Before You Belong to Anyone, Belong to God

About this book

I wrote it from inside a life that has been broken open more than once - and from the other side of lessons I wish I had learned twenty years earlier. I spent thirteen years as a pastor, walking with people through the hardest things a life can hold. I have sat across from young men and women at two in the morning when they did not know who they were or whether anyone cared. I have watched gifted people build their entire identity around another person, a relationship, a reputation - and then watched it collapse when that thing was taken away. I have done it myself.This book is built on one conviction: you cannot give yourself fully to anyone or anything - a partner, a calling, a community, a future - until you know who you are before God. Not the version of you that performs for people. Not the version your parents hoped for. The actual you, standing alone before the God who made you and knows you completely.Forty days will not finish that work. But it will begin it. And beginning, it turns out, is everything.