"An Invitation To Stop Swimming"

Welcome. I am so excited to share this new book with you. Today I am posting the “Introduction”. Then next Friday I will post Chapter 1 and each following week a new chapter. The Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, are free so you can get a feel of the book. The rest of the book is for paid subscribers only.

This book can literally change the way you do life. Each Chapter is followed by “Reflect & Respond” section. Don’t miss doing these!

Finally, I want your feedback on this - good, bad or whatever. So, let’s get started!

I almost called this book something else. I almost called it “Slowing Down” or “Finding Rest” or something safe and predictable that would look nice on a bookshelf. Then I realized that the problem with safe titles is the same as the problem with safe lives. They keep you from telling the truth.

The truth is that most of us are not just busy. We are caught in something. Something invisible, relentless, and far more powerful than we realize. I call it “the current”. It is the force that keeps you moving when everything inside you is begging to stop. It is the voice that tells you rest is a luxury you cannot afford, that your worth depends on your output, that slowing down is the same as falling behind. It pulls you through your days, your weeks, your years, and the whole time you think you are choosing this pace. You are not. The current is choosing it for you.

I know because I lived in it for decades.

I am a marriage counselor. I have spent over forty years helping couples navigate the hardest seasons of their lives. Nancy and I have been married for more than four decades, and I have written books and recorded hundreds of podcast episodes about what makes marriages work. From the outside, it probably looked like I had it figured out.

I did not.

There was a season in my life when I was so deep in the current that I could not feel anything. Not joy. Not sadness. Not even the tiredness that had been building for years. I was producing at a pace that everyone around me admired, and I was dying on the inside. Not physically. Something deeper. My soul was running on fumes, and I had convinced myself that the fumes were fuel.

Nancy saw it. She tried to tell me. I did not listen. I told her I was fine. I told God I was fine. I told myself I was fine. Saying “I’m fine” is the anthem of the current, and I sang it every single day.

Then one Tuesday afternoon, sitting in my office between appointments, everything stopped. Not the world. Just me. Something inside me finally broke, and in the silence of that breaking, I heard the truth I had been outrunning for years.

You were never meant to keep up.

That moment changed everything. Not overnight. Not in some clean, dramatic transformation. It was messy and slow and humbling. It required me to admit that the way I had been living was not faithful. It was foolish. It required me to relearn what rest actually means, not as a reward for finishing my work but as a rhythm woven into the very fabric of how God designed life.

This book is what I learned on the other side of that breaking.

Why This Book?

Every week in my counseling office, I sit across from people who are drowning. They come in talking about their marriages, their anxiety, their kids, their careers. As we peel back the layers, what I find underneath is almost always the same thing. A person who has been running at an unsustainable pace for so long that they have forgotten what it feels like to stand on solid ground.

They are not lazy. They are not weak. They are caught in a current that our culture, our workplaces, our technology, and sometimes even our churches have been building for decades. A current that rewards exhaustion and punishes rest. A current that measures your value by your productivity and makes you feel guilty for breathing.

I wrote this book because I believe there is another way to live. Not a slower version of the same life. A fundamentally different one. A life built on the truth that your worth was settled before you ever produced a thing, and that the God who made you is not asking you to keep up. He is asking you to let go.

That sounds simple. It is the hardest thing most of us will ever do.

What You Will Find in These Pages

This book is organized in three parts.

In Part One, we name the current. We look at where it comes from, how it got so powerful, and the lie buried underneath it all. The lie that says you are what you produce. We also talk about what I call “touching bottom” — the moment you finally wake up to how deep the current has taken you. That moment is terrifying. It is also the beginning of rescue.

In Part Two, we start swimming for the bank. We look at what God actually says about rest, the guilt that keeps us from receiving it, and the courage it takes to choose a different pace when everyone around you is still sprinting.

In Part Three, we find solid ground. We build rhythms that are sustainable. We learn what to do when the current calls us back, because it will. We discover what life looks like when your worth is no longer tied to your output and peace is no longer a distant dream but a daily reality.

Throughout this book, I will share stories from my counseling practice. Names and details have been changed to protect privacy, but the patterns are real. I will also share stories from my own marriage and my own failures. I am not writing this as someone who has arrived. I am writing it as someone who almost drowned and found his way to shore.

Before We Begin

If you clicked on this post, something inside you already knows. You know the pace is not sustainable. You know the exhaustion is not normal. You know there has to be more to life than running until you collapse and then getting up and running again.

You are right. There is more. So much more.

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” That invitation has been open since the day He spoke it, and it is still open right now. For you. Today. Exactly as you are. Not the version of you that finally gets it all together. The version of you that is reading these words right now, tired and probably a little skeptical that anything can really change.

I was skeptical too. I am glad I was wrong.

You were never meant to keep up. Let me show you what you were meant for instead.