Chapter One
Small Footprint: Rendering Down Our Lives

I don’t know how it happened, especially since I never intended it to happen. I just woke up one morning with the realization that I was tired. Not the kind of tired where you didn’t get enough sleep the previous night, but the kind of tired where you boldly proclaim to anyone who will listen, “I need a vacation.” Somehow life had gotten away from me and for the past several years I had been chasing after it, unable to accomplish half of what I had desired to do. In so many areas of my life I had been spinning my wheels, unable to delineate the most important from the somewhat important. Sitting on various boards, building a wonderful growing church body that I loved in Boise, constructing a mountain cabin with my family, as well as maintaining my country home and ranch with my wife Nancy—it all seemed most important.

On a case-by-case basis, everything seemed like it belonged on the top shelf of my life’s priorities. As a regional director, I oversaw nearly a hundred churches in nine states. I traveled across the country and around the world teaching seminars, conferences and encouraging and training church leaders. I was a grandparent, a parent, a husband and a son to people I deeply cared about and who deeply cared about me. I was juggling a hundred balls, not wanting any of them to drop—and I was tired. That morning as I looked out my front window at the distant snow-capped mountains, I realized something had to give. My life had become too complex, too busy and too out-of-control. I realized that the great things that truly gave me joy and the things I deeply desired to invest my life in were being pushed aside for dozens of merely good things. Not just good things but important things—things I had felt privileged to be a part of. It was time for reevaluation, reorganization and refocus.

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