Leaving Las Vegas

A few years back, after the book came out and my social media picked up steam, the invites started rolling in. Podcasts. Conferences. Interviews. Most of them were tied to whatever controversy was hot that week, especially during the pandemic. I didn’t mind speaking to some of it. And once you’re in that world, you start linking arms with others who seem to be in the same fight at differing levels. You do their podcast. Go to their conference. Retweet something that you agreed with.

Most of the connections were friendly, even generous. If someone’s kind to me, I try to return it. That’s just how I was raised. And I’ve never needed everyone to agree with me to get along or vice versa. So over time, the circle got wide. Not deep. Just wide. Mostly friends in the Facebook sense, not Proverbs ones.

From ’18 to the end of ’22, that sort of networking ate up more time than I care to admit. But somewhere in there, I started to feel it turn. Some of those folks were headed places I wouldn’t go. Not with a clean conscience. I’d shared space with them before. Some had backed me in public ways. I didn’t feel any urge to blast them. But I wasn’t going to keep tagging along either. And the constant online noise—always another flare-up, another purity test—was wearing me thin.

More than that, it was pulling me off task.

God didn’t call me to be a professional commentator. I’m not that guy. He called me to lead my home, to pastor my church, and to build a company. That’s the work I was interested in. All this other stuff, tweets, takes, drama, it was starting to feel like smoke with no fire.

Worse yet, I kept getting dragged into fights I had nothing to do with. Online, people confuse proximity with allegiance. If you don’t take a side, they assume you’ve taken the wrong one. Silence gets treated like betrayal, or endorsement. If you’re not with me, you’re against me. And if you agree with them on anything, you must agree with everything they’ve ever said.

But if I’m honest, it still got to me. The noise, the group chats, the low-grade obsession with who’s up and who’s out. It steals more than your time, it drains your judgment. You catch yourself doom-scrolling. Talking strategy. Parsing nonsense. Then one day, you look up and ask, “Why am I here? What does this have to do with the things God has actually put in my hands?”

Some people probably have an answer. And not a fake one. A justified one. But I didn’t. I’m not built for that world. I’m not a pundit. Not a fixer. And I don’t have the luxury of spending energy I don’t have, especially not with what the last three years have looked like for my family.

So I stepped back. Fewer podcasts. Less speaking. I pruned hard. Put my head down and got back to preaching, pastoring, and especially writing. And somewhere in that return, I found a kind of peace I didn’t know I was missing.

Maybe I lost some “platform momentum.” I don’t care. Influence only matters if it’s aimed at the right people. And figuring out who those people are starts with a more basic question: What’s my mission?

From there, you ask: What’s my capacity? How much can I really handle? Do I have a good clutch, or am I grinding through so many shifts that something’s bound to give?

I came close to burning out. And the irony is, I already had the life I used to dream about. It’s crazy how chasing more can leave you with less.