Living on Purpose vs. Living by Accident

For a stretch of years, I would have told you I was doing everything right.

I was present. I dropped my kids at school and picked them up. I was home with them most afternoons until their mom got back. We went to church. I was making sure they grew up inside a faith I knew would shape how they saw the whole world. On paper, I was there for all of it.

And I still managed to drift right past the years I most wanted to keep.

That's the strange thing about living by accident. It doesn't look like absence. I wasn't off somewhere else. I was standing right there in my own life — and somehow letting it happen to me instead of living it on purpose.

What the drift actually looked like

It looked like checking boxes.

Church became something I attended rather than something that was happening to me. I went, but partly because I knew what it would add to my kids' lives — which is a good reason, just not a living one. And when my body said it was tired, sometimes I listened to my body instead. Stayed up too late, felt off the next morning, skipped it. The serving I used to do quietly at church stopped, and I had a ready excuse: I was working a full-time job and trying to build a business. Life got busy. Everyone understands busy.

Underneath all of it, the pace had become so normal I couldn't feel it as fast. I only knew I felt consumed. Consumed by what I was doing, or what I was trying to become. And the whole time I told myself that the doing was the point — that I was building something for the very people I was too busy to sit down with.

The cost had a specific shape

I can name what it cost me now, and it isn't abstract.

My kids were between five and nine. I was there for those years — but I was too uptight to be in them. I needed the house clean. No dishes left in the sink, no cutlery lying around, the rugs at the entryway straight and tidy. I told myself a neat home was a peaceful home, that the order gave me some clarity I needed.

It was what now seems like a decade ago because it may well be so, when my kids were between ages five and nine. I was there for those years — but I was too uptight to be in them. I needed the house clean. No dishes left in the sink, no cutlery lying around, floors swept clean, the rugs at the entryway straight and tidy. By now, you have a slight idea of what a "clean boss" I was. I told myself a neat home was a peaceful home, that the order gave me some clarity I needed.

That's living by accident. Not neglect. Just aim pointed at the wrong thing, for long enough that the good years slipped by while I was straightening the rug.

The tension didn't come from the drift. It came from the light.

Here's the part I didn't expect, and it's the part I most want you to hear.

I didn't feel behind while I was drifting. Drifting feels fine. Drifting feels productive, even. The ache didn't show up until I started paying attention.

A few years back — right around the time I was going full-time in my business — I started listening differently. Not sermons in the background, but sermons I was actually leaning into, trying to hear what God might be saying through them and how I'd apply it. I picked up books on growing as a person and as a man of faith, and I read them to understand, not to check them off. I'd never been much of a reader, especially of the Bible; I became one, reading it and listening to it until a lot more of it got into me.

And that's when the gap opened up. The closer I looked at the promises I was reading, the more clearly I could see: this is what I actually desire. This is where I want my marriage to be, where I want things with my kids to be — and I'm not there yet. The falling-behind feeling wasn't the disease. It was the first symptom of waking up. The light didn't make me feel accomplished. It showed me the distance. And strangely, that was the most hopeful thing that had happened to me in years, because you can't move toward a place you haven't let yourself see.

Waking up made me a stranger

I'd love to tell you the shift fixed everything. What it actually did, first, was turn me into someone my family wasn't used to.

I got less uptight. The spotless-house thing loosened its grip — I could walk past something out of place and just say "hey, take care of that when you get a chance," without the tension that used to ride along with it. I became more relaxed, quicker to let things go, slower to let small disorder steal my peace. My wife noticed. My kids noticed. I was becoming a different man in my own home, and the difference was that I had started valuing the people more than the things I'd been doing supposedly for those people.

It's not finished. I still tiptoe back toward the old uptight version of myself sometimes. The difference now is that I can feel it happening, and more often than not I can name the trigger and catch it before it takes the room. That's not mastery. That's just attention — the very thing that had been missing the whole time.

And slowly, the things I'd envisioned back when the kids were babies have started showing up. My wife and I aren't finishing every sentence yet, but we're getting there — and the place it shows up most is in our devotional time, where more and more we'll walk away having landed on the very same takeaway, like we're being handed the same thing at once. After all these years, we're learning to hear in stereo. I have a marker I use for all of this, too, and it makes me smile: I look at friends younger than me carrying far more gray hair than I do, and I notice that most of mine sits at the back of my head, where I can't even see it. I've decided God put it there on purpose.

Where this leaves us

I'm not writing this from the far side of anything. I'm writing it as a man who spent years being present without being attentive, and who is only now, on purpose, learning the difference.

So I'll leave you with the one question that turned things for me — the question I still have to ask myself more weeks than not.

Where in my life am I present, but not really there?

Sit with that one. Don't rush to fix it. Just let it show you the gap, the way it showed me mine — because that ache isn't the problem. It's the light coming on.

Let's rekindle this, on purpose.

If this landed, it's the kind of thing I write about every week. Subscribe to Rekindled by Intention below and let's keep walking it out together.

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Discovering the truths and letting them dictate our lives rather than circumstances.

I believe God gave us families for us to reflect His unconditional love.

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