The Insiders Challenge

From The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind

I need to tell you something about where I started.

My father was a lay preacher. A good man. A genuinely good man who loved his family and loved his God and gave almost every non-working hour of his life to the church. He was, by every measure that the church uses, a terrific church person.

And growing up inside that world, the God I encountered was a God of rules.

I want to be precise here, because my father deserves precision. The rules were not invented maliciously. They were well-meant, most of them. Many of them were built on actual Scripture, on things God said for good reasons, things designed for human beings to thrive and flourish in. But then men added their rules on top of God’s rules. And then more rules on top of those. And what you end up with, when rule is stacked on rule on rule, is not a path to God. It is a control system. And it is enforced, usually, by a father figure with authority and certainty and the name of God available as the final argument.

Maybe your controlling figure was a father. Maybe it was a mother, an uncle, a pastor, a nun, a gang leader, a guardian, or someone whose title I haven’t mentioned. The specific role varies. The mechanism is the same. And when God’s name is invoked to enforce compliance, something happens in the person on the receiving end that is very hard to undo.

You don’t just distrust the person. You distrust the God they claimed to represent.

I want to say this plainly: that distrust is not unreasonable. It is not a failure of faith. It is a reasonable response to having been handed a counterfeit and told it was the real thing. What the Pharisees had, Jesus himself said, was religion without presence. Rules without relationship. Correct theology deployed as a weapon. That is not God. That is what happens when human control instincts get hold of God’s name and use it for their own purposes. It is, to use the precise word, a slander. And it has driven more people away from the real thing than almost any other force I can name.

If that’s your story, I am not going to argue you out of your distrust. I am going to ask you to consider one thing: you have not yet met the actual God. You have met a representation of him, built by people with their own fears and their own need for control. The two are not the same.

I was twelve years old the first time I met him properly.

A young man, a hippy, had started leading our youth group. He had an unusual approach: he gave us books and told us to read for ourselves and find out who Jesus actually was. He lent me a copy of The Cross and the Switchblade. Then Run Baby Run by Nicky Cruz. And something happened to me reading those books that no amount of rules and Sunday services had ever produced. I encountered a Jesus who walked into the worst situations imaginable and changed them. Not by enforcement. By presence. By love that had no conditions attached to it.

I accepted Christ personally, by my own choice, at twelve years old. I was, for a season, genuinely on fire.

And then the hippy was removed from leading the youth group.

We were told he had been “inappropriate with some of the youths.” Everyone understood what that meant. We were meant to understand what that meant. We were twelve years old and we believed it, because why would adults lie about something like that, and because believing it made them the good guys and him the danger we had been protected from.

It wasn’t true. Inappropriate meant he had been encouraging us to read for ourselves and find out who Jesus actually was.

I have never forgotten that. Not the removal. The lie. The deliberate, calculated use of the worst accusation available to protect the institution from a young man whose only offence was handing teenagers the Gospels and saying: look for yourself.

That is what religion does when it feels threatened. It is not what God does. The two have never been the same thing.

A couple of years later I discovered girls. Jesus moved to second place. Then third. Then further back. He was always somewhere in my life, a presence I acknowledged occasionally, a church I attended from time to time. But as a genuinely born-again, Spirit-filled believer? That came in 2003. More than thirty years after the first fire.

Thirty years is a long drift. I am not telling you this to perform humility. I am telling you because if you are somewhere in the middle of your own drift, I want you to know that the distance does not disqualify you. It never did. He was there the whole time, waiting with the patience of someone who knows exactly how the story ends.

After 2003 I spent twenty comfortable years in a large church. Good years. Real community. Genuine faith. But comfortable in a way I didn’t have the language to examine yet. It took leaving that context and exposing myself to other teachers and pastors, largely through YouTube, which I will say without irony is one of the greatest inventions in the history of the Church, to discover what it meant to actually study Scripture rather than just read it. To go deeper with the Holy Spirit rather than simply acknowledge his existence.

The deeper I go, the more in love I am. That is the only way I know to say it.

I also had a heart attack. I will not dwell on it here beyond saying: it has a way of clarifying what actually matters and what you have been treating as if it matters. I came out of it with a different quality of urgency about the things I had been meaning to get to. This collection is one of them.

Now. The word I need to address.

Sin.

I spent years fighting that word. Not intellectually. Physically, almost, the way you fight something that is being used against you. Because it was being used against me. Every time someone invoked it, I did the same mental calculation: I compared my sin to theirs. I almost always came out better. Less bad. And I believed that calculation. I used it as a defence against the accusation.

Whether the comparison was accurate at the time is beside the point. It was not the Truth.

The Truth is that sin, the actual word in the original language, means to miss the mark. Like an arrow that doesn’t reach the bullseye. Not a verdict on your character. A description of your trajectory. You were aimed at something, the full flourishing of what you were made to be, and you have not reached it. Not because you are irredeemably broken. Because you are human and the mark is perfect and the distance between them is real.

A thrice holy God cannot be near what is imperfect. Not as a punishment. As a simple incompatibility of nature. Light and darkness cannot occupy the same space.

But here is the thing that undoes everything the accusers were using against you: God knew this before it happened. He knew Adam would fail. He knew you would miss the mark. And before the first failure, the plan was already in motion. Not as an afterthought. Not as damage control. As the intention all along.

Jesus, his only Son, perfect where we are not, took the weight of every missed mark in human history and carried it to a cross and died under it. Not because we deserved rescue. Because he loved us without condition and the incompatibility had to be resolved somehow and he chose to resolve it himself, at his own cost, so that the distance could be closed.

He rose. The death did not hold. And the reconciliation he accomplished is available to every person who has ever lived, regardless of how far they drifted, regardless of what was done to them in God’s name, regardless of how long they fought the word sin or compared themselves to the person using it.

You don’t have to perform for him. You don’t have to clean yourself up first. You don’t even have to love him back, though once you know him honestly I cannot imagine why you wouldn’t.

He is calling you right now. Not with rules. With the same two words that are on the cover of this collection:

Come to me.

Before you decide what you think about any of this, I want to ask you one thing.

Watch The Chosen. The first season. Read the Gospels. Not the violent parts, not Revelation, not the passages that have been used against you. Read the story. Look for Jesus everywhere. Look for what God does with an impossible people and how many chances he gives them and what his face looks like when someone comes home who has been a long way away for a long time.

You have been given a representation of God that does not resemble him. I understand the distrust. I carried it too.

But do not let the counterfeit keep you from the real thing. That is exactly what the counterfeit was designed to do.

If what you have read in these six guides has landed somewhere real, and if what I have just told you sounds less like religion and more like something you have been hungry for without knowing what to call it, then here is all it takes.

Believe it in your heart. Say it with your mouth.

Yes, Jesus.

Two words. Everything changes.

You are heard. You are accepted. You are loved. Not after improvement. Not once you have performed sufficient transformation. Now. Completely. Forever.

The oldest vines produce the deepest fruit. Whatever years you think you have wasted, the Architect does not call them wasted. He calls them formation material. And he has not stopped working with what you have given him, which is more than you realise and less than you think.

One last thing.

Every morning, before the day gets its hands on you, there is a question worth asking.

Not how do I perform better today. Not how do I manage the gap between who I am and who I should be. Not what do I need to fix.

Just this:

What’s better today?

Six months from now, if you keep asking it honestly, you will be able to answer it in ways that surprise you.

The Insiders Challenge is the next step, if you are ready for it. The details are at whatsbetter.today/challenge.

But the question is free. It always has been.

What’s better today?

With everything I have learned and everything I am still learning,

John Michael

Singapore

This is The Epilogue from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

From The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind

Three weeks in, Sarah had a crisis.

She yelled at Jake. She scrolled for 40 minutes on a Wednesday afternoon when she had real work to do. She missed the gap twice in her conversation with her mother and didn’t notice until she walked home.

She told Maya, over lunch, that she thought she’d lost it, whatever it was that she’d had three weeks previously. “I think I’m a fraud.”

Maya looked up from her coffee and said “were you twenty posts in before you got to the gap on Wednesday or was it ten?”

Sarah thought about it and said “ten maybe twelve”

“Three weeks ago you wouldn’t have stopped at all,” replied Maya, “so what have you lost?”

The Morning After the Breakthrough

There’s a honeymoon period in every genuine change. A period in which the new thing feels fresh and chosen and vital, in which the gap is easy to find and the old script difficult to remember, in which you can’t believe you ever bought into the other one.

And then, the honeymoon ends. Not with a bang but with a sigh, the initial rush of the change giving way to gravity, the pull back in the other direction. You snap, you scroll, you build a little section of wall before realising with a start that you’ve built it without noticing the gap.

What follows from this, for many, is a belief that they’ve lost it all, that they’ve returned to the other thing entirely, that this latest change simply isn’t working and that they aren’t of a mind to make it work.

This is a lie designed to sound precisely like an honestly arrived at conclusion, which is why it’s all the more dangerous.

You have not lost it, you have arrived at the real work.

The honeymoon was the breakthrough, the actual formation being something rather different.

What you’re feeling is found in the book of Ecclesiastes. The sun rises and sets and rises again, the wind blows this way and that, the river runs to the sea but the sea is never full.

This world is cyclical in nature where everything repeats. With laws like gravity where whatever goes up must come back down. Or how water seeks the path of least resistance.

The old habit still pulls. You answer it with a new response, though it takes more out of you for now.

Sarah and Maya

Maya, having been through the same refit, remembered her own struggles and the thrid week wall. She looked up at Sarah from her coffee and said “you’re confusing agency with control. They’re not the same thing.”

She picked up a pen and a coffee cup and placed them on the table in front of her.

She looked up at Sarah.

“The pen is yours. Your responses, your agency, your control. Your choice in the matter of Jake. Your honesty with him. The decision to stop at post twelve and not forty. Everything you picked up and put down is yours. You are the pen.”

She gestured at the coffee cup. “This is not yours. Jake’s mood, the price of petrol, your mom’s reaction to your questions. Whether or not the right things happen in the right order and produce the right results within the parameters of a given week or not. This is not agency, or control, it’s a coffee cup.”

Sarah looked from one to the other and said “I’ve tried to carry the coffee cup.”

“Everyone does,” said Maya, “especially the people who are actively trying to change things. Because trying to change things is a manifestation of trying to gain control, which makes us feel as if we should have control.”

Maya picked up her coffee.

“Which we shouldn’t. The target was wrong.”

She told Sarah the story of the thermometer and the thermostat, two devices that live in the same room but have very different functions. The thermometer reads the temperature, the thermostat controls it, creating an environment in which the former has to operate.

“Sometimes, being at cause for youself, deliberately making a choice, means being a thermostat: choosing to be patient when the situation is making you impatient, choosing silence when inside you’re screaming to make your point.”

“The mistake is trying to be a thermostat in every situation. “That’s simply exhausting.”

“But that doesn’t mean that you should always be a thermometer either. Patiently reading the room and letting others take advantage of your passivity is not always the right choice. Not for you and not for them either.”

“How do I know which to be?” asked Sarah.

“You ask” said Maya simply, “before you respond to anything, you ask yourself ‘is this moment requiring me to be honest about the temperature or to change it?’ That question, asked in the gap, will generally provide the answer. You’ll find that you move from one to the other frequently throughout the day.”

She went home and told Jake that it was a difficult week. Not a performance, not a script, not even the right word really, but the simple reality stated as honestly as she could manage. He made dinner, they talked for a couple of hours. She wrote in her log that night, thermometer with Jake, it worked.

What’s Actually Happening

Ecclesiastes 11:4 talks of several cyclical things, the sun, the wind, the sea. But the first verse also says that “whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.”

The farmer who waits for the wind is the one who never plants, the one that looks to conditions rather than actions, the one who watches rather than works. He measures, he replants, he changes his approach for no reason other than the shifting temperature of the room. He is a thermometer and not a thermostat.

Kingdom physics is agricultural rather than mechanical. We do not apply ourselves to the world and see immediate results. The change is slow and subtle and occurs beneath the surface, which makes it no less real, no less certain, no less certain of its harvest.

The futility the author of Ecclesiastes talks of is using our agency to chase after the wrong things. When we sow good choices and reap no visible results, it causes us to question the value, even the point, of sowing in the first place.

But it wasn’t pointless, it’s just that the harvest is not for us. The seed is sown. Whatever it is, whatever we’re choosing, we do it not for the reward but for the choice, the change, the character. We sow in faith, in the knowledge that the reward will come but not necessarily in the manner we expect.

2 Corinthians 9:6 talks about sowing and reaping, generosity and its rewards, but the emphasis is placed on the sowing and not the reaping, which suggests that the emphasis be placed on the choosing of the seed and not the measuring of the yield.

The sustained choice is the one we make when we choose to sow, when we choose to plant seeds of character in the soil of our lives, when we commit to the long, slow work of becoming. It is in the sowing that we find our purpose, not in the harvesting, which serves merely to remind us that the sowing was not wasted, and the harvest is not ours alone.

This is how character is built. Not in the spectacular breakthroughs but in the long, quiet, unspectacular faithfulness of continued sowing.

The PCPCR Walk-Through

We’re talking about the long middle here. Not the first flush of change or the all-consuming crisis, but the ordinary sort of Tuesday three weeks in when nothing much exciting is happening and there’s little point in attempting anything that might be described as a change.

Pause. The long middle pause is very different to the crisis pause, in that there’s no adrenaline fuelled trigger to catch. It’s more of a daily reset, a deliberate choice to be still taken before the day really gets going, in which you choose to be honest with the formation work rather than getting on with business as usual. Morning is the best time for it, before the phone, before the emails, before the calendar gets its hands around your neck. Just a little space to be present to the formation work rather than the monster of the daily grind.

Cause. This is where it all gets a bit challenging, as there are two questions for the long middle. First is where am I confusing agency with control? Where am I carrying the coffee cup? Name the thing you’ve been trying to manage that’s never been in your rucksack. Your version of Jake or your mum’s mood or the harvest. Put it down, look at it on the table and leave it there. The second question asks: in the last week where did I sow faithfully even if it didn’t seem to have any impact on things? The quiet places as opposed to the obvious. The pause you took at twelve as opposed to forty. The honest word you said to the person in the next room. The door you chose to open rather than the wall you built. These are just as important, maybe more so, than the obvious places where you’ve changed things.

Pray. This is the stewardship prayer. Not the “make it happen” prayer, not the “make it easier” prayer. Something more in the nature of I am a steward and not a CEO, the harvest is not mine to reap but yours. Sowing is mine. Help me to see the difference between what belongs to me and what belongs to you and help me carry only the things that are mine. This is the long middle prayer, which is not a prayer of resignation but a call to arms of sorts. Stewardship is not as glamorous as reaping, but it is infinitely more important, and the best thing you can do in the long middle is to relocate the weight where it needs to be.

Choose. The thermometer or the thermostat. The honest question asking: is this a measuring moment or a change moment? This is where the real work starts, choosing to respond to the moment with honesty about the measurement (thermometer) or the choosing to change the environment (thermostat). There’s no right or wrong, only the honesty about what’s needed. This is asked before responding to any given moment, ideally, as these are the moments before the response is given. Not in the crisis but in the ordinary day. The question is easy once you get used to asking it.

Review. Tonight, not the usual “did I win” or “did I feel like I got somewhere like I did in week one”. Your question is what did I learn from the choices I’ve made today. The reactive day teaches you little. The intentional day teaches you everything. As a steward you need to learn how the land works, and the best way to do that is to keep sowing and tending and asking. Your field log is a useful tool in this process, but even more useful is the simple honesty about your day and what you saw happen. You are a farmer reading the land. What is in it? What is growing? What can you do to help it along? The point of the field log you keep is you paying attention to your own formation.

The Kingdom Lens

The world says if it doesn’t work straight away then it’s not worth doing. The world says the feeling of it working is the proof of it working and when the feeling wears off it’s all a sham.

The Kingdom says character is built in the long middle. In the ordinary Tuesday when nothing exciting is happening and the choice to build something worthwhile is really quite exhausting.

You’re not striving after the wind, you’re building a foundation. Stone by stone, step by step, pause by pause, honest word by honest word.

The land is not empty, the seed is not wasted and the long middle process is no less real for happening beneath the surface.

Keep sowing, it’s all that’s required and the reaping will come, it always does, only not when you’re expecting and not quite in the way you thought.

Before You Move On

Sherman placed two mugs on the table and sat facing Sarah. Bruiser lay between them, as if he’d been invited to a very important meeting he really didn’t want to be part of. Sarah herself had been in the long middle for some time now, having gone through the six guides, not perfectly obviously, and having fallen back into old patterns not least in her conversation with her mother, but she was here nonetheless, and there was something different about the woman who had spent her nights awake at 02:47 losing an unfair fight with an algorithm.

She asked Sherman the question that had been worrying her for a while.

“Does it ever stop being work?”

He looked at the two mugs for a while

“The effort changes” he said eventually. “In the beginning it’s concentration. It becomes honesty and then eventually you stop noticing what it’s costing you. The work does not stop but the burden of it lifts because you’ve stopped needing it to be a choice” he looked up at Sarah. “At some point you begin to understand you’re not doing it to change but to because it’s who you are.” He picked up his mug.

“That’s the sustained choice. Not your forced willpower but your identity becoming from the inside out.”

Bruiser heaved a great sigh and slid three inches to the left, for some reason only he could explain.

“What’s better today?” asked Sherman.

Sarah thought about it for a while

“More than yesterday” she eventually replied.

He nodded. That was enough.

What’s Better Today? - John Michael

You’ve reached the end of The Refit.

Before moving on to anything else, now go (back) and read the introduction.

It will mean something different to you this time. That difference is the work.

This is The Sixth Guide from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

From The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind

It was 02:47.

Sarah knew the time because she had checked it three times in the last hour, each time telling herself that she would put the phone down after the next check.

She was twenty-three posts deep in someone else’s feed. Melissa’s promotion, Emma’s apparently perfect weekend.

Jake was fast asleep in the next room, and she’d snapped at him for something she could barely remember doing, and the realisation of why she was so irritated at him and this pointless argument was sitting on her lap in her hand.

She wasn’t angry at Melissa, not really, and she certainly wasn’t angry with Jake.

She was losing a fight with an algorithm. And the algorithm didn’t care if she existed.

The Cage You Build Yourself

Romans 12:2 describes two ways we choose to be shaped.

The first is conformation: the pressure we’re always under to fit in, to shape-shift according to the desires of the world around us, and the second is transformation, the renewing of our minds, our pushing against that pressure, the choice to be shaped according to something different.

Most of us miss the fact that conformation is a choice that we make in response to the pressures around us.

Unless we’re making a huge, obvious choice, an outright battle between good and evil, we find ourselves conforming to the expectations around us without consciously choosing to do so. We’re simply reacting, and the tiny, habitual decisions we make in reaction add up to a person we never decided to become. The important thing to understand is that failing to make a conscious, deliberate choice is itself a choice.

It’s a cage you build yourself, one scroll at a time.

But, there is good news: the cage you build, you can also demolish. One bar at a time. And we begin with the half-second gap between the trigger and the response. Everything is in that half-second.

Sarah’s Story.

She saw Emma’s post at 02:51.

It said something about choosing to focus on what she could control instead of what she couldn’t, her responses and not what other people did, and Sarah immediately put her phone down in the kitchen.

She wasn’t particularly dramatic about it. Just put the phone down, face down, on the kitchen counter, and walked back to the bedroom.

She spent some time lying in the dark, thinking about the last hour, and not really realising that during that time she had not been resting, she’d been giving her peace away to people who didn’t actually care either way and didn’t even notice the loss.

She thought about Jake, the thing that had provoked her, the look on his face that came after she’d shouted at him, the way he’d taken it in and moved on without complaint or defensiveness, and she hated it almost as much as she hated what it meant about her.

She did not pick up her phone. That was all she did that night… stopped.

That was all she had to do, in that moment, to unbuild the cage, and it was hardly a victory at all.

It’s also the reason she fell asleep that night having deliberately chosen to do something - anything, rather than simply finding herself somewhere else.

She told Sherman about it the week afterwards.

He listened to the whole story, and finally said, “Well?

What was in that three seconds between you putting the phone down and deciding not to pick it up again?”

She thought about it, and said, “Honesty about what I was actually choosing to do.”

“That’s where everything happens.

That’s the gap, most people never find it.”

What’s Actually Happening

Proverbs 14:12 talks about paths that look good but turn out to lead to death, because they’re built on lies.

The path looks good as you walk down it. It doesn’t look destructive. The words that sneak out of your mouth that felt justified until you heard them out loud. The instinctive swipe right that seemed harmless enough. It’s as if you’d have no reason to choose it or not choose it… unless you knew what was waiting at the end.

But it’s not often the path that leads to death we choose knowingly. You won’t really know that death lurks at the end until you experience it. And then it’s too late. Far too late.

The neuroscience and theology both agree on this one, insofar as it’s not the lying path we take that’s most damaging - it’s the path we stop questioning once we’ve been on it a while, the one we take on autopilot, the one we don’t have to consciously choose each day because it’s beaten a groove into us by repetition.

Viktor Frankl, writing from direct experience in the holocaust, put it like this: “Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space is our power to choose.

In that choice is our freedom.”

He was referring to the space between something happening to us, and us responding, and our ability to stop and think about whether we want to respond that way or not, rather than simply reacting.

It’s not easy to put that into practice, but it’s not an unreachable ideal either - the formation work requires that we learn to observe that space between whatever has happened to us and whatever response we’ve been programmed to give, and notice what choices are built into that response.

That’s not a choice between doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing.

It’s a choice between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing.

PCPCR Walk-Through

Pick your trigger - whatever most consistently causes you to react in a way you don’t consciously choose and you don’t like. For example, the person who’s name on a message makes something tighten before you’ve even read the message. Or the situation you instantaneously snap or scroll or withdraw. That’s the one to choose for this guide.

Pause: For three seconds this time. This is the practice in miniature. This is not a pause to work out what to say or do, but simply to acknowledge that you’re at a choice point, and you’re making a choice in response to something rather than simply reacting to it. One second might suffice, the length of the pause is less important. That you pause is what matters.

Cause: Two questions. The first is simply to name the automated response you’re making. For example: withdraw, scroll, swipe, sarcasm, shout.

The pause is the action that makes your choice possible, but the cause is the reason for making it.

Ask yourself, what am I reacting to?

Name it - the provocation, the script, the programmed response.

The second question is to think about the cost.

Mostly, you want to avoid the temptation to assign this cost to someone else.

The cost of reacting the way you usually do at this point in these circumstances is a cost to you, not a cost to them, and you should be thinking about what that actually means.

What choices are you forgoing by simply defaulting to your old patterns?

What are you saying about your version of Jake, the team, the other person in the room?

Pray: The agency prayer. In this prayer you aren’t asking to take the trigger away. Neither are you asking God to “fix” the other person. Instead, you ask Him to show you the gap. The space between what happens and how you react. To help you notice that you are at a choice point. This is a prayer for agency not control.

Choose: A specific micro-action you can take to introduce the break and interrupt your default pattern.

Sarah’s choice was to physically put the phone in the kitchen, face down, and leave it there.

That was all she had to do, and it was entirely up to her to decide what that would look like.

You might decide to stand up before you reply, or walk to the window before you open the app, or say the other person’s name before you say the next sentence.

Something small and repeatable. This action, repeated often, becomes your new pathway. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, it just has to be real.

Review: Tonight, when you’re reviewing your day, ask yourself, one question: where did I find the gap today? Even if it’s only the one time and even if your default script ran anyway and you caught it half way through and stopped. These moments count. The gap is getting wider and you are learning to live in it.

The Kingdom Lens

The World and the Kingdom say very different things about the nature of the cage and the role of the gap.

The world will tell you that you are your reactions, that you are who you are under pressure. That this is simply how you’re wired. The Kingdom, however, teaches that the space between what happens to us and the way we respond to it is our space, the space where the Holy Spirit meets us and you are exercising the agency you were given from the very beginning..

You are not your reactions.

The cage you created with your own thumbs is dismantled this way. Your reactions are simply a series of habitual choices you’ve made to respond to various pressures in certain predictable ways. You do it one pause at a time. One choice at a time. The gap, found and used, before the script runs itself.

The truth is, no one will see most of it, which is why it’s not helpful to keep track of what you do see - and you will see it, and that’s what matters.

Before You Move On

Sarah came back the following month.

She’d been keeping a one line log for herself, just to help with the process, about where she’d found the gap, and she showed it to Sherman without saying much.

He read through it slowly, and Bruiser somehow relocated himself from the corner to Sherman’s feet, for reasons known only to dogs.

“There’s more of them than you’re probably aware of,” Sherman said eventually.

“I know.

That’s the whole point really, isn’t it?

You start to see them everywhere.”

“That’s right,” he said, and handed it back to her.

“Keep looking.”

What’s Better Today?

John Michael

Next: Refit Guide 06: The Sustained Choice. You’ve found the gap. Now we look at what happens when the first wave of change passes and the long, quiet work begins. This is where most people stop. It is also where the real formation starts.

This is The Fifth Guide from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

From The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind

Amara said it quietly, almost to herself

“I thought I was maintaining excellence. I was actually just building a cage.”

Sherman didn’t feel the need to jump in and fill the lull. Bruiser had found a nice shady spot by the door and was being his usual unconcerned self.

“Tell me about the cage,” said Sherman.

What Protection Becomes

For every wall there is a reason. Some are built in response to a legitimate threat. You learned early on that there were standards, that excellence was expected and that there were a particular set of failures that would have repercussions far beyond the failure itself. You built the wall, stone by stone, standard by standard. It served its purpose… for a while.

The problem with walls is that they don’t discriminate. They keep out the threat, yes, but also everything else; the friend who might see the wall, the colleague who might genuinely help and the grace that might come in if only you could admit that you needed it. Job 5:7 is surprisingly practical concerning trouble. It does not come “up from the dust” but “like sparks” and you cannot build a wall high enough to keep sparks at bay. What you can do is build a gate. Not a weakness in the wall but the most masterful part of the whole construction, a gate is not operated by fear but by wisdom.

Most of us have built a fortress without a gate and have slowly starved to death within it.

Amara’s Story

Amara Tadesse, growing up as an Ethiopian-British girl in Birmingham, knew about walls. She knew she would have to build one to get by. Perfection was the price of entry. It is not that there was any specific policy but rather that she learned to internalise the extra scrutiny, the extra correction and the extra silence as an unavoidable cost if she wanted to get ahead.

She paid the cost exceptionally well, as she became a doctor, an excellent doctor at that. By the age of thirty she had not only graduated but was respected and recognised for her skills. And she was finickity enough to turn down coffee with a colleague if their shirt was wrinkled. She told Sherman this last part without any shame, having apparently moved on from the need to feel shame about it

“I realised the fortress wasn’t built from pride but from fear that if I wasn’t twice as good I wouldn’t be respected or welcome”

The wall had made sense to her when she built it but it had failed her since it was completed. It could not distinguish between friends and threats. Sherman floated the idea that she consider lowering her standards in some areas…

“No,” she replied instantly, “You don’t understand, I’m a doctor, if I lower my standards I risk patients lives and my career, the entire industry is built on people trusting that doctors are never wrong.”

“I’m not talking about lowering your clinical standards,” replied Sherman. “Whatever is stopping you is not in your professional competence. That’s not what’s isolating you.”

She let that thought hang in the air.

“The standard that is getting you is the one that says nobody should see you struggle with your professional competence,” he continued. “The performance of never needing help. That’s where the wall goes up.”

She paused, considering.

“So not the standard but the silence around it.”

“The gate,” said Sherman. “Not a smaller fortress but a gate.”

That night she sent a text to her colleague Hanan saying “I’m a bit of a mess”. It was the first time she had ever willingly taken a stone out of her wall. Hanan arrived not long after and the two spent three hours talking, about nothing in particular. Amara later told Sherman that she had forgotten what it was like to let someone in.

What’s Actually Happening

Genesis 3:6 tells us what went wrong in the garden, and it’s worth asking ourselves this diagnostic question: what did Eve see in the fruit that made her pick it? It appears that she found three things appealing; that it looked good, that it would taste nice and that it would make her wise. In other words, appearance, appetite and ambition.

Not one of these things is relational. None of them asked “how will this affect the people I care about?” Perfectionism is the same. It is motivated by appearance (how will I look?), appetite (will this do?) and ambition (how will this make me look?) and cares little for the people you actually care about. Not that there is anything wrong with appearance, appetite or ambition. It is the relational neglect that comes with choosing them that is a problem. The repair is not in abandoning them but in asking how they affect the people you care about. Christ is not here to take the wall away from you and leave you vulnerable but to show you the gate so that you can build it.

There is a you that is excellent and genuine that is competent and connected that is bounded and open that is capable of holding the gate without losing the wall. That is not the you that needs to be alone. That is not the you that needs to be invisible. The image of God is not a solo performance.

Moving from self-protective isolation to safe, honest connection.

The PCPCR Walk-Through

Think of a relationship or a repeated area of interaction where your standard has turned into a wall. This is not about professional competency but about presentation, that is, the demand to always look better than you are.

Pause. Before you defend the wall, pause and consider that Christ is not asking you to lower your professional competency. He is asking you to evaluate if the presentation of your performance is costing you more than it is serving you.

Cause. Two questions. First, ask what good things is the wall keeping out. Not the threats but the colleagues, the help and the grace that can only come in if you let someone see the cracks. The second question relates to who taught you that being seen to struggle was a bad thing. The answer is rarely recent.

Pray. This is the prayer of the gate. Not the prayer of tearing down the wall, not the prayer of becoming “less picky” about who sees you but a more honest prayer that simply asks where the gate goes. Where in your relationships is there space to lower one stone so that someone can come in? Perfectionism is a spiritual condition before it is a behavioural one and the root of it is the assumption of conditional love. Ask God to reveal it to you, and expose it for what it is; a lie that has existed long before you were born and has nothing to do with loving people better than you love yourself.

Choose. One honest sentence. Said to one person who has earned it, about something that is not going perfectly. The goal is not to become more vulnerable but to become more honest. Amara’s “I’m a bit of a mess” was not a vulnerable statement it was an honest assessment of the situation. The standard of her work did not change, only the silence around it. Lowering the wall is not about lowering your expectations but about building a gate. You are not asking permission to fail but rather the opportunity to let someone see you.

Review. Tonight. As you go to sleep ask yourself this question: did I choose connection over perfection today? Not in terms of performance but in terms of choice. Did I let someone in? Either answer is a good one. You are not grading yourself. You are learning to read the gate.

The Kingdom Lens

The world tells us to be flawless or be forgotten. The world tells us that the fortress is the safest place and that the gate is the most dangerous thing you can build. The Kingdom tells us that trouble stirs like sparks, uninvited, unwanted and unstoppable. The peace that passes understanding is not behind a wall but in the middle of the trouble, held by someone who can carry you through it. When you stop building your own fortress and start using the resources of the Kingdom you are protected not by the wall but by the presence of God, and the wall that you had erected for your own protection becomes the very thing that protects you.

The gate is not a weakness. It is an act of faith in a God who builds better fortresses.

Before You Move On

Amara came back to Sherman three months later with more news. Or, rather, with more of a quiet about her. He picked it up on sight

“I think I spent twenty years convincing myself that if people saw the real me they would decide that the real me wasn’t good enough,” she said eventually

Sherman didn’t feel the need to jump in, only to make some tea. Eventually, she looked at Bruiser who had relocated himself to the doormat in the meantime and had not shown any particular interest in the conversation.

“They saw the real me,” she said, “and they didn’t leave.”

“They rarely do,” said Sherman as he put the tea down. “Once you give them the chance.”

What’s Better Today? - John Michael

Next: Refit Guide 05, The Choice Point. You’ve built the gate. Now we look at what happens in the half-second before you open it or close it. That half-second is where everything is decided.

This is The Fourth Guide from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

From The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind

Kai Nakamura had been staring at the same blank document for eleven days.

It wasn’t that he was blocked. He knew what he needed to do. His project was carefully laid out, mapped, planned, and researched; the Maldives proposal was solid work, and he knew it.

All he had to do was start.

“I’ve tried everything,” Kai whined to Sherman. “I’ve been super productive in my system, held myself accountable, made deadlines for myself, and then moved them…”

Sherman was quiet for a moment as he met Kai’s eyes. “What will you lose if it all begins?”

His stomach churned as he opened his mouth to retort that he didn’t know what he was afraid of losing, and then stopped.

The truth was surprising.

“Options,” he said finally. “… if I start, it commits me. It commits me to this one way, with no room for any other.”

Sherman smiled sadly. “So, it is not that you are lazy.”

“No.”

“It is that you are trying to control.”

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Willpower

When a habit or pattern is hurting you, you instinctively try to fight it. Harder, better, more determined - a whole litany of options present themselves, all of which are variations on the theme “hurt it more so it’ll go away.”

It is entirely reasonable, entirely expected that a hurting person would attempt this.

QuickSand works because frantic movement increase the vacuum pressure sucking at your body; what you need to do is the exact opposite. This is the counterintuitive truth about spiritual patterns: the more you try to crush them and destroy them, the more they seem to have a will to live.

In Romans 7, Paul does not describe his patterns as weak. They are not ineffective, absent, or somehow failing to hold him back. The problem is that he tries too hard. “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, this I keep on doing.” This is the confession of a man exhausting himself in spiritual combat, tying himself in knots and begging for help. The more he focuses on the evil, the more often it appears. The more defeated and ashamed he feels, the more he seems to want it.

In other words, the more we act like our salvation comes through grit and determination, the more we are likely to find ourselves in need of salvation.

Kai’s Story

Kai’s friend David asked him the same question Sherman had. After he answered, he began to understand that procrastination was not his problem; it was a symptom.

A story that said, essentially, if I commit fully and it fails, I have nothing left to fall back on. Having all options open was his way of keeping himself safe, and starting was a commitment. In a very real sense, he was in danger of having nothing to fall back on.

He was struggling with his procrastination, when he should have been studying his pattern.

He closed his productivity apps, turned off his timers and trackers, and prayed a strange prayer: God, I can’t do this perfectly, but I can do it with you.

Then he did something dangerous: he wrote the first sentence of his paper. It was a bad sentence, but the document was no longer blank. The battle was not over. Still, he felt himself floating gently free.

He told Sherman it wasn’t like he’d broken through some dam, it was more like he was walking out of quicksand.

What’s Actually Happening

Kingdom physics are agricultural; not mechanical.

Mechanical things can be made stronger and more efficient by applying more pressure. Agricultural things cannot be made to yield by being pushed harder or squeezed tighter. The farmer knows this; he knows that trying to hurry along the process only makes it more likely to fail. The laws of grace are the same. We are not stronger Christians by trying harder; we are more faithful Christians by trusting more fully in the God who made us. There is power in stopping, in giving the Holy Spirit the space and time to do what only He can do. It is no accident that Jesus told us to pray, “thy will be done,” not “thy strength be done.”

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “…my power is made perfect in weakness,” and then goes on to say in the very next verse that he will be “glad to boast in my weaknesses…” This is not a statement of cosmic power dynamics; it is not that God is weak, and He needs us to compensate. It is a declaration of freedom: I am free in Christ, and free from my old patterns and habits. We don’t have to make ourselves stronger in order to serve God; we are free to accept that our salvation has been earned for us, and not by us.

You were never designed to save yourself. That’s not a flaw in your character; it’s a feature of the system. Everything God asks you to do is possible within the economy of grace, because they are not being asked of you in the mechanical sense. They are being asked of you, not as an employee of sorts, but more in the capacity of an assistant.

These two roles are profoundly different. An employee is expected to do the work themselves, to make themselves stronger and more efficient so that the company benefits. An assistant, on the other hand, is a person who helps someone else do the work. The work is not their responsibility; the success or failure of it is not their burden to bear.

The PCPCR Walk-Through

Here’s how it works. Pick out a pattern that seems to get stronger the more you fight it. Anxiety that tightens when you fight it, or procrastination that deepens when you berate yourself for it, or a habit that becomes more frequent every time you white-knuckle your way through a period of abstinence. That is your pattern.

Pause. This is different than the pause in the previous walks; it is not a preparatory measure. This one is a cessation. Stop trying to fight it for a moment, and just notice the feeling of not fighting.

Cause. Ask yourself what you think this pattern is trying to protect you from. What would feel unsafe or unprotected if this pattern was no longer a part of your life? The pattern probably has a reason for existing; it almost always has a cause. It may well be that it made sense at some point or that it used to function well. You do not have to “be grateful” for this pattern, but you do have to understand it, because you cannot release it if you do not understand it.

Pray. This is the float prayer. Not a prayer of desperation that God will somehow fix it all, or a prayer of judgment that He will punish it and it will go away, but something quieter and more honest: I can’t fix this, but you can. I’m working in your economy now, not mine. You do the work, Lord; I’ve stopped trying to do it myself.

Choose. A small, deliberate movement. It does not have to be much. It can be as simple as Kai writing one sentence at the beginning of this long and difficult document. It is about spreading your weight out over something solid, not about fighting to get unstuck.

Review. Tonight, when you come to this pattern, do not ask yourself if you won or lost, but rather, what did you learn today? If you managed to catch the pattern in the act of running and stopped, that is fantastic, but even if you did not, that is still a lesson. You are not judging yourself; you are reading field notes. What did the pattern do today? When was it running? What was happening when it started? Every day of honest observation makes it easier to see the pattern the next time it runs because you already know what to look for.

The Kingdom Lens

The world asks you to be more together. They ask you to want it more. They ask you to build systems around it and hold people accountable, to be tougher and stronger and more disciplined.

These are all variations on the theme “apply pressure.”

The Kingdom sees your patterns as something different; it sees the pause as sacred. The half-second of hesitation before a knee-jerk reaction is a holy moment in which the Holy Spirit can do extraordinary and miraculous things.

You are not “recovering” from patterns; you are being set free from them. That is not a small difference, and it makes all the difference. You don’t recover from something you’re not stuck in. You recover from something that has stuck you in a place.

Stop struggling. Spread your weight around. Move towards something solid.

The ground holds.

Before You Move On

Kai sent Sherman a message three weeks later. One word: The document is done. First draft, not perfect, but done. Sherman showed it to Bruiser, who was only mildly impressed before going back to sleep.

Sherman lingered over his phone for a moment longer.

Eleven days he’d fought the blank document, and three weeks he’d been gently and honestly working through the process.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop trying to be the one who fixes it all.

What’s Better Today? - John Michael

This is The Prologue from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

#TheRefit #SpiritualFormation #MarketplaceLeadership #BurnoutRecovery #CorporateMisfits #WhatsBetterToday

Next: Refit Guide 04, The Formation Fortress. You have learned to stop fighting the quicksand. Now we look at the walls you have built for protection, and ask which ones have become your prison.

This is The Third Guide from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

An Insiders Challenge Bonus Episode

Sherman set two flasks down on the jetty rail, one for tea, one that would stay unopened for the whole afternoon, and watched three boats pull away from the same short stretch of sand.

Bruiser had claimed the good end of the bench, the end with the sun, and was already unbothered by any of it.

“Three of them,” Sherman said, to nobody in particular, or possibly to the dog. “Same water. Same start. Watch what they do with it.”

The Start

Robyn went first, more or less by accident, because her boat had no engine to warm up and no sail to hoist. She simply pushed off, sat back, and let the morning take her. She looked, for what it was worth, like the most relaxed person on the water.

Mimi was still shouting instructions to herself when her engine caught. It caught well. The motorboat surged off the line so hard it rocked both other boats, and Mimi’s grin, wide and genuine and already a little breathless, said everything about how good that first thirty seconds felt.

Sami was last away. She wasn’t rowing and she wasn’t gunning anything. She was standing at the mast, head tilted, feeling for something the other two hadn’t stopped long enough to notice was there at all.

“She hasn’t started,” said a woman further along the jetty, not unkindly.

“She has,” Sherman said. “You’re just watching the wrong part of the boat.”

The Lead

Mimi’s wake was the story of the first twenty minutes. White water, noise, a crowd on the jetty that had started cheering before anyone had asked them to. She was pulling away from the other two so fast it barely looked like the same race.

“She’s flying,” someone said.

“She is,” Sherman agreed, and didn’t say anything else, which several people noticed and nobody asked him about.

He’d watched enough of these to know what a full tank sounds like, and what it sounds like forty minutes later isn’t so different, not yet. The engine note hadn’t changed. Mimi hadn’t changed. It would be a while before either of them did.

The Drift

Robyn was a long way back by now, though back wasn’t quite the right word, since she wasn’t trying to get anywhere in particular. She’d stopped even glancing at the other two boats. She lay back against the stern, one hand trailing in the water, and looked, from the jetty, like the only genuinely happy person out there.

Sherman watched her for a while. Then his attention went, the way everyone’s did, to the noise and the wake further out, and when he next thought to look for Robyn’s boat, some indeterminate amount of time later, he had to search the water for a full minute before he found the shape of it, small now, and further out than he’d expected, and drifting in a direction that had nothing to do with any lighthouse.

Nobody on the jetty had noticed she’d gone quiet. That was rather the point of drifting. It never announces itself.

He didn’t say anything about it yet. He just made a note, the way he made most of his notes, without writing anything down.

The Waiting

Sami, meanwhile, appeared to be losing.

She’d trimmed her sail three times in the last ten minutes and gone almost nowhere for two of them, sitting nearly still on water that looked, from the jetty, entirely flat and windless. A man near Sherman actually laughed.

“She’s stalled,” he said.

“She’s listening,” Sherman said.

“To what?”

Sherman didn’t answer that one directly. He’d learned a long time ago that some questions answer themselves better if you let them sit a while.

What the man on the jetty couldn’t see, and what Sherman could, barely, was the faintest line on the water a hundred yards out, a darker patch moving steadily toward Sami’s boat. She wasn’t stalled. She was waiting for something she couldn’t summon and wouldn’t fake. When it reached her, her sail filled so suddenly it looked, to the crowd, like luck.

It wasn’t luck. It was the one thing on the water that morning that nobody controlled, arriving exactly where someone had finally stopped long enough to be found by it.

The Quiet

Mimi’s engine didn’t die so much as it simply stopped mattering.

The note didn’t change until it did, all at once, a cough and then nothing, and her boat sat upright and level and going absolutely nowhere, a hundred yards short of where the noise had promised she’d be by now. She didn’t capsize. She didn’t sink. She just sat there, in a boat that had done exactly what it was built to do for exactly as long as it had fuel to do it, which had never once been the same thing as the distance she actually needed to cover.

The jetty had gone quiet too, in the particular way a crowd goes quiet when the thing they were cheering for stops making noise.

“Someone should go out to her,” the woman near Sherman said.

“Someone will,” Sherman said. He wasn’t looking at Mimi anymore. He was looking further out, at a sail that had, against every prediction made about it an hour earlier, drawn level with where the motorboat used to be.

Sami Comes In

She came alongside the jetty faster than anyone expected, sail full, water peeling off the bow, and the grin on her face when she cut close enough to shout was not the tight, breathless grin Mimi had worn at the start. It was something looser than that.

“That was awesome,” Sami called up. “You want to come?”

Sherman looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the unopened flask, and at Bruiser, who had opened one eye and closed it again, entirely unconcerned, and he climbed down off the jetty and into the boat.

He hadn’t planned to. He’d been commentating on this race, one way or another, for longer than he could easily remember. It had not occurred to him, until she asked, that the correct response to actually seeing the Wind at work was to keep standing on dry land describing it.

The boat pulled away from the jetty. Sami didn’t point it toward open water, or toward whatever finish line had technically been marked out that morning, days ago, by someone who was no longer anywhere in sight.

She pointed it back the way they’d come.

“The race doesn’t end,” she said, trimming the sail without seeming to think about it, the way you breathe without thinking about it. “We should go and help the others. Don’t you think?”

Sherman looked out at Mimi, sitting dead and dry in a boat that had run exactly as far as self-effort could carry it. He looked further out still, to where a small shape drifted somewhere past where anyone had thought to keep watching.

“I think,” he said, “that’s rather the whole point of the boat.”

The sail filled. They went to find them.

What’s Better Today? — John Michael

#TheRefit #SpiritualFormation #MarketplaceLeadership #BurnoutRecovery #CorporateMisfits #WhatsBetterToday

The Race is a Bonus Episode from the Insiders’ Challenge

Not a step in the Challenge itself. Something that sits underneath it, or beside it, or between two parts of it: a core idea that didn’t want to be a lesson, so it became a story instead.

You don’t need to have started the Challenge to get something from this. But if you have, you may recognise more in here than you expect to.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

David Chen told Sherman his story for the first time as he sat in the chair by the window, hands folded around a cup of tea long gone cold.

He didn’t come to Sherman seeking forgiveness or wisdom, just a witness. Someone to listen without judging.

“I knew what I should do,” he said quietly. “I’ve always known. The problem was never information.”

Sherman gave a small nod, a silent sign that he was listening.

“The problem was the moment the pressure came, I was somewhere else,” David continued. “Running the same scenario over and over again.”

Sherman nodded again. “You’ve been trying to stop the behaviour.”

“Everything I could think of.”

“And it keeps happening.”

“Always.”

Sherman set down the small pot of tea he used to make sure the plants in the courtyard survived. “You’ve been trying to prune what’s above the ground,” he said, gesturing toward the jade plant that had outgrown its pot. “And never the roots.”

David looked up at him. “How do I get to the roots?”

“You stop trying to prune everything from above,” Sherman said simply. “And you get a spade.”

What You’re Actually Fighting

Most people have fought their demons through willpower.

Not because they were ignorant of other options, but because they’ve never been taught what’s really happening.

Here’s what is actually happening: your habits, actions, and behaviours aren’t random. There’s always a story beneath it; a belief, usually unconscious, usually formed from childhood - that makes the habit, action, or behaviour seem like a good idea. It’s easy to think you’re just being lazy when you procrastinate. Just a lack of willpower, we’re told (or we tell ourselves). But there’s always a story being told beneath it. You procrastinate because there’s a story that says you need more time, you need to be in control, you need something to distract yourself from feelings you can’t manage. Or maybe, the story tells you that you can’t give up the other options.

Formation asks different questions. Instead of examining the leaf, it looks at the root. Instead of deciding if the habit is good or bad, it finds the belief that produced it.

You can’t kill a plant by taking its leaves. You kill it by digging up its roots and removing them. And that’s where real change always begins.

David’s Story

David’s rent was due on a Thursday. By Thursday evening, his betting app was open and waiting for his command. He’d been clean for four months. He’d told Emma. He’d been doing so well, and then the pressure came, and he was right back where he started. He knew why he’d done it. It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t a moment of weakness. It was always the same scenario: he was a failure, and he needed to prove to himself that he wasn’t by winning this bet. He was in control of one thing in his life, and he would be damned if he lost that too.

And still, the habit wasn’t the issue. The problem was in the root. David remembered the lesson his grandmother had taught him when he was little, Nai Nai kneeling in the dirt next to him, trying to plant sunflower seeds in soil as hard as concrete. “You can’t plant seeds on top of rocks, David,” she’d said, gently taking the tiny hands that were trying so hard to press seeds into the dirt. “You have to break up the ground first.”

He called Emma later that evening, using the word they’d chosen as their secret code… “soil”. She didn’t ask questions. She just came over. He didn’t fight the habit, only the story beneath it. I’m my own saviour. He held it up to the light and it withered when confronted with honest scrutiny. He didn’t win that night. He only didn’t lose as badly as before. And that was enough to get him started.

What’s Actually Happening

2 Corinthians 5:17 is a declaration:

“If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.”

But it’s also a description of exactly what happens to a person who is in the process of becoming new. You are not what you used to be, but you are still genuinely becoming something better. Your old root doesn’t have to nourish you, but it still has to be dug up and examined. It may have to be broken up. You have to choose something different.

Your neural pathways are not permanent. The pathways your brain has formed through years of repeating the same behaviours can be changed. New patterns can be formed, and old ones can be weakened. There’s no dispute about this in the neurological community. It’s all physics. Once you’ve established a pattern, it requires conscious effort to follow a different one. That effort builds new patterns in the brain. That’s all there is to it.

That’s not just poetic faith-speak. That’s how the renewing of your mind actually works. The physics behind it are pretty simple. Paul just didn’t have the words for them.

The PCPCR Walk-Through

Pick one habit. Not your worst habit, just one habit that represents a pattern, something you’ve done over and over again when faced with a particular stimulus, a behaviour you’ve tried to stop doing but always failed at.

Pause:. Before you do anything else, stop and breathe. This isn’t a battle you fight with sheer willpower. You can’t outrun the habit by thinking harder about not doing it. You need to create a moment of pause between the stimulus and response, even if it’s just one millisecond. Create a small gap. Everything happens in that gap.

Cause: This is where you do the hard work. Don’t ask “Why do I keep doing this?”. Rather ask what the habit is trying to protect you from? What is the story that makes this habit desirable? What does the habit make you believe about yourself, and is that what you want to believe?

For David, it was the belief that he had to be his own saviour. He had to prove to himself and to God that he was worthy, that he wasn’t as bad as he believed himself to be. That was an old story that fed old shame. It was running on old, faulty data, but it had persisted for a long time because there were no questions asked about it.

Name the story. Write it down if you need to. Something simple like “I believe I am unworthy and this habit makes me feel worthy of God’s love.”

Pray: You are not asking God to take away the habit. You’re asking him to take away the lie. Ask him to bring the root to light. Ask him where the story came from, what experience gave rise to it, what lie took root in your heart and made it flourish. Two lies are at the root of every bad habit in existence: I am not enough, and I am not loved. One or both of these lies are almost always present in your habit. Bring those lies out into the light where they can be confronted.

Choose: One tiny override. One micro victory. A pause before the stimulus is delivered. One verse of scripture said before you engage in the habit or behaviour (or during it when you catch it late). One honest word spoken to a trusted friend. The choose step is not about big flashy gestures, it’s about planting new roots, and roots grow slowly.

Review: Tonight, before you go to bed, reflect on the day. What was the story you believed today? Did you recognise it before you engaged in the habit or afterwards? Both are good. There is no failure in this process, only information.

The Kingdom Lens

The world says that your habits define you. Once an addict, always an addict. Once a failure always a failure. You are defined by your struggles and those struggles are permanent fixtures in your life.

The world says that who you are is a result of your habits. The Kingdom says that your habits are a result of who you are. You are not your habits. You are new creation. You may still struggle with the same desires or urges, but those desires no longer define you. You are not your sin, your failures, or my mistakes, and you are not limited to them.

If you’ve accepted Christ, you have not been simply redeemed. You have been renewed. You’ve received new life. You’re not just getting better… you’re becoming someone new. That’s a big difference. It’s the difference between “recovery” and “formation.” When you think of recovery, you think of something being repaired. When you think of formation, you think of something coming into being.

You are not what you used to be, and you are not what your habits say you are. You are what your Creator intended you to be, and he hasn’t stopped speaking yet.

Before You Move On

Bruiser laid across the doorway, his usual indifferent self: untouched by the business the humans inside were discussing.

David sat silent for a while. Sherman didn’t push him.

Finally David spoke. “I spent years trying to fix what was above the ground. Nobody seemed to think about the root.”

Sherman gave a small nod. “Most people don’t. It’s much slower work.”

He stood up, moving toward the kitchen. “Dig it up. Examine it. Then choose something new.”

What’s Better Today? John Michael

Next: Refit Guide 03, The Quicksand Principle . You’ve found the root. Now what?

This is The Second Guide from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

An Insiders Challenge Bonus Episode

Vic had been away three weeks. A day here, fly there, a different hotel bed each night, the kind of trip that reflects self-importance on a LinkedIn post and feels, by the end of it, like being deeply hollowed out from the inside.

He still revelled in the rest of it. The upgrade. The lounge. The way his Titanium loyalty card made people move a little faster… just for him. But he hadn’t had a proper sleep since last Tuesday, and now, nine fitful nights later, he had a flight to catch.

The trouble started at checkout.

“There’s a minibar charge here,” Vic said, “that isn’t mine.”

The woman behind the desk had already checked it once. She checked it again, slower this time, in that special way people check something a second time to prove conclusively that they were right the first time. “The minibar has been verified, sir. Twice.”

“I didn’t touch the minibar.”

“The system shows…”

“I don’t care what the system shows. I know what I drank, and I know what I didn’t, and I did not personally sleepwalk through an entire minibar’s worth of miniature spirits and then walk back to bed and forget about it.”

It went on far longer than it needed to. Vic knew, somewhere beneath the volume, that it was going on more than it needed to, and that knowledge did absolutely nothing to slow him down. He ended up paying the disputed amount himself, on his personal card, muttering the whole time about expense claims and principle, and then signing the room bill his company would cover. He told them, as he swatted the signed room charge back, that he looked forward to their abject apology and refund when they admitted their error.

He got in the airport limo already late.

The traffic was heavy. Of course the traffic was heavy. The driver took a route Vic didn’t know, and Vic, in the back seat, decided within about ninety seconds that this was not just a different route but the wrong route, taken either through incompetence or, in the darker corner of his mind that had been running the show since Tuesday last week, on purpose.

“Where the heck are you going?” Vic said, too loud. “This is NOT the way to the airport.”

“Traffic on the highway, sir. This is faster.”

“It doesn’t feel faster.”

The driver didn’t say anything else for the rest of the journey. Vic didn’t either, unless you count muttering under the breath.

At the check-in desk, his usual seat, the one he always requested, the one by the window three rows back from the bulkhead, had been given to someone else. He was moved to a middle-of-the-cabin aisle seat next to an old Black man who looked up from his book, smiled at him kindly, and went straight back to reading.

The plane was one of the old ones. Shabby seats, ancient tiny tv screens, a cabin crew who, in Vic’s assessment, did not greet him with anything like the warmth his status warrented.

He sat there adding it all up. The faulty minibar. The driver. The seat. The plane. The greeting. By the time they’d reached cruising altitude, it felt less like a bad day and more like a pattern, a conspiracy the world had decide to organise against him personally, at the end of a long three weeks when he had the least capacity left to absorb it.

He muttered some of this out loud. Not all of it. But enough that the cabin crew began, without discussing it, gave him a wider berth than they gave anyone else.

An hour passed. The tightness in his chest loosened without his permission. He hadn’t decided to calm down. The fuel of his anger simply ran out.

He muttered something to himself, more out of habit than intent, a small continuing complaint about the day.

The old man beside him turned, unhurried, and said, “I’m sorry. I was lost in this.” He held up the book a fraction. “Were you speaking to me?”

Vic felt his face go warm. “No. I wasn’t.”

A pause.

“I should probably apologise anyway,” Vic said. “For the scene. Earlier. If you saw any of that.”

“Some of it,” the man said. Not unkindly. Not with any judgement in it either, which was somehow worse. “I’m Sherman.”

“Vic.”

The cabin crew came through with drinks. “Tea, please,” Sherman said, “if you have it.” Vic took a gin tonic and a small foil packet of the crunchy, spiced things that get called nuts on every airline menu Vic had ever flown, despite containing no actual nuts, on account of the allergies.

He tore it open, ate a couple, and muttered, mostly to himself again, “Ridiculous, this. Everything ruined by a handful of people with pathetic allergies.”

Sherman looked at him for a moment, the kind of look that wasn’t unfriendly but wasn’t in any hurry either.

“Do you find yourself doing that a lot?” he asked.

“Doing what?” Vic spat back.

“That. What you’ve been doing most of this flight, as far as I could tell without trying particularly hard to notice. The minibar, I’m guessing, from the phone call I overheard at the gate. The taxi. The seat. Now the nuts that aren’t nuts.”

Vic opened his mouth to be offended and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn’t actually have the energy for it.

“It’s been a week,” he said instead. “Three, actually. I’m exhausted. And today every single thing that could go wrong has gone wrong, and none of it was my fault, and nobody seems to want to admit that.”

“Tell me the minibar thing,” Sherman said. “Properly. Not the version you gave the poor woman on the desk.”

So Vic told him. All of it. The charge that wasn’t his, the argument, the taxi, the seat, the plane, the whole accumulating case for the prosecution against a world that had apparently decided, this particular Thursday, to make an example of him.

Sherman listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which Vic found, oddly, more unsettling than if the man had argued with him.

“Can I tell you something my grandmother would have called old news,” Sherman said, when Vic finally ran out of things to say, “dressed up as something new?”

“Go on.” He sighed.

“Most of us, most of the time, don’t respond to what happens to us. We react to it. There’s a difference, and it’s a much bigger one than it sounds. When you react, something happens, an event, and before you’ve had any real say in the matter, an Emotion arrives and takes the wheel, and that emotion dictates your Action. Only afterwards, if you’re lucky, does the Thinking turn up. Usually too late to do anything except regret.”

“Emotion, Action, Thinking,” Vic said slowly.

“E, A, T,” Sherman said. “You EAT the day. The day happens at you, and you swallow it whole, and it decides who you’re going to be for the next hour before you’ve had any real vote in the matter.”

Vic thought about the woman at the desk. The driver. The old man’s stolen seat that wasn’t even his fault, not really.

“That’s…” he started, and didn’t finish, because he didn’t have a comfortable way to finish it.

“It’s how nearly everyone runs,” Sherman said. “It’s not a character flaw specific to you. It’s just the default setting most of us never get shown an alternative to. But there is one. Instead of letting the event go straight to Emotion, you put Thinking first. You pause, even for a breath, even for half a second, and you choose to think about what’s happening before you decide how you feel about it. That changes the Emotion that actually arrives. A different Emotion produces a different Action.”

“Think, then Emotion, then Act,” Vic said.

“T, E, A,” Sherman said. “Instead of eating the day whole, you drink it slowly. Drink TEA Don’t EAT. It’s how to renew your mind in four words.”

Vic looked down at the crushed foil packet in his hand. “So that’s why you drink tea,” he said. “To remind yourself.”

Sherman almost smiled. “No. I just prefer tea. That, and I’m from Yorkshire.” He lifted the small plastic cup the crew had given him, considered it, and set it back down. “Though it is a good reminder. And we need reminding daily. Hourly. Moment by moment, if we’re honest about how easy it is to forget.”

He looked at the cup again.

“Though, to be completely honest,” he said, “this is not good tea.”

Vic laughed. It surprised him that he still had a laugh in him after the week he’d had.

“The receptionist,” he said. “I owe her a real apology. Not the version where I’m technically sorry whilst being convinced I was right.”

“Were you right? About the minibar?”

“For sure. I never touch them.” Vic said. “Doesn’t mean I needed to EAT the morning the way I did.”

The Kingdom Lens

The world tells you your reactions are simply who you are. Quick temper, thin skin, no patience for fools: character traits, fixed, inherited, nothing to be done about them except manage the fallout afterwards.

The Kingdom says something quieter and considerably more hopeful. Romans 12:2 does not ask you to suppress your feelings or perform a calm you do not have. It asks for something upstream of the feeling itself: the renewing of the mind, so that a different thought produces a genuinely different emotion, which produces a genuinely different action, rather than a masked version of the same old one.

You rarely control the Event. The minibar charge, the traffic, the stolen seat: none of that was in Vic’s hands. What was in his hands, the entire time, without him noticing it, was the half second between the Event and the Emotion. That half second is where Thinking is either invited in or gets skipped entirely.

EAT is not a moral failure. It is simply the default, and almost everyone runs it most of the time on most days.

TEA is a choice, remade daily, hourly, moment by moment, for the rest of your life. It does not require good tea. It only requires you to actually drink it.

What’s Better Today? — John Michael

#TheRefit #SpiritualFormation #MarketplaceLeadership #BurnoutRecovery #CorporateMisfits #WhatsBetterToday

Don’t EAT. Drink TEA is a Bonus Episode from the Insiders’ Challenge

Not a step in the Challenge itself. Something that sits underneath it, in this case, under Refit Guide 05: a core idea that didn’t want to be a lesson, so it became a story instead.

You don’t need to have started the Challenge to get something from this. But if you have, you may recognise more in here than you expect to.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

From The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind

Sherman’s phone vibrated on the table between them.

He gave it a glance, then a thumbs down and laid it face down on the surface.

Kim studied his reaction. “Doesn’t that just drive you crazy?” she asked. “Not knowing?”

“It drove me crazy for a while,” Sherman replied. “Until I realised what knowing was costing me.” He picked up his tea mug. “The inbox will be there in an hour. This conversation won’t.”

He placed the mug back on the table and looked out over the courtyard for a moment.

“Most of us think formation is found in the doing. The doing and the discipline and the habit we pick up and hold on to this time.”

Sherman picked up a fistful of dirt from the pot of jade plant on the table and let it slowly slip through his fingers.

“It’s not. Formation is found in the inbox, the feed, the meeting room with its unsubtle values. We’re absorbing something from all of it, right now, whether we intend to or not.”

The Question You Haven’t Thought to Ask

At first glance, the Parable of the Sower is an allegory about the seed. But the seed doesn’t change. It’s how the soil receives the seed.

The soil is the variable.

And the thing about soil is you didn’t choose most of it. Whatever family held you shaped you for life, not out of malice but sheer persistence. The organisation that employed you carved its values into your heart. Your culture soaked into your lungs.

You are being formed by something. Right now. Today. By every conversation you carry or walk out of. By the news cycle you’re in the middle of. By the room where the unspoken values are right there with the spoken ones.

The question is who’s holding the shovel?

Your calendar is full of other people’s priorities. Your phone has other people’s priorities. Your attention has been trained by systems built to capture it, with exquisite precision. It’s not neutrality. It’s not objectivity. It’s dirt someone else has been spreading in your heart for their benefit.

The reason your habit trackers aren’t working isn’t a lack of willpower. It’s because you’re trying to apply mechanical solutions to an agricultural problem. You can’t bolt new behaviours onto soil that’s still growing something else. Those behaviours aren’t sticking because they don’t understand the ground.

The first step to breaking free is a soil audit.

Kim’s Story

Kim Chen had been teaching preschool for eleven years before she stumbled onto the insight at a family dinner. Uncle Jin’s questions were as reliable as the changing of the seasons.

“Still teaching children, Kim? When are you going to get a proper job?”

Six months ago she would have died a little inside at his words. Her hands would have clenched inside her lap or she’d have stood up and shouted him down. Either one, either reaction, was a harvest of someone else’s values in her life.

This time she looked at the windowsill and saw the jade plant her family had neglected for years. Her grandfather had carefully tended it when she was little, teaching her the lesson that went with it: You can’t change the garden, Kim. But you can choose your soil.

This time she heard her uncle’s admonishment and didn’t argue. Didn’t force her customary patience, either. Simply acknowledged what he’d said and refused to let it inside.

Later she told a friend, “I spent all these years trying to grow in the wrong sector. I kept puzzling over why nothing took root. I was watering concrete.”

What’s Actually Happening

Romans 12:2 tells us to not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

What’s actually happening is we’re seeing the physics of formation written on our bodies.

The world does not stop trying to make you in its image. You do not have to agree to it. You do not have to cooperate with it. You can simply refuse to put your guard down, to let your fingers curl around the offered vine. That’s the first step to transformation, in any direction. Formation is not a passive process.

The renewing of the mind is the opposite of conforming, and it too is an active choice. We have to practice it. Attend to it, and understand what it means to choose what gets past our mental gatekeepers.

Your heart is not uncharted territory. You have authority over your soil.

That doesn’t make you unfeeling or unteachable. That makes you discerning. There’s a world of difference between a wall and a gate.

The PCPCR Walk-Through

Use a real situation. Something where you’re regularly feeling deflated. A relationship or a context where you know you’re leaving smaller than you entered. A place you go regularly and leave with something you don’t want and didn’t take with you.

Pause: Before you do anything else, take a breath. Not to centre yourself. To create distance. To give yourself space to observe what’s about to happen.

Cause: What’s actually happening here? Don’t focus on the emotions. Look at the influences.

What values are on display in this situation? Which of them do you absorb without deciding to? Where does the tension start? In your chest or your jaw? That’s a good indicator that something is trying to take root before you’ve had a chance to choose.

Pray: This is not about asking God to change the other person. It’s about asking God to show you where you’ve already allowed the wrong influences to take root.

Where in your heart do you need to turn over new soil? The Parable of the Sower doesn’t end in judgement on the rocky or weedy ground. It announces the blessing on the fruitful soil. The ground can always change, if we have the honesty to admit it.

Choose: Pick ONE thing you can change this week. One new habit. One place to start listening differently. One gate to open wider.

Last week Kim spent her Monday mornings in a particularly awful meeting. Every week she took a breath and repeated the same phrase to herself: I hear you. She didn’t argue, she didn’t retreat. She simply acknowledged what was happening and refused to let it inside. That’s enough space for new roots to appear.

Review: Every evening, every night, ask yourself one question: What did I allow to take root today? This is not a performance review. It’s a field journal. You’re learning to read your own soil.

The Kingdom Lens

The world says you are the product of your environment. That the basement you grew up in defined you, the room you worked in defined you, the people you interacted with defined you.

The Kingdom says your environment is where you are formed. That the place you lived, worked, and interacted from is the ground you’re being formed on. It doesn’t decide who you are, but it does determine your formation.

You can choose to stay inside and interact with people who carry values that oppose your own. You can choose to be there and not allow their beliefs to take root inside you. That’s not being passive. That’s not being ineffective. That’s the most advanced form of presence there is.

You’re not passive dirt in the hands of others. You’re a gardener with tools and authority over your own soil.

The reason your habit trackers aren’t working isn’t a lack of willpower. It’s because you’re trying to apply mechanical solutions to an agricultural problem. You can’t bolt new behaviours onto soil that’s still growing something else. Those behaviours aren’t sticking because they don’t understand the ground.

The first step to breaking free is a soil audit.

Before You Move On

Bruiser had followed Sherman out to the courtyard and was now lying in a patch of afternoon sun, unbothered by any of it.

Sherman watched him for a moment. “He doesn’t absorb what doesn’t concern him,” he said. “There’s a lesson there. I’m still learning it.”

He picked up the jade plant and set it back in the light. His phone was still face down on the table.

“Choose your soil. Not once. Every day.”

What’s Better Today? — John Michael

Next: Refit Guide 02, Breaking New Ground. The soil is prepared. Now we look at what’s already been planted.

This is the First Guide of The Refit: Choose Your Soil: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.

Sarah was “fine”.

refit.whatsbetter.today

That’s the word she used when Jake asked her how she was doing over the almost-finished coffee she’d had no time to drink and when her mother rang on Sundays for the calls that lasted precisely as long as they needed to.

She used it at work, where she really was fine, where she was doing a lot better than most, where being “fine” was a kind of efficiency that everyone was keen to admire.

She was thirty-four years old and she was “fine” and she had the life she knew everyone was meant to have, from all the angles she could think to look.

The house was “fine”.

The boyfriend was “fine”, in a warm and occasionally loving way.

Her job was the one she’d fought for and she was good at and she knew she was good at and it was “fine”, mostly, and if it wasn’t, she couldn’t say why.

The ache had no name,

and that was the problem; if it had one, she could fix it, make it better, build systems around it.

It turned up on certain evenings, when she was done with work and the flat was empty and there was no real reason for it to be there at all, hovering just at the corners of her vision.

She told herself she was tired.

She needed a better morning routine.

She bought two books on building habits and read the introductions of both and laid them carefully on the shelf beside the others.

She started running, and stopped, and started again.

She was “fine”.

The night it happened, she wasn’t aware of it at all.

It was 02:47 on a Tuesday, Jake was snoring, she had work in five hours and she was twenty-three posts deep into someone else’s life and she didn’t even know she was about to stop.

Melissa’s promotion, Emma’s apparently perfect weekend in Lisbon, someone she’d gone to university with a baby she didn’t even know was coming, looking thoughtful in the photograph, knowing something she wasn’t privy to.

She wasn’t angry at any of them, really,

and she wasn’t even entirely sure what she was feeling, this dull, jealous disappointment.

It was something else, quieter than envy, deeper, older, less flashy; she was losing a battle with an algorithm and it knew nothing about her existence.

She eventually put the phone down,

not because she’d won, or even really believed she’d lost, but because Emma had posted again, and it was a picture of a salad, and something in her soul ran out of patience for the whole sad spectacle.

She lay in the dark for a while.

This is not a life.

This is the space between lives,

she thought, before giving it up, as she always did, because what else could she do with it, and lying back down, and telling herself she was fine and it would all come when it came and nothing needed to happen in the meantime.

It wasn’t enough.

Nothing was ever enough, not on its own, not without a fight, not without something else to happen.

There is a question that lives beneath the dull ache of nothing being enough, and it isn’t often spoken out loud, not really.

Few who live with it have the presence of mind to acknowledge it, fewer still will admit it to themselves let alone anyone else. There is never a good time to ask it; no “right” moment, no convenient place. It has no name, not even to itself. It knows it won’t be answered for a while, if at all. It isn’t pretty. It doesn’t want to be gentle. It asks,

is this all there is? Is this who I am? Was there meant to be something more, and if so, where did it go, and is it too late to get it back?

You can carry that question everywhere, even when everything else in your real life is “fine”, even when you’re incredibly successful, even when other people see you as someone who has it all together. Some people carry it more often when things are going well because when they’re in a good place, the question feels mean, so they bury it and tell themselves they’re “fine” when they’re not, and buy books on building habits and build walls around their disappointment.

This book is not about building habits.

It is an invitation to take your ache with you, wherever you go, and to stop pretending it isn’t there, and to let it hurt you, and to let it change you, and to help you realise it isn’t you, it’s not in your head, it’s not some unfair weakness.

Sarah found out. It took her six guides, and more honesty than she thought she had in her, and one difficult, unremarkable conversation at 02:53 on a Tuesday that only she knew about, but eventually, Sarah was able to look at her ache and see what it wanted.

What it needed.

What it had been trying to tell her all along.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Matthew 11:28

The Refit begins on the next post.

The introduction ends at the end.

Read that last.

This is The Prologue from The Refit: Come to Me, Leave the Lies Behind.

If it landed somewhere, the whole thing is waiting for you. Free.

Choose your season. Choose your pace: read it alone, or walk it day by day with a real person alongside you.

refit.whatsbetter.today

Pay what you want, including nothing. The only real cost is the willingness to do the work.