WHAT NOW
The questions you carry determine where you land.
This is Jasper. Born September 22, 2014 — which means he’s climbing the same ladder I am, just on a different rung. He goes everywhere with me. Has been present through more than most people know — through decisions that cost more than I expected, through seasons that didn’t go the way I planned, through the quiet that follows when the noise finally stops. On this particular day he sat at the edge of something wide and open, looking out over the hills like he’d already made peace with whatever was out there.
He wasn’t running scenarios.
He wasn’t asking why.
He wasn’t spinning what ifs.
He was just present. Completely, effortlessly there. Waiting on whatever came next. Some nights I get up in the middle of the night and there he is — curled up as tight as he can be right under my bed, right where my foot lands. He gets a rub. An “I love you.” And then we both go back to the dark. There is no bottom to what I feel for that dog. I’ve been trying to learn something from him for years. And I’ve slowly come to understand — it’s not just Jasper I’ve been learning it from.
Some questions you were born carrying.
Some you picked up along the way.
Some you never thought to put down.
And some of them — if you’re honest — stopped fitting a long time ago.
DEDICATION
For the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ — who have shown me, again and again, that part of living is learning to accept how life unfolds. That presence matters more than answers. That availability is its own kind of faithfulness. You didn’t ask me to have it all figured out. You asked me to show up. The closer I get to You, the more the questions find their place. I’m still learning what that looks like — but I’m learning.
For Marty — my wife, my covenant, my constant. You don’t just stand beside me through the seasons — you revive them. You renew the air in our home when it gets heavy. You bring balance to a life that has not always made balance easy, and you do it without asking for credit. You signed up for this — thick and thin, all of it — and you have never once let go. What I have with you is beyond my ability to measure and beyond what I deserve. I am grateful to God for you every single day.
For my friends who keep telling me to write — who read these words and say, that’s exactly what I was feeling but couldn’t say. You open doors I didn’t know needed opening. Your encouragement means more than you know. Keep reading. Keep reaching out. This is as much yours as it is mine.
For my sister — who has known me all my life, through every version of who I’ve been. We are both in our own unfolding, our own season, our own trail. And yet we can sit with each other’s thoughts and just be okay with where we’ve each landed. That is a rare gift. I don’t take it lightly.
And for this life — my life — which has taught me that this world is not a destination. It is a preparation. The lessons have not always been gentle. But they have been faithful. And I am grateful for every one of them.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” — Proverbs 3:5–6 (NKJV)
“It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.” — Hebrews 9:27 (NKJV)
THE HOOK
I watched a movie last night.
Brad Pitt. F1. The Grand Prix. The whole thing.
But what stayed with me wasn’t the race.
It was a question that ran underneath the entire film like a current nobody could quite name.
Why.
His character spent decades chasing a specific feeling behind the wheel — that moment when the acceleration is so great nothing behind you can catch up.
No one closing in.
No noise.
Just pure, clean, forward.
He chased it through loss.
Through failure.
Through everything the world threw at him.
And when he finally crossed the finish line — he knew the answer.
He just never said it out loud.
Because some whys can’t be spoken. They can only be lived.
But I’ve come to believe there is one Why that answers all the others. And it’s not something you arrive at by thinking harder. It’s Someone you draw closer to.
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
THE STORY
My wife Marty asked me this morning what I was going to do today.
I said, whatever I want.
And I meant it.
That’s where I am now.
The business is gone.
The schedule is gone.
Fifty-three years of pressure — of decisions, of carrying other people’s livelihoods, of pushing through things I didn’t always have the strength for — mostly done.
I can say whatever I want and mean every word of it.
But here’s what didn’t go anywhere.
The questions.
What should I do today?
What needs handling?
What if I don’t get to it?
What am I building toward now?
And underneath all of that — oldest of all — why?
It doesn’t matter that the alarm doesn’t go off anymore.
The moment my feet hit the floor the simulation starts.
What if leads to why.
Why leads back to the question.
The question circles back to what if.
Every morning.
Every afternoon.
Right up until sleep finally takes me.
Then I wake up and run the whole loop again.
I used to think this was a problem to solve.
There’s something called the Kobayashi Maru — a training scenario from Star Trek.
A no-win test designed to break cadets.
A civilian ship is stranded in enemy territory.
Rescue them and get destroyed.
Leave them and they die. Either way you fail.
There is no programmed way out.
The test isn’t about tactics.
It’s about character under pressure.
How do you carry yourself when every option costs something?
Captain Kirk famously beat it.
But not by finding a better answer inside the simulation.
He reprogrammed it. He refused to accept the premise of a no-win scenario.
For a long time I tried to live like Kirk.
In business.
Under pressure.
In every impossible corner I’d go looking for the angle nobody else found.
Change the rules.
Reframe the problem.
Force the outcome.
And sometimes I found it.
But the questions I was carrying in those years were built for that season.
Built for a man with something to prove, somewhere urgent to be, someone still becoming.
I’m about to turn 67.
Some things have changed that I didn’t get a vote on.
There are things I used to handle without thinking that now require a phone call, a favor, a check written to someone younger and stronger.
And sometimes even good help — willing help, well-paid help — still doesn’t hit the bar of where I used to function from.
That is a real and deep internal adjustment.
One I have to make peace with every single week.
And somewhere in the middle of all that — in the spinning and the adjusting and the honest-to-God uncertainty about what this season is even for — I started noticing a different voice.
Not loud.
Not urgent.
Not running any kind of loop.
Still. Steady.
And unmistakably not mine.
It was Jesus.
Not a concept.
Not a theology.
The actual living voice of Christ — cutting right through the noise of my own reasoning, not to answer every question I was carrying, but to remind me that I didn’t have to carry them alone.
THE MOMENT
Several people I know have passed away recently.
Some were close.
Some I knew through someone else.
But they were here — and then the clock stopped.
Just like that.
No warning.
No negotiation.
No opportunity to finish what they were still running.
Marty looked at me and said quietly, God says for every man a time and hour is appointed to die.
It is the last thing we do here on earth.
I sat with that for a long time.
Then I looked over at Jasper.
Sitting exactly where he always sits.
At the edge of something wide, looking out.
Still.
Not fighting the season.
Not asking why his legs don’t move the same way they used to.
He’s aging right alongside me — same trail, different pace — and he just shows up. Present.
Available.
Trusting completely in where I lead.
The clock stops for no one.
Not one nanosecond — no matter what you’ve built, what you’ve done, or what you still think you have time to figure out.
THE TURN
Here is what I’ve come to understand about the loop.
Why is a good question?
It looks for meaning.
It wants to understand.
But when you run it past its usefulness it turns backward — into rumination, into blame, into stories that explain everything and change nothing.
Why circles.
Why digs.
Why keeps you in the same place wearing a deeper groove.
What if is a good question too.
It imagines.
It plans.
But when it runs unchecked it doesn’t look forward — it looks sideways into every possible branch of every possible bad outcome.
What if spirals.
What if multiplies.
What if feeds on itself until you’re exhausted and haven’t moved an inch.
Same inputs.
Same answers.
Same place.
Round and round.
The Crazy Eight.
The loop that sounds like processing but is really just a wheel spinning in a rut.
The shift most people miss — the one that actually moves something — is the question nobody thinks to ask when they’re deep in the loop.
What now?
Not why did this happen.
Not what if it gets worse.
Just — what now?
Because here’s how it actually works:
The question sets the direction. The answer creates options. The choice determines the path. Action determines the destination.
And when you genuinely don’t know what now looks like — when the direction is unclear and the options feel empty and the path is hidden — you have to hand the coordinates to Someone who can see the whole map.
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Not I have the way.
Not I know the way.
I AM the way.
Which means what now already has an address.
You don’t have to figure out the route.
You just have to stay close to the One who is the route.
And the closer you stay — the more time you spend in His word, in His presence, in honest conversation with Him instead of just with yourself — the more the why starts to resolve.
Not because you figured it out.
Because He already has.
The why isn’t a puzzle to solve.
It’s a Person to know.
And here’s the deeper thing about seasons.
The what now questions of this chapter are not the same ones I was asking at forty. Or fifty. Or even sixty.
The season changed the terrain.
The terrain changed what needs to be asked.
And old answers — answers built for pressure and speed and the proving years — they don’t feed where I am now.
The questions we carry determine the direction we run.
And old answers rarely feed new seasons.
THE DRIFT
It sounds like self-awareness.
It isn’t.
Self-awareness examines the questions it’s carrying and asks whether they still fit.
This voice just keeps running the familiar loop — calling it experience, calling it knowing yourself, calling it depth.
It tells you the wrestling is the work.
That why and what if are signs of a thinking person.
That if you push through long enough, analyze hard enough, reprogram the simulation one more time — clarity will come.
What it never tells you is this: the questions you ask don’t come from nowhere.
They come from who you believe you are.
Same identity — same questions. Same questions — same answers.
Same answers — same life.
The loop doesn’t just keep you stuck in the wrong thinking.
It keeps you stuck in the wrong you.
And there is only one thing that changes identity at the root.
It isn’t trying harder.
It isn’t a better framework.
It isn’t another pass through the same loop.
The voice of Jesus is quieter than all of it.
But it’s the one that’s actually true.
The inner voice will keep you running why and what if until the sand runs out.
His voice asks what now — and already knows the answer.
I know. Because I followed the wrong voice. For years.
THE REFLECTION
There’s a reason the questions don’t stop.
There’s a reason they survive retirement and empty schedules and every season where you thought things might finally settle.
There’s a reason Brad Pitt’s character kept chasing that feeling long after he’d proven everything he needed to prove.
There’s a reason Jasper still looks out over that hillside like something just past the horizon is worth watching for.
The questions are not a malfunction. They are evidence.
Evidence that something deep in us already knows we are not the whole story.
That there is more to navigate than our own reasoning can map.
That we were wired — from the very beginning — for a conversation that goes somewhere beyond ourselves.
A conversation that was always meant to go to Him.
Every grain through that hourglass is appointed.
The clock stopped for people I knew this year.
It stopped without warning, without ceremony, without any regard for what they still had left to do or figure out or say.
It will stop for me.
It will stop for you.
Not as a threat. As a fact. A clarifying, honest, focusing fact that has the power to change every question you’re carrying — if you let it.
Are you still running why and what if past their season?
Still trying to reprogram simulations that God never asked you to solve alone?
Still driving fast enough that nothing can catch you and calling that peace?
The higher I’ve climbed in this life the quieter it’s gotten.
Not because the questions stopped.
But because I finally started sending them to the right address.
And the closer I get to Jesus — the more I understand the why.
Not all at once. Not always the way I expected.
But in the way that only truth can settle into a person — steady, deep, and permanently.
That’s what Jasper has been showing me all along.
He doesn’t need the why.
He doesn’t spin the what if.
He just stays close.
Present.
Available.
Trusting that where I go is exactly where he needs to be.
Stay close. That’s the whole thing.
Hand the questions upward.
Not because you’re giving up. Because you’re finally asking the right One.
Then show up — present, available, willing.
Like Jasper.
The quality of your life is shaped less by the answers you get and more by the questions you live inside.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
What question have you been running past its season — and what would change if you stopped sending it to yourself and started sending it to Him?
MY PRAYER
Heavenly Father,
You already know every question I’m carrying. You knew them before I woke up this morning. You knew them before I was born into this season I didn’t fully see coming.
I confess I’ve run the loop longer than I should have. Why circling backward. What if spinning sideways.
Following my own voice past the point where it had anything true left to say. Meanwhile the sand keeps falling and I don’t always know what I’m spending it on.
But You sent Jesus. And in Him — in His presence, in His word, in the still quiet voice that cuts right through the noise when I finally get still enough to hear it — the why starts to make sense.
Not because I figured it out. Because He already has.
Teach me to ask what now — and to bring it straight to You.
To let the season change the question instead of forcing old answers onto new terrain. To stay close the way Jasper stays close — present, available, trusting that where You lead is exactly where I need to be.
The clock runs for all of us. Help me spend what’s left asking questions worth asking — and pointing every single one of them toward You.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
ABOUT G~
G~ writes from lived experience — exploring identity, authority, and time through the lens of faith, trial, leadership, and surrender. His reflections are not meant to condemn or hype, but to steady. Rooted in covenant, forged through adversity, and anchored under the authority of Jesus Christ, his work invites readers to examine who governs their lives — and to live intentionally under truth.
If what you’ve read resonates with your journey, feel free to reach out.
G~