The Page I Thought was the Whole Book
After 20 years, I retired from the Navy at 37 as a Petty Officer First Class. It was an honorable career, just not the one I had planned. I had set goals for rank and reached none of them. I watched friends and colleagues make chief—the next rank up—and some become officers. Each time, I did the same math about my own life, and the answer never changed: I had failed. Of course, I didn't put it that way. I said the Navy's evaluation system had failed me, because that was easier to carry.
So that was the page: twenty years, a promotion that never came, and a story about a system that wouldn't let me in. At the time, it didn't look like a page. It looked like the whole book.
What Actually Happened
Some of the blame was fair. For most of my career, I lacked the mentorship that helps a sailor understand what the next rank entails. My evaluations were average. Then one was very bad, and it closed the door to the next rank.
Here is the part I left out of the story for years.
At one duty assignment, I worked under an officer I strongly disagreed with. We had different views on the division's work and how it should be led. I didn't just disagree; I refused to follow his lead and let my anger show. Things got so bad that we barely spoke, and he gave me the worst evaluations of my career. The system didn't write those evaluations alone. I helped write them.
The mature version of that moment isn't complicated. It looks like a subordinate who listens, asks the right questions, and asks for guidance, even when he disagrees. I knew what that looked like. So why couldn't I do it?
Because I was protecting something: myself from being treated as less than, from being seen as a man who didn't measure up; the anger was a wall around that fear.
The Wound Under the Anger
I didn't understand that fear until years later, while studying to become a therapist. I joined the Navy at 17 and grew up without a father figure. No man had ever shown me how to stand before a man in authority, disagree with him, and stay steady. So I learned the only way I knew: by bracing. Men in authority didn't seem like guides to me. They seemed like threats.
That officer wasn't the cause. He was where an old wound met new pressure. You may know this pattern from the inside. Maybe it isn't a commanding officer. Maybe it's a boss, a father-in-law, a pastor, or your own father. You find yourself reacting with more force than the moment deserves, and afterward you can't fully explain why. Most men can tell you exactly what the other man did wrong. Fewer can tell you what old wound that moment was pressing on.
What Faith Actually Is
When I retired, I made the mistake most of us make on a hard page: I treated that one page as the whole book. When you're inside a hard chapter, it's all you can see.
This is where people often misunderstand faith. They think it means believing something without reasons, or holding on out of stubbornness. That isn't the faith I've come to know.
Faith is not believing without reasons; it is trusting the Author of a story you can only read one page at a time. That trust isn't vague optimism that things will work out. It rests on a God who has already shown He can be trusted, most of all in Christ. And because we live one page at a time, that trust becomes hope. We know how the story ends: with Him, and with everything made whole. What we can't see is how this page connects to that ending.
I'll be honest: I didn't see any of this while I was living it. I saw it later, looking back through faith. That's often how it works. The Author doesn't usually explain the page while you're on it.
The Pages That Came Next
Retiring at 37 meant I was still young enough to start over. My first civilian job was as a federal investigator, but the old wound came with me. And yes, I needed to meet expectations, measured by complicated metrics, to be promoted from GS-7 to GS-12, the expected performance level. It all looked like I needed to make the next rank after my promotion to GS-9. And yes, again, I found myself angry with a supervisor.
This time, though, something was different: I didn't blame him or the system. Instead, I asked a better question: What kind of work suits the temperament God gave me? I’m melancholic: I think deeply and do my best work where people collaborate as peers rather than through a chain of authority, and where work is more predictable than military life ever was. That isn't avoiding authority; it's knowing where I work best. The job didn't offer that, so I left after three years without calling myself a failure or blaming anyone else.
Then I returned to school to become a therapist. Looking back, I see that I used the university as a kind of training ground. Professors have authority, but it's a gentler kind—one you can practice trusting. So I let them mentor me. The master's program was hard. They valued my work, and I let myself believe them.
During my internship, I worked under a demanding supervisor. She was direct and expected high-quality work, the kind of authority I had always braced against in men. But she also praised me when I earned it and defended my work when it needed defending. This time, I engaged her with clarity and honesty instead of anger. That relationship became one of the working relationships I value most.
The same wound. Three people in authority. Three different responses. From the page where I retired, I never could have seen any of this coming. I needed every one of those pages to understand the one I was so certain had ended my story.
The Author is on the Page with You
There's a danger in all this talk about pages and books. It can sound like I'm telling you to zoom out until your pain seems small. I'm not.
The hard page is real. So are the divorce, the job you lost, the drinking you can't get under control, and the son who won't call you back. A God who only watched from above, writing the story from a safe distance, would be hard to trust on a page like that.
But that isn't the God we believe in. On the Cross, the Author stepped onto the page. He didn't explain suffering from outside; He entered it and suffered alongside us. That's why we can trust Him with the pages we can't read yet. He has already been on the worst page.
Many of the men I work with today are a lot like I was: strong men who take risks, run toward hard things, and fight hard—then can't understand why the fight turned against them. Many are where I was at 37: convinced the page in front of them is the whole story, and quietly blaming themselves or someone else for it.
You already know the story doesn't end on this page. You believe that. The hard part is living as if you believe it while you're still on that page. That's the gap I help men close. Together, we look honestly at the page you're on, uncover the old wound beneath it, and learn to live in a way that reflects what you believe. We also learn how God orders our lives toward the final destination—with gratitude and, I dare say, excitement.
If you're on a hard page right now, reach out to schedule a consultation. I'd be glad to talk.
