The Reckoning | The Prize
My own lesson in contentment began quietly. During a corporate downsizing, my title stayed but the team beneath it disappeared. From the outside, the role looked unchanged, same office, same nameplate, but the strength inside had thinned. The shell remained while the core felt hollow. For years I had preached teamwork and stewardship, yet I had tied worth to output more than I realized.
The first mornings after were strange. The house was silent. The usual noise of emails and calendar alerts had stopped. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the feeling that I had stepped off a moving sidewalk. That stillness was uncomfortable. It was also the first honest mirror in a long time.
It wasn’t recovery. It was reckoning. The fog began to lift and pride looked different in that light; smaller, more fragile. There are no pills for adjust humility, only therapy, and I needed to make an appointment with the Doctor.
In time, that therapy took the shape of small, steady corrections. Not dramatic resets, just quiet repairs that re-aligned the lean. On the farm it’s rehanging a dragging gate. Tightening a loose hinge. I noticed how the work itself began to talk back. Every repair felt like a line of confession: a simple act that said, I still care about what I’ve been given.
Those small corrections built a rhythm that discipline alone could not. I began to sort my days using a simple test I still keep close: Source or Drain.
Each task, role, or relationship leans one way or the other. A source builds, adds, and renews. A drain removes, consumes, and depletes. Anything that spends too much time in the middle eventually becomes a drain; constant indecision drains more than it feeds.
If it is a source, give thanks and protect it. If it is a drain, ask whether it can be restored through re-ordering or must be pruned. Balance returns when love, not volume, sets priorities.
Somewhere in that rhythm, peace returned, not the loud kind that announces itself, but the steady kind that stays. I noticed it one afternoon while stacking wood for winter. Each split log, once awkward and uneven, found its place in the pile. Together they made something solid, balanced, useful. The weight that once felt scattered now rested in order.
That wood pile became its own quiet sermon. Life rarely stacks itself neatly, but grace teaches us how. Layer by layer, habit by habit, the hollow fills again. Strength comes the same way a well-stacked pile holds together—through the small tensions that keep it upright and sound.
Peace rarely arrives with applause; it grows quiet and steady, where grace restores what pride once hollowed.
When grace steadies what pride once hollowed, stewardship begins to take form. Next time, we’ll look at the economics of care before the breakdown.
I’ll be sharing more reflections like this on work, calling, and leadership. If you’d like to follow along, the best way is to connect with and follow me on LinkedIn.
