He is risen.

Not metaphorically. Not in a spiritual sense that sounds nice on Sunday but doesn’t touch Tuesday morning. Actually, physically, bodily risen — and reigning. Today. Over your kitchen table and your inbox and the thing you’re worried about in the quiet hours of the night.

This is the part we forget by Monday. Easter becomes a feeling that fades, a service we attended, a nice brunch. But the claim is wilder than that. The tomb is empty and the King is not waiting in the wings. He’s on the throne. Here. Now. Over everything you’re carrying and everything you’re afraid to set down.

Since that’s true — he’s actually reigning — then nothing you’ve been entrusted with is random. None of it. Not the hard year, not the ordinary Wednesday, not the thing you’re still grieving. You’re not carrying it alone, and you’re not carrying it for nothing. You’re carrying it under a King who is alive and present and working.

Happy Easter.

This week’s a short one. I’m frantically completing the punch list at the new house — we move this weekend — and I’ll spare you the metaphor about how moving is like stewardship. (It is. But I’m surrounded by half-labeled boxes and a toddler who I expect will treat bubble wrap as a dress-up cape, and I’m bound to screw it up.)

Instead: five books.

These aren’t “recommended reading.” They’re the books that changed how I think about stewardship, calling, and what it means to hold your life loosely. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ve been reading the downstream effects of these five whether you knew it or not.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

This is the one that rewired my eschatology — which is a fancy way of saying it gave me the language to discuss what I think the whole story is headed toward. Wright makes the case that the Christian hope isn’t evacuation (we leave earth, go to heaven, the end) but resurrection and renewal. God is making all things new. Which means what we do now isn’t burned up at the end. It’s taken up into something. If nothing lasts, stewardship is just delayed loss. But if God renews what’s been faithfully tended, then the 2 a.m. feeding and the thankless Tuesday and the unglamorous repair work all have a future.

John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

Comer is the most accessible writer on this list, and that’s not a backhanded compliment. He took Dallas Willard’s axiom — “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day” — and made it land for people who don’t read theology for fun. His chapters on limits and Sabbath convinced me that your finite body and your finite hours aren’t obstacles to faithfulness. They’re the shape of it. If you’re the person who reads this newsletter on your phone at 11:45 p.m. because it’s the first time you’ve sat down all day — start here.

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

Willard is harder. Denser. Worth it. The core idea: the gospel isn’t a ticket to heaven when you die. It’s an invitation to live under the reign of God now. And the Sermon on the Mount is the manual — not a set of ideals you admire from a distance, but instructions for people who are actually trying to live in the kingdom today. That idea sits underneath my entire book. If the kingdom is here, then stewardship has teeth. How you handle your money, your anger, your neighbor, your morning — it all counts, and Willard is the one who convinced me it was supposed to.

Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary

Warren writes about making the bed, brushing your teeth, sitting in traffic — and she finds the whole Christian life inside it. She actually believes the incarnation means God entered the ordinary and stayed, and she writes like it. This is the book I’d hand to anyone who reads about stewardship and thinks it sounds like one more thing to get right. Warren says: you’re already in it. The question is whether you’re awake to what’s happening.

C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

Not a book — a sermon. Short enough to read in one sitting, and it will rearrange your worldview. Lewis says there are no ordinary people. The dullest person you talk to may one day be a creature you’d be tempted to worship — or a horror you can’t now imagine. If you’ve ever caught yourself treating another person as a problem to manage rather than a soul to tend, this is the corrective.

That’s it. Five reads, one move, zero metaphors about boxes.

If you read any of these because of this letter, I’d love to hear about it. Just reply — I read every one.

More next week,
Rex

Wells noticed the green shoots.

It was bath time and, as we walked into the bathroom, his little face lit up. He looked at me with wide eyes, pointing at the three little sets of pots he and Rachel planted weeks ago. Each pot holding at least one seedling pushing up a pale stem through the dark soil. “Look, Daddy. Look. They grew.”

Three weeks, maybe four. He planted seeds, he waited (impatiently), and the soil did what soil does.

Three weeks of writing about seeds and layers. But a seed sprouts in weeks. Fujimura finishes a painting in months. You can gut your way through a month of invisible work.

What about eight years?

In physics, impact is force divided by time. A large effect in a small window. We measure everything this way now. The viral post, the hockey-stick graph. How do you scale?

Jesus never talked like this. He talked about mustard seeds and yeast in dough, seeds falling into the ground and dying. His metaphors assumed a timescale that would make any investor walk out of the room.

Andy Crouch has spent years writing about technology and what we lose when we optimize everything. In one fascinating conversation, he lingers on a particular image: the olive tree.

You plant an olive tree, and you wait. Eight years before it bears its first fruit. Eight years of watering and pruning and protecting a thing that gives you nothing back.

That’s the opposite of impact.

But there are olive trees in the Mediterranean that were planted two thousand years ago. Still bearing fruit. Still rewarding people who will never know the name of whoever knelt in the dirt and planted them.

That’s also the opposite of impact.

The olive tree doesn’t scan the horizon for better soil. It sinks into the ground it’s been given and stays, becoming more itself with every passing decade, trunk thickening, roots reaching deeper into the same earth.

I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.
— Psalm 52:8

Crouch asks two questions.

Am I doing anything I don’t expect to bear fruit for eight years?

Am I doing anything that might still be bearing fruit in two thousand years?

My instincts run the other direction. I want results I can measure, growth I can see within a quarter. Plant Monday, harvest Friday.

I’ve been contemplating the seeds of this book for years. Some days it has felt like watering dirt. Other days like arguing with a tree that refuses to grow on my schedule. I don’t know when it’ll bear fruit, or whether anyone will taste it.

But I keep showing up with the water. You can’t rush an olive tree. You can only decide whether you’ll still be kneeling there when the eighth year comes.

This week’s practice:

Answer Crouch’s two questions. On paper, not in your head.

Am I doing anything I don’t expect to bear fruit for eight years?

Am I doing anything that might still be bearing fruit in two thousand years?

If both answers are no, don’t just sit with that. Name one thing you’ve been avoiding because the timeline scares you. A community you commit to past the point of convenience. A calling you keep pouring into before anyone notices or pays you for it. Write it down. Put a date on it.

More next week,

Rex

Last week I wrote about seeds in the dark, about invisible first movements. I keep seeing that pattern everywhere.

I came across an artist while researching the book. His name is Makoto Fujimura, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about his process. He paints with crushed minerals — azurite, malachite, gold leaf, ground shells — mixed with hide glue and applied to the canvas one layer at a time. Each layer has to dry before the next one goes on.

One of his paintings has over sixty layers.

I’ve never seen one in person, but even on a screen you can tell something is different. The colors don’t sit flat. They blend in ways that give the painting a dimensionality behind its surface, like there’s more in there than one layer could produce. Because there is.

The pigments are actual minerals, some of them millions of years old, ground to powder before they become paint. The stone has to be broken before it can become beautiful.

And the glue holding all those layers together is organic, perishable. Crushed stone bound by something fragile. Paul said we carry treasure in jars of clay, so that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. Fujimura paints like that’s literally true.

He spent seven years in Japan learning the technique from a master, and he calls it “a slow process that fights against efficiency.”

Rachel and I have been remodeling a house. It’s taken far longer than either of us expected, and we’re ready to be done. There are days when the temptation is to cut corners, skip steps, get to move-in. And nobody around us would blame us for it.

But Fujimura’s whole life is an argument against that. He recently wrote that “to be human is to be a maker of beauty and a steward of justice.” A maker. A steward. Not someone optimizing for outcomes, but someone whose work itself is an act of worship.

Sixty layers of crushed stone, each one dried before the next goes on. That’s what formation looks like, I think. Each layer too thin to see on its own. Each one necessary.

The thirty-seventh layer looks exactly like the thirty-sixth.

Do it anyway. Sixty layers.

This week’s practice:

Where are you laying down layers nobody can see? The prayer you keep praying. The habit you keep showing up for. The relationship you keep investing in without visible return.

What if the hiddenness isn’t failure? What if that’s exactly how it’s built?

More next week,

Rex

P.S. Remember those tiny pots on the window ledge? I see a few green shoots poking up through the dirt.

Rachel and Wells planted seeds one night earlier this week. I walked into the kitchen and they were at the counter together, Wells standing on his stool, pressing seeds into small pots of dark soil with his fingertips. Rachel was next to him, guiding his hands, both of them quiet in a way that surprised me. The whole counter smelled like wet earth.

The pots have been sitting on our bathroom window ledge since then. Three sets in a row, damp and still. Nothing visible.

Wells checked them yesterday morning. “Are they growing yet?”

Not yet, buddy.

He’ll check again tomorrow. And the next day. And at some point he’ll lose interest, because nothing is happening. Except something is. The seed is in the dark doing exactly what seeds do. Splitting open. Sending a root down before it ever sends a shoot up. The first movement of every living thing is invisible.

We don’t have much patience for invisible work. The culture we swim in measures life by the sprout. The visible, the shareable, the proof that something is happening. If you can’t show progress, you’re not making any. If the soil looks the same as yesterday, nothing’s changed.

But that’s not how growth works. It’s not even how Jesus said it works.

He told a story once about a farmer scattering seed. It landed on four kinds of ground: a hard path, rocky soil, thorns, and good earth. Same seed every time. Same farmer. Same throw. The variable wasn’t the seed. It was the soil.

It’s easy to read that parable and focus on the harvest. The thirty, sixty, hundredfold return. The fruit you could count. But lately I keep looking at the dirt. The good ground didn’t produce because it was special. It produced because it was ready. Broken up, turned over, cleared of the things that choke new life before it can take hold.

Which means the season where nothing visible is happening might be the most important one. Not wasted time. Preparation. God working the soil while you’re standing at the window wondering why nothing’s growing yet.

Most of faithfulness looks like a window ledge. Small pots. Damp soil. Nothing to show anyone.

Wells will check the pots again tomorrow. He’ll press his face close to the dirt and look for something green. And I’ll say the same thing I said yesterday: not yet. Keep waiting. It’s doing what it needs to do.

Tend the ground. The seed knows what to do.

This week’s practice:

What are you waiting on right now that feels stalled? A relationship. A calling. A change in yourself you keep praying for.

What if the wait isn’t a delay? What if you’re the soil?

More next week,

Rex

We tried for five years to have kids.

Rachel and I knew from early on that we wanted children. But “wanted” is a slippery word. For most of our marriage, what we meant was: someday. Not now. The timing wasn’t right. We weren’t ready. We had things to figure out first.

I don’t know exactly when “someday” became “now.” I think it had already happened in the background at some point while we were focused on other things. But I remember the moment the fear arrived, because it was sharp.

We’d been trying for over a year with nothing. Then two. Then we were sitting in a fertility clinic, and the doctor was explaining options, and I was listening with one ear while the other was tuned to a frequency I couldn’t quite name. Something between prayer and panic.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear God’s answer.

Not because I didn’t trust him. Or maybe exactly because of that. I’d been taught that God is good, that his plans are for my flourishing, that he knows what I need better than I do. I believed all of it. In theory.

But when you’re three years into asking for something and the silence stretches, theory gets tested. And what I found underneath my theology was a tangle of questions I couldn’t untie:

If I keep praying for this, am I making a faithful request, or am I just pushing my own agenda and calling it prayer?

What if wanting this so badly is the problem? What if I’m supposed to let go, and I just can’t?

Is there a “reason” this hasn’t happened? And if there is, do I want to know it?

I was paralyzed. Not because I didn’t care. Because I cared so much that the risk of engaging felt unbearable. What if we poured ourselves into this and it didn’t work? What if God’s answer was no, and I had to live with that? Easier, maybe, to keep “someday” alive than to find out.

I almost buried the talent.

There’s a parable in Matthew 25 that I’ve been studying for weeks. A master entrusts three servants with money and leaves. When he comes back, two have doubled what they were given. One buried his in the ground.

I grew up hearing this as a story about laziness. Work hard. Use your gifts. Don’t waste what God gave you. That’s not wrong, exactly. But it misses the thing that matters most.

The third servant wasn’t lazy. He was afraid.

He says so himself: “I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” The Greek word the master uses to describe him, okneros, doesn’t mean slothful the way we think of it. It means to hesitate, to shrink back, to lack the resolve to act. Two thousand years of scholarship keep landing in the same place. D.A. Carson puts the causal chain in a single sentence: “Because he didn’t know him, he didn’t trust him. Because he didn’t trust him, he did nothing.”

The servant had built a god in his head. A hard master, impossible to please, ready to punish. And that false god produced exactly the response such a god would deserve: self-protective withdrawal. He couldn’t risk engagement because he was convinced the master would crush him for failing. So he buried what he’d been given and handed it back untouched.

Here. You have what is yours.

Scholars hear passive aggression in that line. Not trembling humility. Resentment. He’d constructed a theology that justified his refusal to try, and he was daring the master to prove him wrong.

But the master wasn’t hard. Look at the evidence inside the parable itself.

He entrusts astronomical sums without micromanagement. One talent alone equals roughly twenty years of a laborer’s wages. He calls five talents “a few things.” He gives no explicit instructions, trusting the servants to act within the spirit of the assignment.

And when they return, the servant who earned five talents and the servant who earned two receive identical, word-for-word praise:

Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things; I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your master.

Not “well done, you produced the most.” Not “well done, your yield was higher.” The same words. The same welcome. The same invitation into joy. What mattered wasn’t output. It was whether you engaged at all.

The master wasn’t looking for a return on investment. He was looking for trust.

I want to be careful here.

We tried for five years. In 2022, after multiple rounds of fertility treatment, our son Wells was born. Brynn came after. We got a yes.

But this is not a story about outcomes. I know people who prayed just as long, tried just as hard, and got a different answer. I have no theology that explains why we hold our children and they hold grief. I won’t pretend that our yes validates the asking.

And yet I almost let fear make the decision for me. Fear had built a version of God in my head — not one who might say no, but one who might say nothing. A God who wasn’t even interested. A God I couldn’t trust with the asking.

That God wasn’t real. The real one, the one who entrusts and invites and says enter into my joy, could be trusted with the question. Even in the silence.

The shift wasn’t from doubt to certainty. It was from burying to trading. From protecting myself against a hard master to engaging with a generous one. We opened our hands and let God be God with the thing we wanted most.

The condemned servant wasn’t the one who tried and failed. There is no servant in this story who tried and failed. The only one condemned is the one who never started.

And his problem, underneath everything, wasn’t cowardice. It was theology. He had the wrong God. And the wrong God kept him safe, and barren, and alone.

What you believe about the master determines whether you trade or bury.

This week’s practice:

Where are you burying right now?

Not out of laziness. Out of fear. The prayer you won’t pray because you’re not sure anyone’s listening. The conversation you won’t start. The risk you won’t take because it’s safer to keep “someday” alive than to find out.

Name it. Just one thing.

Then ask yourself: what kind of master am I imagining? A hard one who’s setting a trap? Or a generous one who’s inviting me into his joy?

You don’t have to have it figured out. Just stop burying.

More next week,

Rex

Wells found a stick on a hike a few weeks ago. Not an unusual stick. A stick. But it came home with us, and it has lived in the backyard ever since, serving whatever purpose the moment requires. Some days he carries it around narrating a story I can’t follow, waving it at things only he can see. When the snow came, it became a fishing pole. He stood knee-deep in a drift, casting his line into a frozen lake that exists only in his head, pulling up fish after magnificent fish.

At some point he found a special place for it in the backyard. Tucked it away where he could return to it, pick it up again whenever he wanted.

For the last six weeks, I’ve been doing something similar. Tucking a few ideas into place, ideas we’ll keep returning to.

We started with a confession: you’re exhausted, and the exhaustion isn’t a character flaw. It’s the weight of living like you own a life that was never yours to own.

Then I gave you a definition: Stewardship is faithfully tending everything God has entrusted to you as worship, as mission, as formation. Not a church word about budgets. A framework sturdy enough to hold the actual weight of your life.

We named three lies that keep you grasping — performance, control, scarcity — and the root lie underneath all of them: that you’re the source. The provider. The one keeping it all together.

Then we went to the cross. Because without it, “God owns everything” is cosmic landlord theology. With it, it’s a rescue story.

We asked the hardest question last: what survives? What are you actually building toward? Three things last — community, character, communion — and most of what we’re grasping so tightly doesn’t.

And last week, I released Chapter 1. A bit of the book itself, or at least the beginning of it, in your hands.

That’s the map. But a map isn’t the territory. Knowing that stewardship matters doesn’t tell you what to do when you’re staring at a bank account that doesn’t add up, or sitting in a job that takes more than it gives back, or waiting on test results for someone you love.

Now I want to go deeper.

This newsletter can sit with one idea for a thousand words. It can chase a thread the book only has room to mention and give it the space it deserves.

Here’s what I mean. In 1 Corinthians 15, there’s this Greek word — kopos — that references the kind of labor that leaves you hollowed out at the end of the day. Not generic work. Exhausting, costly toil. And even that labor is not in vain. The promise reaches all the way down to the work that empties you. Which means everything above it counts too.

I kept coming back to that verse. It changed how I think about the job I lost, the book I’m writing in between job applications, the parenting that demands everything and explains nothing. I want to show you why.

That’s what this newsletter becomes from here. A companion to the book. Some weeks it’ll be a passage like that one. Other weeks a painting, a philosopher, or a story from my life that left a mark. The place where I bring you what I’m finding and we sit with it together.

Every week, it’ll be honest. And it’ll be aimed at the same thing: what does it look like to hold your life loosely, faithfully, in a world that rewards the opposite?

This week’s practice:

No practice this week. Just a question.

Of everything we’ve covered so far, what landed? What’s the idea or the phrase you keep coming back to?

Hit reply and tell me. One sentence is enough. I read every response, and your answer will shape what I write next.

Seven weeks in. Thank you for reading these on a Thursday morning when you have a hundred other things pulling at you. I don’t take that lightly.

More next week,

Rex

P.S. — If you haven’t had a chance to grab Chapter 1 yet, it’s still available for $1.
[GET CHAPTER 1 →]

It’s here.

For the last five weeks, I’ve been sharing pieces of what I’m learning about stewardship—the exhaustion of living like an owner, the freedom of living as a steward, the lies that keep us grasping, the identity that sets us free.

Today I’m releasing Chapter 1 of my book.

It’s called “What Is Stewardship?” and it contains:

• The 11:47pm moment when I realized I was white-knuckling a book about surrender

• The ancient meaning of oikonomos—manager of the household

• The definition I keep returning to: Stewardship is faithfully tending everything God has entrusted to you as worship, as mission, as formation

• What that costs—and why the freedom is bigger than the cost

• A practice called “Inventory of Trusts” to help you see what’s in your hands

Why $1?

Not because I need the dollar.

Because I want readers who are invested. Readers who will actually read it and tell me what they think. Readers who might become the first wave of people to share this book when it releases in 2026.

If you’ve been reading these emails and thinking this is what I needed to hear, this chapter is the foundation for everything else.

GET CHAPTER 1 FOR $1

When you purchase, you’ll get:

• Instant PDF download of Chapter 1 (~3,500 words)

• A practice you can try this week

• The chance to reply and tell me what landed—and what didn’t

I’m writing this book in public, and I need honest readers.

Is that you?

Rex

P.S. — If $1 is genuinely a barrier right now, reply to this email and I’ll send you the chapter free. No questions asked. This isn’t about money. It’s about connection.

You can steward faithfully and still miss the point.

You can release control, make wise decisions, honor your limits—and still be building toward something that won’t last.

Before I share a chapter of my book with you next week (more on that in a moment), I need to answer a question that sits underneath all of it:

What am I actually building toward? What survives?

Jesus said something that should stop us cold:

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”

The first part is easy to grasp. Everything material passes away. The car rusts. The house crumbles. The résumé fades.

But what about the second part? What is “treasure in heaven”?

I’ve come to believe that three things last: character, community, and communion.

Character. The person you’re becoming will last forever. Not the persona you project. The actual you—the one being formed through a thousand small surrenders.

Community. The people you invest in are eternal. Every person in your living room on a tired Tuesday night will exist forever. The relationships you build? They don’t rust.

Communion. The deepest treasure isn’t what you build or even who you become. It’s who you’re becoming like—and the promise that you get to be with Him. Forever.

Two kids under three, both crying. My wife beyond exhausted. My reserves completely gone. And a thought I’ve never said out loud: They have taken everything away.

I thought I was a patient father. Turns out I was a father with margin. When the margin disappeared, I saw what was underneath.

That exposure? It’s formation. God isn’t using my children to make parenting easy. He’s using them as a crucible, forging something in me that will outlast everything else.

The person I’m becoming through that? Eternal. Even when it doesn’t feel like treasure yet.

Almost everything I’m rushing toward will burn.

But the person in front of me? The person I’m becoming? The God who’s with me?

Those I get to keep.

This week’s practice: Treasure Audit

Take 5 minutes. Write down:

1. Three people God has placed in your life who will exist forever. Specific names, not categories.

2. One thing God is forming in you right now. Not what you wish he were forming. What is he actually growing?

3. One moment recently when you were fully present with someone who matters.

That’s what lasts. Build toward that.

Next week: I’m releasing Chapter 1 of my upcoming book. A chapter entitled, “What Is Stewardship?” where I begin to unpack some of what I’ve been sharing in these emails—the definition, the framework, the freedom.

It’ll be $1. Not because I need the dollar. Because I want readers who are invested. People who will actually read it and tell me what they think.

If that’s you, keep an eye on your inbox next Thursday.

Rex

There’s a question you probably won’t ask out loud.

You’ve heard the theology before. God made the world. God owns the world. Some of you will nod along with that. Some of you reading this share my faith. Some of you don’t. Either way, stay with me.

Because here’s the question humming underneath:

Is that good news?

A God who owns me. A God who claims everything I have. Doesn’t that just mean I’m trading one burden for another?

Here’s what you’ve learned from life: people who claim ownership over you usually want something from you. Bosses who say “we’re family” but mean “you owe me your weekends.” Systems that promise belonging if you just perform well enough.

Ownership has rarely felt like freedom.

So when God says, “You are not your own”—some part of you flinches.

I want to show you why this is different.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: I was already owned. I just didn’t know it.

We all are. Owned by the need to prove ourselves. By the fear of not being enough. By the relentless voice that says more. The autonomy we grasp for is bondage. The control we demand is a cage.

Paul puts it more bluntly: “You were slaves to sin.” Slaves. Bound. Unable to break free by your own effort.

And slaves don’t free themselves.

Into that captivity came a rescue.

“You were bought with a price.”

Those words sit in the middle of Paul’s letter like a grenade. The language is marketplace language. Slave-market language. The kind of language you used when you walked into the agora and saw human beings on auction blocks, and you paid a price to set them free.

This is what I believe God did. For me. For you. For all of us.

Silver and gold weren’t enough. The price of our freedom wasn’t money—it was blood. It was the Son of God, stretched out on wood, absorbing the wages of sin so I wouldn’t have to pay them myself.

The King didn’t send a check. He came Himself.

Without the cross, “God owns everything” is just cosmic landlord theology. But with the cross, ownership becomes personal.

The God who claims your life is the God who bled for it. The hands that hold your life are scarred.

I don’t steward to earn love. I steward from love. Because of love. Inside the love that will not let me go.

This week’s practice:

If this stirs something—or if you want it to—sit with Romans 8:31-39 this week. Not as homework. As medicine.

Let the words reach the places where you still feel like a slave:

• The place that says you have to earn your keep

• The place that wonders if God’s patience will run out

• The place that performs because it’s terrified of rejection

Here’s where it ends up: Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

You were bought. You are beloved. What would it look like to live as if that’s true?

Rex

“It’s all on me.”

That phrase ran my life for years. It felt like responsibility. Like leadership. Like what a good father and husband and provider is supposed to believe.

It was actually a slow-motion collapse.

Last week I gave you a definition: Stewardship is faithfully tending everything God has entrusted to you.

This week I want to name what fights against that. Because underneath “it’s all on me” are three lies most of us are living without knowing it.

Lie #1: Performance

My worth comes from what I produce.

This is the voice that says you’re only as valuable as your last win. The voice that can’t rest because rest feels like failure. The voice that turns every day into a scorecard.

I know this lie well. I’ve spent entire seasons trying to earn what was already given.

Lie #2: Control

If I don’t manage every outcome, it will all fall apart.

This is the voice that grips the budget, the calendar, the kids’ futures. The voice that can’t delegate because no one else will do it right. The voice that treats every variable as a threat.

I lived this lie in Lisbon, sitting on a rooftop with my wife, watching a house of cards finally tumble. More on that story another time.

Lie #3: Scarcity

There’s never enough—time, money, energy—to do this well.

This is the voice that hoards margin. The voice that can’t be generous because generosity feels reckless. The voice that lives in perpetual deficit, no matter how much is in the account.

Scarcity cost me joy for years. I couldn’t savor a meal because I was thinking about the work waiting for me. I couldn’t rest because rest felt like waste.

The Root

These three lies feed each other. You perform to secure control. You control to manage scarcity. You live in scarcity because you believe your worth depends on performance.

And beneath all of it is one root lie: You are the source. You are the provider. You are the one holding it all together.

That’s the garden lie. The serpent’s whisper: You can be like God.

We’ve been gasping under the weight of it ever since.

This week’s practice: Lie Detector

Where do you feel the most pressure right now? Work? Parenting? Marriage? Money?

Pick one area. Be specific.

Now listen to the voice underneath. What do you hear?

• “You’re not doing enough. Try harder.” (Performance)

• “If you don’t manage this perfectly, it will fall apart.” (Control)

• “There’s not enough to do this well.” (Scarcity)

Which is loudest?

Say it out loud: “The lie I’m most tempted to believe right now is __.”

Naming the lie doesn’t fix it. But it drags it into the light where grace can reach it.

Next week: what’s actually true about you.

Rex

It’s 11:47 p.m. and I’m staring at a paragraph I’ve rewritten ten times.

I’m writing about surrender. About how the King owns everything, how we’re stewards, not owners.

And I’m white-knuckling every word.

The irony isn’t lost on me. Here I am, trying to control a book about letting go.

And in the quiet, something breaks through. A whisper:

I’ve got this. Bring what you have. I’ll do the rest.

The book was never mine. It was entrusted.

---

So what is stewardship, exactly?

Not a synonym for “be responsible with money.” Not a church word that shows up during pledge season. A framework that can hold the actual weight of your life.

I’m coming at this from a Christian faith. But the problem—the weight, the grasping—that’s human. And what this framework has given me feels less like religion and more like rest.

Here’s the definition I keep coming back to:

Stewardship is faithfully tending everything God has entrusted to you as worship, as mission, as formation.

Let me unpack that:

Faithfully — You’re measured by obedience and trust, not outcomes. You plant. God gives the growth.

Tending — You’re not passive. You labor. You build. You show up with your hands and your heart. But you do it within God’s story, not trying to write your own.

Everything — This isn’t just about money. It’s your time, your body, your work, your family, your attention, your neighborhood. No sacred/secular divide.

Entrusted — You didn’t earn it. You can’t keep it. It’s all on loan. That’s not a loss. That’s freedom.

The cost? If it’s not mine, I can’t arrange it for my ego. I can’t curate my life to impress people. I can’t hoard for security.

The freedom? If it’s not mine, then I am not God. I can stop being a counterfeit owner. I can labor with excellence and rest with peace, because the outcomes were never mine to secure.

---

This week’s practice: Inventory of Trusts

Sit somewhere quiet with a blank page. Write down what God has placed in your hands:

- People: Who depends on you? Who has God given you to love?

- Time: What season of life are you in? What does this season require?

- Work: What contribution is yours to make right now?

- Resources: What provision has been given?

- Place: What ground are you standing on?

Now look at the list.

You didn’t earn any of this. You can’t keep any of this. It’s all entrusted.

The question isn’t “Am I doing enough?” It’s “Am I holding this the way it was meant to be held?”

---

More next week,

Rex

You know that feeling when you climb into bed at 9:30 p.m. because you’re exhausted, but you can’t actually fall asleep because you’re mentally cataloging everything you didn’t do?

The dishes are still in the sink. The text from your friend—the one you’ve been meaning to reply to for three days—is still sitting there, unanswered. Tomorrow your son will run into your room at 5 a.m., and you’ll roll over and let your wife drag herself out of bed to make his breakfast. Again.

You are not okay.

Not in a crisis way. Not in a way anyone would notice. But you’re exhausted.

The exhaustion you feel isn’t a character flaw. It’s the weight of ownership.

I’ve been sitting with this truth a lot lately. Picking it up over and over, tracing the contours like a worn stone. Mostly because I’m writing a book about it.

The book is about stewardship, but probably not in the sense you’ve heard that word before. I’m not here to talk about church budgets and annual giving campaigns. I want to dig into something deeper. Something that might help.

You’re living like an owner—of your career, your family, your money, your future. And owners have to secure what they possess.

But what if you’re not the owner at all? What if you never were?

That’s what this newsletter is about. Every week, I’ll share something I’m learning about holding life loosely—about tending what’s entrusted instead of grasping what we can’t keep.

I don’t have it figured out. I’m writing this book as much for myself as for anyone else. But I think we might be tired of the same things. And I think there’s a better way.

---

This week’s practice:

Before you close this email, ask yourself one question:

What am I holding right now that feels like it might slip away?

A job. A relationship. A child’s future. Your health. Your sense of being enough.

Name it. Don’t analyze it—just notice it. Feel the grip.

Now ask: Am I holding this like an owner, or like a steward?

You don’t have to answer yet. Just notice.

---

Welcome to Holding Loosely. I’m glad you’re here.

Rex

A weekly newsletter for people who are tired of living like owners—gripping their careers, their families, their futures—when they were only ever meant to be stewards.

I’m Rex. Husband, dad of two, business strategy + operations guy by trade. I spent years optimizing my life like a system. It doesn’t work. You can’t control your way into peace.

So I’m writing a book about a different way to live, one rooted in an ancient idea: that I’m not the owner of my life, I’m the steward. I tend what’s entrusted. I show up fully. And I release what I can’t control.

This newsletter is where I share what I’m learning along the way: stories from the middle of it, theology that actually helps, and practices you can try.

Every Thursday. Short enough to read with your morning coffee. Substantial enough to sit with all week.

If you want in, subscribe. First letter lands in your inbox this week.

I’m glad you’re here.

Rex

Subscribe now