2026 - The Year You Stop Standing Outside

A new year doesn’t ask for your resolutions.

It asks for your honesty.

You already know the patterns you’re carrying forward — the habits you excuse, the questions you keep at arm’s length, the inner resistance you dress up as independence. You’ve learned how to function without clarity. How to stay busy enough to avoid stillness. How to manage life without ever fully yielding it.

And for a while, that works.

But if you’re honest, something in you knows this:

you’re standing outside a life that keeps calling your name.

Most men don’t reject God because they’ve disproven Him.

They reject Him because they don’t want to surrender control — or because surrender was modeled to them as weakness instead of strength.

So they negotiate.

I’ll believe later.

I’ll clean myself up first.

I’ll figure out my doubts before I step in.

I don’t need faith — I need discipline.

But discipline without identity just hardens you.

And independence without purpose eventually hollows you out.

Jesus never offered men a vague path or a spiritual suggestion. He drew a clear line and invited them to cross it.

That statement is not poetic.

It is confrontational.

Jesus didn’t say He shows the way.

He said He is the way.

He didn’t say He teaches truth.

He said He is the truth.

He didn’t say He points to life.

He said He is the life.

And He removed the illusion that there are side doors, workarounds, or alternative paths.

This year doesn’t require you to pretend belief you don’t have.

It requires you to stop hiding behind your hangups.

Your wounds don’t disqualify you.

Your doubts don’t disqualify you.

Your past doesn’t disqualify you.

What holds you back is the lie that you must become worthy before you belong.

That’s not how sons are made.

Faith isn’t blind optimism.

It’s a decision to step forward before you have all the answers — because something deeper than logic is already pressing on you.

You don’t need more proof.

You need courage.

The courage to admit you’re tired of carrying everything alone.

The courage to admit that self-mastery hasn’t delivered what it promised.

The courage to admit that maybe — just maybe — you were never meant to be your own savior.

Jesus does not meet men who have it together.

He meets men who are willing to come.

Not cleaned up.

Not confident.

Not certain.

Just willing.

This year can be the year you stop circling faith and actually step toward it.

The year you stop arguing from a distance and respond to the invitation.

The year you stop protecting your independence at the cost of your soul.

You don’t become a son by achieving something.

You become a son by receiving Someone.

And that choice — to come to the Father through the Son — is not abstract.

It is personal.

It is present.

It is now.

Stop standing outside.

Come. -eight