​This one is vulnerable for me to write. I thought “Freedom” was the zinger, but this one hits closer to the bone for me on some levels.

​I did not choose some key parts of the life I have.

I have made choices along the way, certainly. And it’s not as though I live in a swirling eddy of regret. I am not unhappy. The opposite, in fact.

But I am here, in my forties, newly embracing an awareness of how my life was shaped by hands that weren’t always my own.

So many of my choices in my teens and twenties, and certainly even into my marriage were influenced by a desire to be a part of things. In our case a very large church community with many tentacles. Many ways in which it reached into the lives of it’s parishioners.

I was asked to do things I had no business or experience or expertise doing. By the tender age of fifteen I was called an “evangelist” and sent on “crusades” in faraway places. Christ Jesus forgive me.

Early in our marriage we planted a church, (that’s fancy Christian-speak for “started”), in a specific community of people who were WAY out of our depth, especially at the time. We’re talking people twice and three times our age who had been struggling with addictions I couldn’t even comprehend for longer than my parents had known one another.

Single parents. Bereaved widows. Real adults with real problems just trying to get by.

At least today I’d know to float along with people instead of pretending I knew how to backstroke. At the time we were handed a standard-issue Savior-Complex and sent out. We got a little curriculum, and we were going to get them properly saved.

​Here is a story I’ve told before, but it seems germane now.

​In 2008, when the bottom dropped out of construction, I started a coffee shop alongside a few friends. I had no startup capital and I didn’t know what I was doing. We used someone else’s money; he was willing to spend it for his own private reasons.

We gleaned labor from our church. One guy made art. Another guy textured the walls with his bare hands. Left literal fingerprints everywhere. I worked in the cafe daily.

In mid 2009, just about nine months later, a friend of mine, (who roasted coffee), hatched a plan with my church-chieftain. This guy wasn’t a pastor per se, but at the time I would have followed him into the very belly of hell. (As an aside: beware of that level of commitment. I’m not saying it’s always unhealthy, but I’m saying be conscious and aware).

My wife is Canadian. We went to Canada to visit her mother for Mother’s Day. We turned our cell phones off and kept them in the glove box so as not to rack up international roaming fees. We’d been burned before, you see.

​When we returned, I was met with a half-dozen messages. While I was offline, these two guys had hatched a plan for me to buy the coffee roasting operation.

And so I did. That’s how I became a coffee guy. That’s the story.

Now, mine is a dissimilar story from many in this industry.

If you know me, I may look quite flashy. Expensive cars, fine suits, platinum watches, etc. (That is a joke).

But generally speaking, the people who stick around this industry are people who love it. Deeply. They’re not here for the money.

​I was not that person. Nobody asked me if I liked coffee. Or loved it. Or even if I wanted to be a business owner. It just sort of happened. Just like that I was running hard on the treadmill of finding personal value and a sense of worth in entrepreneurship.

It was a moment in my life when someone might have offered me a Choice of My Own Goals, and didn’t.

Instead, they handed me a script. That happened in my life over and over. I don’t think I’m unique in this. And responsibility must be taken! Nobody forced me to do anything! But nobody thoughtfully offered an alternative path, either.

​I think that is why this card matters so much to me now.

We could pause here and talk about my wife. My partner. What choices was she ever handed? I won’t speak for her here, in this forum. It’s not my place. She should write her own essays. I am, as established, a big white dude. How is the story different, (or the same) for women? I shudder.

​As I’ve grown up, I’ve begun seeing my goals not as scripts handed down from a leader, but as a hinge point in my understanding of life.

​As we’ve discussed, our lived experiences inform our Values. Our Values inform our Vision.

Goals exist in the in-between place. They are the pivot-point where we take the ethereal thought-work of our values (and our beliefs, which are really just calcified values anyway), and we reformat them, alchemy-like, into the hand-work of our daily tasks and time management.

They’re where we go from thought to action.

​If you don’t choose your own goals, someone else will choose them for you, that’s my experience. And they will generally, naturally, choose goals that serve their vision, not yours. And if you’re particularly unlucky they will tell you, (and they will believe), that their vision is actually GOD’S vision and that can be pretty hard to argue with.

​In the old days, I had goals that were informed by my community. They were big. They were very Christian. They were life and death. They were about saving the world. Being a part of the action. Teaming up with God to get some s**t DONE.

Today, my goals are simpler.

Actually, let me rephrase that: My goals are finally mine.

Take my truck. I own a 1971 Ford F250. It belonged to a grandfather figure of mine—not my blood grandpa, but a grandpa person in my life. He was a chicken farmer. And now that I am starting to raise chickens myself, keeping this truck running feels like keeping a promise.

But the original engine—a 390 Ford-Edsel big block—was old. It was worn out, tired, and drank gas like it was angry with me. The “Script” says you restore a truck like that. You keep it pure. You respect the Ford heritage.

I didn’t do that. I chose my own goal. I wanted a truck that started every time and could work for another 50 years. So, I committed a little heresy. I had that 390 pulled out and I swapped in an “LS” engine from a wrecked Chevrolet Tahoe.

If you are a car person, you know that putting a Chevy heart in a Ford body is a kind of a sacrilege. It upsets the purists.

But I didn’t build it for the purists. I built it for me. I saved a piece of iron from the scrapyard by grafting a modern heart into it. It runs nearly perfectly, it is positively efficient in comparison with it’s original equipment. It honors the chicken farmer who owned it before me, but it runs on my terms.

That sounds like a small thing compared to “saving the world.” But it is a goal I chose. It comes from my value of stewardship, my value of reuse, and my value of rejecting the shiny new thing.

I am learning that a small goal that is truly yours—even if it’s a Frankenstein truck made of mixed parts—is infinitely better than a big goal that belongs to someone else.

I am finally in the driver’s seat. (And this time, it starts on the first turn).

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