case of fear of missing out is in Genesis 3.

Eve was in a garden where every need was met. Walking with God. No pressure. No striving. No shame. The original picture of peace.

The serpent did not start with a lie. He started with a question.

“Did God really say…?”

Then he made the move that has been working on humans ever since.

He pointed at the one thing she did not have and convinced her she was missing out.

“You will be like God.” (Genesis 3:5)

Translation. You are behind. You are incomplete. You are settling. Take the shortcut.

She bit. Adam bit. The whole world has been biting ever since.

FOMO is not a modern marketing tactic. It is the oldest temptation in the book.

What FOMO Costs You

Let me put it plain.

Every yes you say out of fear is a no to something you were actually built for.

When you chase the trend, the title, the deal, the platform, the next shiny thing, because you are afraid of being left behind, you are not just spending money or time.

You are spending alignment.

You are pulling your hands off the work God actually assigned you so you can grab at something you saw someone else holding.

That is the cost. And it compounds.

A few years of grabbing leaves a person exhausted, scattered, and quietly resentful. They have done a lot. They have built almost nothing that matters to them.

Solomon, the wealthiest, most accomplished man in the Old Testament, looked back at his entire life of grabbing and called it chasing the wind. (Ecclesiastes 2:11)

The wealthiest man in history. Chasing the wind.

Read that and let it sting a little.

The Counterfeit Urgency

Here is what makes FOMO so effective.

It feels productive.

When you are afraid of missing out, your body releases the same chemicals it would if a real opportunity were in front of you. Your heart rate goes up. Your focus sharpens. You feel like you are doing something important.

But you are not making a decision. You are reacting.

There is a massive difference between a decision rooted in calling and a reaction rooted in anxiety.

Both look like motion. Only one produces fruit.

Jesus Said No All The Time

Read the gospels with this lens and watch what happens.

Jesus turned down the crowd in Capernaum even though they wanted Him to stay. (Mark 1:35-38)

Jesus walked away from the people trying to make Him king. (John 6:15)

Jesus did not heal everyone in Jerusalem on every visit. He healed who the Father told Him to heal.

If Jesus, with the most important assignment in human history, could say no to good opportunities to protect the right ones, what makes us think we are exempt?

He was not afraid of missing out.

Because He was not afraid of who He was.

That is the antidote. Identity kills FOMO every single time.

The Tell

Here is a quick test.

The next time you feel that pull to grab something, ask yourself one question.

“Am I moving toward this, or am I running from the fear of not having it?”

Movement toward a calling feels heavy but clear. Running from fear feels frantic and noisy.

One is led by the Spirit.

The other is led by the algorithm.

You already know which one has been driving most of your decisions.

The Air Is Going To Get Louder

I will tell you something I have been sitting with for months.

The amount of noise pulling at your attention is about to multiply, not decrease.

New tools. New platforms. New voices. New opportunities. New “you have to be doing this or you will fall behind” messages coming at you faster than your nervous system can process them.

If you do not learn to live anchored now, you will not be ready for what is coming.

This is not me being dramatic. It is me being honest with you because I love you enough to say it.

The people who will thrive in the next five to ten years are not going to be the people who chase the hardest.

They will be the people who can sit still long enough to hear God say “that one is not for you” without panicking.

That is peace.

That is the whole point of the book I have been writing.

What's Coming

This is part two of three in the series. Next email, I will walk through how to stay anchored when the world is shifting around you, including what the next few years are likely going to demand of every believer who wants to lead well.

Until then, the framework that ties all of this together lives inside Peace Not Pressure.

If you have not grabbed a free chapter yet:

Click → Peace Not Pressure Book
 
The fear of missing out is a thief.

Identity is the bouncer.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Psalm 23 starts with “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” The whole psalm hinges on that one sentence. If the Lord is your shepherd, you do not lack. If you do not lack, you do not have to grab. Most of the chasing in your life would quiet down today if you actually believed that one line. Pray it tomorrow morning before you open your phone. Watch what shifts.