For a long time, I kept my spiritual boxes tight and the lid clamped down.
Years ago, I served in a church culture where everything had a label and a line. You knew what was right, what was wrong, who was in, and who was out. Then a family crisis involving someone close to the pastor exposed how brittle those boxes really were.
It wasn’t just about one situation. It was about the boxes — how tight we had made them, and how badly they held when real life finally hit them.
I’d like to tell you I learned that lesson gently. I didn’t.
The mirror
Years later I walked through my own divorce. And the first thing I found was that I had spent years being hard on people who had done exactly what I was now doing. In the eighties and nineties, “divorce” was the ultimate bad word in Christian circles — and I had treated it that way.
Now here I was, in the middle of one, and my self-judgment was worse than anything anyone else could have said.
The verse that kept finding me was the one that says, as you judge others, so you will be judged. It wasn’t a threat. It was a mirror. And it showed me a man I didn’t want to be.
The No Flinch Rule
That took years to walk through. During that season, I started attending a church led by Mike Erre, a pastor whose teaching I came to respect. I volunteered. I got involved in serving. And somewhere in that process, I learned about a phrase they used with people in leadership.
They called it the No Flinch Rule.
Here’s what it meant: if you were serving in children’s ministry and two same-sex parents walked up to check in their child, you didn’t flinch. You loved their child, you checked them in, and that was it.
I’ll be honest — at first it shocked me.
Then I sat with it. And I began to understand the heart behind it. It wasn’t pretending convictions don’t matter. It wasn’t saying everything is simple. It was saying: we don’t condone, and we don’t condemn. We move to the middle and we love.
Then I heard the thing that undid me: we don’t check your divorce standing at the door either.
We don’t stand at the door with a checklist. We never did. We just told ourselves we did.
I turned that over for a long time. And it occurred to me — we don’t check the overweight person at the door, even though Scripture addresses gluttony. We don’t check the gossiper at the door, even though Scripture addresses that. We don’t check the person carrying hatred at the door, even though Jesus said that is the same as murder.
Jesus follower
Loosening those boxes cost me. It put me at odds with a lot of typical — and especially evangelical — viewpoints I had grown up holding without ever questioning them. I started asking things I had been afraid to ask.
Is there really only a short list of acceptable reasons to end a marriage? Is physical abuse not a valid reason simply because it is not named in the New Testament?
Those questions changed me.
I don’t reject the word “Christian.” And I know good people who still use the word “evangelical.” But for me, both words had collected enough baggage that I began reaching for something simpler and more honest.
Jesus follower.
I love Jesus. I am committed to what he said and to the way he lived. I am not a traditionalist, church-attending-in-the-expected-way kind of guy. But I love digging into how the Scriptures speak into real lives — without a small box, and without the judgment that built the box in the first place.
What this means in coaching
So when it comes to coaching, this matters.
I genuinely enjoy talking with people I disagree with. I like helping people I don’t see eye to eye with. Because when I take the time to actually understand their side, I usually learn something — and I have changed my position more than once over the years.
Being a believer at sixty-five looks nothing like it did at twenty-five, thirty-five, or forty-five. Thank God.
If that is the kind of person you are looking for — maybe you have been beat up by church, maybe you are still seeking, maybe you are carrying a load of questions — I welcome that conversation.
I don’t need you to have it all figured out. I don’t either. But I do believe Jesus still meets people in the middle of real life.
And I would be honored to help you find your true north.