On the bottom of my computer monitor, there is a sticky note with three words on it.

Less, but better.

I put it there years ago, and I haven't taken it down. I look at it dozens of times a day. When I'm answering email. When I'm thinking about a new project. When I'm deciding whether to take a meeting that doesn't quite have a clear purpose. When I'm wondering if a piece of work is finished or if it needs another pass.

It's the closest thing I have to an operating principle for the way I work and live.

It’s aspirational. This is the way I want to work and live. I often fail, but this reminder keeps me focused.

At first glance, less, but better sounds like a productivity slogan. A clever way to say do fewer things, but do them well. And it is that—but if it were only that, it wouldn't be on my monitor. I have plenty of productivity advice on my bookshelf. None of it ends up on a sticky note three feet from my face.

The phrase is on my monitor because it isn't actually about productivity. It's about something deeper, and I want to spend a few minutes explaining what I think that is.

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The phrase didn't originate with me. It didn't originate with the productivity world either.

It comes from a German industrial designer named Dieter Rams, who spent forty years at Braun in the second half of the twentieth century. He designed some of the most iconic consumer products of his generation—calculators, audio equipment, kitchen appliances. If you've ever held an Apple product and noticed how clean the design feels, you've already encountered Rams's influence. Jony Ive, the designer behind much of Apple's product line for two decades, has been open about how much of what he learned came directly from Rams.

Rams worked by a principle that became famous in design circles. In German, Weniger aber besser. In English, less, but better.

Rams meant something specific by it. He wasn't saying make products that are smaller or cheaper. He was saying strip away everything that doesn't serve the actual purpose of the thing, so that what remains can serve that purpose well. A calculator should help you calculate. Anything on the calculator that doesn't serve that core function is noise. Get rid of the noise. Keep what's essential. Make it excellent.

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Greg McKeown picked up the phrase in his book Essentialism, published in 2014. His version is more applicable to our daily lives, and this is where I first heard the phrase.

McKeown isn't talking about industrial design—he's talking about the way most professionals run their lives. We say yes to everything. We treat every opportunity as roughly equal. We tell ourselves we can do it all. And then we wonder why we feel scattered, depleted, and behind.

McKeown's conclusion is that almost everything is noise. Very little is genuinely essential. The work of an essentialist—a word he coined for the book—is to distinguish the vital few from the trivial many. Most of what you spend your time on doesn't actually matter. The faster you can see that, the faster you can stop doing it.

I read Essentialism shortly after my cancer diagnosis. Cancer forced me to drop most of what I'd been doing because I no longer had the strength to do it. I was running my agency at maybe a third of my normal capacity. I genuinely could not work normal hours. And what I discovered, which McKeown predicts in the book, is that most of what I'd been doing didn't actually need to be done. The business kept running. The clients I served well stayed well-served. The projects I cut quietly disappeared and no one noticed.

I'd been treating more as the path to growth. Cancer forced me to treat less as the path forward. And the business didn't suffer. If anything, it got cleaner.

That's when I wrote less, but better on the sticky note. I needed the reminder.

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Let’s go even deeper on this.

Here is what I didn't fully understand at the time.

The principle wasn't actually invented by Dieter Rams in the 1960s. It wasn't invented by Greg McKeown in 2014. Christians have been writing about it for two thousand years. They just didn't call it less, but better. They called it simplicity.

The contemporary Christian writer who has done the most to recover this tradition is Richard Foster. His book Celebration of Discipline, first published in 1978, is one of the most influential books on the Christian spiritual life in the last fifty years.

Foster's argument is that simplicity is not an aesthetic. It's not a lifestyle choice. It doesn’t mean stark white walls and empty countertops. It's not a productivity strategy. It's a spiritual discipline—one of twelve historic Christian disciplines that have been used by serious believers to clear out the noise of life and make space for God.

His working definition of simplicity, drawn from his Quaker tradition, is this: simplicity is the practice of holding the kingdom of God as the singular priority of life. Everything else is downstream of that one yes. When the Kingdom is your one yes, you become free to say no to nearly everything else. Not because the other things are bad, but because they aren't the one thing.

The Quakers had a word I love for what gets in the way of this. They called it cumber. All the stuff—possessions, obligations, divided loyalties, accumulating noise—that buries the freedom Christ purchased for us. The danger isn't usually that we go after big sins. The danger is that we get buried under small things we never quite chose, but never quite refused either.

When I read Foster for the first time, I realized that the phrase on my monitor wasn't an industrial design principle that happened to resonate with a Christian worldview. It was a Christian conviction that an industrial designer had described from a different angle. Rams was articulating in the language of products what the Christian church has been articulating in the language of souls for centuries.

Less, but better. Strip away what doesn't serve the actual purpose, so that what remains can serve that purpose well.

For Rams, the purpose was the function of the product.

For McKeown, the purpose is your highest contribution.

For Foster, the purpose is the kingdom of God.

Same logic of subtraction. Three different answers about what it's all for. The deepest one is Foster's. The more I sit with it, the more I think the principle has always been pointing at the Kingdom.

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This matters for us because most of the small business owners I know are drowning in cumber.

Not in dramatic failures. In quiet accumulation.

Too many software subscriptions. Too many client commitments that should have ended a year ago. Too many "priorities." Too many newsletters in the inbox. Too many books half-finished on the nightstand. Too many side projects that don't really fit the main work. Too many obligations to people who probably wouldn't notice if you politely stepped back. Too many new business ideas.

I'm guilty of most of these. The temptation toward more is my default.

The optimization industry sells you more tools to manage the noise. Use this app. Try this morning routine. Buy this wearable. Read this book. The implicit promise is that the right system will let you do everything well.

It won't. You can't do everything well. The honest answer is to cut.

Most of the work of less, but better is not learning a new technique. It's giving yourself permission to subtract. To end the meeting series that no longer serves its purpose. To stop the client engagement that isn't bearing fruit. To unsubscribe from the newsletter you haven't actually read in six months. To say no to the obligation you took on because you didn't know how to say no when it was offered. To delete the app you opened twice and never used. To give away the equipment in the garage that you've been telling yourself you'd use someday.

For the Christian, this isn't just productivity. It's a spiritual discipline. It's clearing out the cumber so the Kingdom can come back into focus. It's the slow recovery of the singular yes from which a thousand free, easy noes flow.

For a small business owner, it means asking a question almost no one asks: what would this look like if we did less of it, but did it better? The honest answer might be uncomfortable. But it will be true.

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I still look at the sticky note dozens of times a day. The work of subtracting never quite ends. Every season brings new noise. Every quarter, a new round of decisions about what to keep and what to release.

I am not very good at this. I drift toward more all the time. The note exists because I need the constant reminder, not because I have mastered the principle.

But I have come to believe that less, but better is one of the truest things I've encountered in many years of trying to figure out how to live well. It works for industrial design. It works for business. It works for Christian discipleship.

Christ is the one thing.

Less of everything else.

Better of what remains.

I first picked up The Lord of the Rings in high school.

I devoured it then and since my early twenties now try to do a full re-read of the trilogy every year. I know exactly how the plot unfolds. I know how the story ends. I have memorized most of the chapter titles. I know who lives and who dies. Yet every single time I get to certain scenes, I have to put the book down for a moment because I cannot see the words through my teary eyes.

The horns of Rohan sounding across the field of the Pelennor as Théoden and the Riders crest the hill and the dawn breaks behind them. The black sails of the ships from the south arriving at the harbor of Minas Tirith, and the banner unfurling on the mast—not the banner the city was bracing for, but the standard of the rightful king. The moment at Helm's Deep when the fortress is about to fall, and Gandalf appears on the eastern ridge. The Eagles…

I cannot read these scenes and remain unaffected. The effect does not wear off with rereading. If anything, it gets stronger.

For years I thought this was just because I love the books. It probably is partly that. But I have come to think it's also because Tolkien is doing something specific in these scenes—something the rest of modern storytelling has mostly forgotten—and that something is connected, in ways I am still working out, to how the Christian life is actually built.

Tolkien had a word for it. He invented the word himself, because the words that already existed could not quite carry what he meant.

He called it eucatastrophe.

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Tolkien introduced the term in a 1939 lecture called On Fairy-Stories. The Greek roots are simple. Eu, meaning good. Catastrophe literally meaning overturning—the sudden collapse of fortune that ends most ancient tragedies. Tolkien took the word, kept the suddenness, and replaced the disaster with rescue.

He thought eucatastrophe was the highest thing a story could do. He thought the moment of unlooked-for rescue gave the reader a glimpse of something true about reality itself—a joy that exists beyond the edges of the story and even beyond the world.

And he was explicit about why he thought this. Tolkien believed the Resurrection of Christ was the great eucatastrophe of human history. The actual, historical defeat of death. The rescue that came from outside, exactly when every visible resource inside the situation had failed. Everything else in the entire literary tradition, in his view, was a faint echo of that one real deliverance. All the smaller eucatastrophes in our stories work on us because they are pointing, knowingly or not, at the great one.

And the Christian story holds out one more eucatastrophe still ahead of us. The Resurrection has already happened. The King has already won. But the King will also return. The dead will rise. Every tear will be wiped away. The kingdom that has been held in trust for two thousand years will be restored to the One it was always meant to be ruled by, and the eternal glory we have been promised in Christ will arrive in full. The great rescue is not only behind us. It is also ahead of us. We live between.

This is the reason the scenes I cry at all share the same shape.

The horns of Rohan, the banner of the King, Gandalf at the eastern ridge—these are not just exciting plot points. They are the same pattern, three different times. The hope unlooked for. The help that arrives when nothing in the visible world warranted expecting it. The rescue that no one inside the story could see coming.

When I read these scenes, something in me recognizes them. Not because I am inside the story. Because I am inside a much bigger story that runs on the same pattern.

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Let me dwell on each of them for a moment, because I think the specifics matter.

In The Two Towers, the situation at Helm's Deep is hopeless. Saruman's army has breached the outer walls. Théoden and his men have been driven back to the inner keep. The night has been long and brutal. The dawn is the last dawn most of them expect to see. Théoden, who has been broken by despair for most of the book, finds something at the bottom of himself and decides to ride out. Not because he thinks he can win. Because he would rather die on a horse than behind a wall.

They ride out into the morning. The orcs are everywhere. Then, Gandalf appears on the ridge to the east. The light catches him as the sun rises behind. The orcs scream in panic.

I have read this scene more times than I can count, and I cannot read it without crying.

In The Return of the King, the field of the Pelennor is worse. Minas Tirith is falling. Denethor has given himself over to the enemy. The Nazgûl are flying overhead. When out of the distance comes the sound of horns. Théoden and the Rohirrim have arrived—the help that was promised but no one believed would come in time.

Théoden gives his great speech: Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! The Rohirrim crest the hill. The horns sound across the field. And the riders charge into the fray.

And then, even worse for the city, even more lost—because Sauron's reinforcements are still coming—the black sails appear in the harbor. The ships of the southern raiders. The men of Gondor see them and despair. The reinforcements are reinforcements for the enemy. The day is finally, certainly lost.

Except the banner on the lead ship unfurls. And it is not the banner of the enemy. It is the white tree of Gondor. The seven stars. The high crown of Elendil. Wrought by Arwen and carried in secret. The ships do not carry the enemy. They carry the king. They carry Aragorn. The rightful king is coming, with the army he has been gathering since he passed through the Paths of the Dead. The help no one knew was on the way has arrived.

I cannot describe this scene without my chest going tight.

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The thing I have come to understand about Tolkien is that he is not writing for cheap emotional effect. He is not setting up Helm's Deep so the rescue feels satisfying in the way a sports comeback feels satisfying. He is teaching the reader to recognize a pattern.

The pattern is this. In a fallen world, the situation often looks lost. Sometimes the situation is lost, by any reasonable accounting. The horns at the end of the long night are not the result of better planning by the heroes inside the keep. The banner on the ship is not something the men of Gondor produced by their own faithfulness. The help comes from outside the visible field. It arrives when the resources inside the situation have given out.

This is what Tolkien believed about the Christian story. The Resurrection is not the natural conclusion of Jesus's strong moral teaching. It is a rescue that came from outside the visible field. It was not produced by the disciples' faithfulness. It arrived after their faithfulness had completely failed—after they had abandoned him, denied him, and scattered.

Eucatastrophe is the pattern of all true rescue. It is the rescue that arrives from outside, when the resources inside the situation have given out.

This is why these scenes work on me at forty the same way they worked on me at sixteen. The pattern is hardwired. We were made to recognize it. The Christian who learns to recognize it in Tolkien is being trained to recognize it in the small rescues of his own life, and ultimately to trust that the great rescue is still coming.

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I want to be careful here, because there is a shallow version of this that I want to avoid.

The shallow version says: trust God, and your problems will get suddenly better. Pray hard enough, and the help you need will arrive at the last minute. Have faith, and your version of the horns of Rohan will sound when you most need them.

That is not what Tolkien is teaching. It is not what the Bible teaches either. We are not promised a rescue from our suffering on the timeline we want. The cancer comes back. The business fails. The marriage ends. The prayer is not answered the way we hoped.

Eucatastrophe is not the promise that every small story in your life will resolve happily before you die. Eucatastrophe is the promise that the largest story is already resolved—and that another resolution, larger still, is on its way.

This changes how we wait.

If the great eucatastrophe is real—if Christ has been raised, and is returning to make all things new—then every small dark night is being lived in by people who know the dawn is real. The dawn is not just a metaphor. It is the real return of the real King, on a real day that has not yet come but will. Every small story that does not resolve in this life is being held by someone who knows the largest story will. Every prayer offered into silence is offered by someone who knows the silence is not the final word. Every business owner working through a slow quarter, every patient waiting for a scan, every parent waiting for the prodigal to come home—all of them are doing what the Stewards of Gondor were doing. Holding the kingdom while the King is away. Working faithfully. Waiting hopefully. Trusting that the horns are coming, even when they cannot yet be heard.

This is what Tolkien knew that most self-help misses. The stoics say: endure. The optimists say: it will work out. The positive thinkers say: believe and you'll receive. None of those is what Tolkien meant.

Tolkien meant: the situation may be much worse than you can see, and a rescue is coming that you cannot yet imagine. Both at the same time. The darkness is real. So is the dawn.

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I expect to read The Lord of the Rings many more times before I die.

And every time, I expect to cry at the same scenes. The horns on the Pelennor. The banner on the ship. Gandalf at the eastern ridge.

I do not think this is sentimentality. I think it is recognition. Tolkien wrote the scenes that way because he knew what we were made to respond to. We were made to long for the unlooked-for deliverance. We were made to believe that the rescue is coming. We were made to hope, even from inside a dark keep at dawn, that someone is approaching from outside our line of sight.

The horns are coming. The banner will unfurl. The dawn will come. The King is returning.

In the meantime, we hold what we have been given in trust. We tend the kingdom that is not ours. We do the work in front of us. And we keep watching the eastern ridge—because what we are waiting for is not a metaphor. It is the King, returning. It is the eternal glory waiting on the other side of every story that did not end the way we wanted.

This blog was almost named “Pace and Process”.

In January 2026, after weeks of deliberation, I landed on “Build and Walk” because it has much more of a deeper meaning for me, but “Pace and Process” is still a very important part of my life. In fact, I actually made the final decision to call this blog Build and Walk after much pacing and processing to arrive at that name.

“Pace and Process” is the method for how I manage stress throughout my day. It means exactly what you think it means - I pace back and forth while mentally processing whatever I am currently struggling with.

Sometimes Pace and Process looks like me going for a long walk to think through a strategic business problem.

Sometimes Pace and Process is me literally pacing back and forth in my office or around our kitchen while I am working up the nerve to make a challenging phone call.

Sometimes Pace and Process looks like me going for a 10- to 15-minute slow, methodical walk around our yard to just soak in the beauty and enjoy the sun on my face.

Oftentimes Pace and Process looks like me going for a ruck to manage my stress and anxiety about whatever challenge has risen to the top in my life.

Pace and Process looks like me going for a short walk at the end of my workday to help me make the mental transition between work mode and family time.

Pace and Process is what I use to help me declutter my mental energy.

It can be short or it can be long. You decide what you need in the moment.

Sure, you might get some odd looks from your family for making laps around your kitchen for 30 minutes. But, if that helps you manage your stress and process complex emotions, it is infinitely better than reaching for sugar, alcohol, tobacco or some other vice.

My wife laughs at me sometimes, but she knows how much my pacing helps me, so she doesn’t give me too many funny looks.

I tend to do my best thinking while walking and am never sorry I took the time to pace and process.

Give it a try. It just might change your life.

I was introduced to “rucking” on the Peter Attia podcast in 2018. He was having a conversation about his habit of putting on a really heavy backpack and going for a long walk in the hot Texas sun. The idea was oddly alluring, so I followed his direction to the website of a company called GoRuck to learn more.

My obsession was born.

I bought my first ruck about a week later - the original GoRuck GR1, which I still use to this day - and I’ve been rucking multiple days per week ever since.

If you’ve never heard of the term “rucking” outside of a Tom Clancy novel, it can be defined as simply walking with weight on your back. That is the whole thing. You can do it in the woods, on a trail, around your neighborhood, on a sidewalk, or even on a treadmill if you have to. You can use a real rucksack with weighted plates, a backpack with books or rocks in it, or a hiking pack. For busy parents, I will even concede that giving your child a piggy back ride is an excellent way to get time under load. The barrier to entry is nearly zero.

You just walk. With weight.

It sounds simple, and it is, yet I cannot think of a single practice that has done more for my body, mind, and soul than this. It’s even improved by business and made me a better husband and parent. I’ve even convinced several friends to taking up the regular practice.

Here is why I find rucking so special.

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First, the physical benefits.

When you walk with weight on your back, your body is doing several things at once. Your legs are doing strength work. Your core is stabilizing under load. Your cardiovascular system is being trained at a sustainable intensity - ie. You are generally walking in Zone 2 heart rate, which builds long-term physical endurance. Your skeleton is getting the bone-loading stress that maintains density. Your joints are getting low-impact movement that doesn’t destroy your knees and hips the way running can. If you’re able to ruck outside, your body is getting natural light, fresh air, and uneven terrain that requires the small stabilizing muscles to work in ways gym machines cannot replicate. Even walking with light weight on a treadmill at zero incline at slow speed delivers many of these same excellent benefits.

This is not a guess. The military has known it for a long time. Every soldier in every army in history has trained by walking with weight, because no other single exercise is as effective at building a capable and versatile human body. Peter Attia talks about it on his podcast. Michael Easter has built an entire brand around the broader principle. The studies are starting to catch up to what soldiers and hunters and farmers have always known. Loaded walking does more for human physical health than almost any other single activity. One could even argue, and many have, that God designed the human body to carry weight.

The most surprising physical benefit to me has been the improvement in my posture. Carrying a heavy load on my back for multiple miles per week requires your entire posterior chain to strengthen as your body naturally seeks to counterbalance the gravitational pull of a heavy pack pulling you backwards. This means that the muscles in your lower back, calves, hamstrings, glutes and spine all strengthen as your body naturally seeks stability while you walk. This forces your body to stand up straighter.

As with many things in life, the habits that stick long-term are the ones that become engrained in other patterns of your life. Rucking is such an easy habit to fit into your daily and weekly rhythm because it can be completed alongside so many other tasks. Taking a work call? Throw on a light pack and take your call with earbuds in while walking. Need to get groceries? Park at the end of the parking lot and wear your pack while shopping. Need to go to the mall to visit the Apple Store to pick up your new iPhone? Throw on your pack and walk the mall. Bonus points for skipping the escalator and taking the stairs while walking with weight. Meeting a friend for coffee? Grab your coffees to go, throw on a pack, and walk together. I can virtually guarantee the conversation will be better. You get the idea. Rucking doesn’t have to be boring. You can incorporate it into your daily life to the point that it becomes a habit and you don’t even think of it as exercise. Win win.

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The benefits that rucking provide for our mind and our soul are harder to quantify, but I believe they are even more important and profound.

When I first started rucking, I treated it like every other workout. I put in earbuds. I listened to podcasts. I listened to audiobooks. I treated the walk as productive time, where I could be exercising and consuming content at the same time. I felt like I had discovered a new life hack.

It took me about a year to realize that the constant barrage of information was killing most of what was actually valuable about the practice.

The audio kept my brain in the same mode it lives in all day. Receiving input. Processing input. Responding to input. My body was outside, but my mind was still inside, still scrolling, still being talked to. Trying to connect the dots from what I was listening to and apply it to the applicable areas of my life. I would finish a ruck and feel great physically, but often even more overwhelmed. The exercise helped. The audio canceled out most of the rest.

The day I stopped wearing earbuds on my rucks, everything changed.

I won’t pretend it was easy at first. The silence felt strange. I noticed that I had not been alone with my own thoughts in a long time. The first few walks were uncomfortable. Stuff came up. Things I had been carrying without quite knowing I was carrying. Anxieties about the business. Worries about my health. Thoughts about my marriage and my daughters. Things I had been keeping at bay with constantly seeking either the next best self-help book or escaping into my favorite fantasy fiction novel.

I started to pray on those walks. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes silently. I started to notice the trees and the light. I started to greet the people I passed on the trail instead of nodding at them with my earbuds in. I would literally stop to smell the roses on the side of the road sometimes. I started to think real thoughts instead of half-thoughts, and to follow them all the way through to the end.

If there is an anxiety that I am holding inside, I will go for a ruck. It does not always make the anxiety go away, but it is always a good time to gain perspective and to think. Quite often if I’m struggling with a problem, going for a walk with weight is the place where I work it out. I don’t always solve problems while walking, but it almost always helps me plan a next step, or just work up the courage to take the next step if needed.

Ryan Holiday has a line about walking I keep coming back to. Going for a walk, he points out, will not solve all your problems—but as he puts it, "I cannot think of a single problem it will make worse." That has been my experience exactly. Whatever I am carrying when I head out the door, I am carrying it more lightly when I come back.

Jason McCarthy, the founder of GoRuck, talks about how when you get to the end of a ruck you finally get to set down the weight. He means this in both a literal and figurative sense - you take off your literal weighted pack, but you also get to shed the weight of whatever emotional burden you were carrying and working through on your walk.

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There is one more piece to this that Michael Easter has helped me name.

Easter has written extensively about how modern life has stripped away nearly all the inherent difficulty our ancestors took for granted. We don’t walk long distances. We don’t carry heavy things. We don’t let ourselves get hungry. We don’t get too hot or too cold. We are never get bored. We don’t often encounter difficulty unless we go looking for it. And he argues, persuasively, that this elimination of difficulty is making us physically weak, mentally fragile, and spiritually hollow. ( Side Note - I understand that I am speaking from a profound place of privilege when I make these statements. I fully recognize that there are many people both around the world and within walking distance of my own home that face unimaginable difficulty every day whether they choose it or not. I don’t say these things to minimize their suffering, but rather to shine a light on the avoidance of difficulty that many of us succumb to in our privileged first world existence.)

His prescription is to deliberately reintroduce some of the difficulty modern life has removed. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Choose the harder path. He cites a statistic: only 2% of people take the stairs when an elevator is available. He wants to be in that 2%, not because being uncomfortable is virtuous in itself, but because the kind of person who chooses the harder path in small things ends up capable of choosing it on the larger ones.

Rucking is one of the cleanest applications of this principle I have found. Nobody has to ruck. You can walk without the pack. You can drive instead of walking. You can lift in an air-conditioned gym instead of carrying weight up a hill. The whole practice is voluntary difficulty. It is choosing the slightly harder thing, every day, on purpose.

And here is what I have noticed. The voluntary difficulty of rucking has made the involuntary difficulties of life easier to carry. The cancer diagnosis. The hard hard problem in my business. The bad day with one of the kids. The phone call you do not want to make. All of them feel less heavy when your body has spent the morning carrying actual weight up an actual hill.

There is a Christian word for this too. We don’t always use it, but it is what Easter is describing through his evolutionary biology lens. The word is discipline. The body and the soul are both formed by what they are subjected to. If we subject ourselves to nothing, we are not formed. We have to deliberately undergo what life would never make us undergo on its own. And I believe the Bible is very clear that God often asks his people to go through suffering as a way of forging our souls. God asks us to go through fiery trials and tribulations for our own good and for his Glory. We are not promised an easy life, but voluntarily entering into the hard things makes your body, mind and soul more resilient to do the work that God has called us to.

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There is one more thing I have come to love about rucking - It is one of the best social activities I’ve ever found.

It is hard to think of an activity better suited to time with friends. You are outside. The pace is slow enough that conversation comes easily. There are no screens. There is somewhere to go and something to do, but the something is simple enough that the conversation can wander wherever it wants.

Introverted or extroverted? Makes no difference here.

Some of the best conversations I have had in the last few years have happened on rucks with friends. Long talks about marriage and parenting and work and faith. Talks that would have been awkward in a coffee shop and would never have happened on a phone call. The walking does something. The weight does something. The fact that you both committed to be outside doing something difficult together does something else. By the time you are done, you have shared real time, real movement, and real conversation, and you have come back lighter than you went out.

It is also, frankly, a lot of fun. There are not many things I would rather do than head out on a long ruck with a friend or two. The weight makes you tired. The conversation makes the time fly. The coffee at the end just tastes better.

If you have a friend you want to spend more time with, invite them to ruck.

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I would love to tell you that I get out for a long ruck in the woods every single day. The truth is more complicated.

The demands of work, parenting, and being a good husband do not always allow for an hour-long walk outside. Some weeks I manage five or six. Other weeks I manage two. There are seasons when getting out the door for an hour, in the daylight, before the day swallows me, is just not realistic.

Thankfully, I found a simple workaround I have come to love. I bought an inexpensive treadmill desk and set it up in my garage. On the days when I cannot get outside, I can still get a ruck in while I work. I put on the pack. I set the treadmill to a walking pace. I take meetings. I answer emails. I write. I run my business with 40 pounds on my back, doing what my body was actually designed to do.

It is not the same as walking through the woods. The mental benefit is reduced when I am simultaneously working. The prayer and the silence and the trees are not there. But the physical benefit is real. The body is still moving under load. The compounding is still happening. And on the days when I would otherwise miss it entirely, the treadmill desk has saved me.

Rucking can adapt it to whatever your real life actually looks like.

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You don’t need an expensive specialized pack, as nice as some of them are. You can throw on any backpack or bag with some books or rocks in it and walk. You do not need a fancy treadmill. You can use any treadmill, or no treadmill at all. You do not need to commit to a specific protocol. You can carry 10 pounds for 15 minutes one day and 40 pounds for an hour the next. You can adjust the weight, the distance, the speed, and the route depending on how you are feeling.

If you live in a city, walk through the city. If you live near woods, walk in the woods. If you live in suburbs, walk in your neighborhood with a heavy bag and let the neighbors wonder what you are doing. They will get used to it. So will you.

The whole point is that there is almost no version of your life where rucking is not possible. You can start small. You can scale up. You can use what you already have. And on the days when you cannot do it the way you would like, you can do it some other way.

I won’t tell you this is the only form of exercise that provides benefits. Lifting weights is good for you. Running is good for you. Yoga, Pilates, CrossFit—there are plenty of good options.

But I am telling you that I have found nothing that combines physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual benefit the way rucking does. Nothing that integrates body, mind, and soul the way walking with weight in silence does. Nothing that makes the rest of the day easier to carry. Nothing that builds real friendship the way a long walk with weight and good conversation does.

Many years in, I am still rucking as often as I can. I expect to be doing it twenty years from now. It costs me nothing. It gives me everything I need to walk into the rest of the day capable of doing what God has put in front of me.

If you are looking for one thing to add to your life, this might be it.

You do not need permission. You just need a pack, some weight, and 15 minutes of free time.

Lace up. Load up. Walk.

On December 8, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood before Congress and asked them to declare war on Japan. The day before, December 7, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt's speech that morning coined the phrase: a day which will live in infamy.

Three days shy of the 82nd anniversary of that day, I had my own personal day which would live in infamy.

On December 5, 2023, I was diagnosed with brain cancer.

What follows was originally written and posted on my personal Instagram account as a five-part series in 2024.

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Rachel (my wife) reminded me recently that I have never gone back and shared the full story of my cancer journey to date. I have taken some time to record all of the details over a 5 Part Series. Grab some popcorn!

On December 5, 2023, I had a typical morning at home. I had just finished a workout in our living room and was walking through the kitchen. The next thing I knew, I was being wrestled into a chair in our living room by strange men, and the dog was in full-on protector mode. I had experienced a Grand Mal seizure (It's often called a generalized seizure, but I prefer Grand Mal because it sounds like a Star Wars reference) and was just regaining consciousness as paramedics were moving me into a chair.

After my initial seizure, I took an ambulance ride to the hospital, and they began to run tests. One of our dear friends is an ER doctor, and though he was not on call that morning, he was gracious enough to come into the hospital to be with us. They quickly did a CT scan, and God, in his providence, allowed our friend to be the one to interpret the CT scan results and tell us that I had a large tumor in the front right lobe of my brain.

I spent the rest of the day having several more tests and scans done. The doctors wanted to rule out, which they did, that this tumor and cancer existed in any other part of my body. The tumor was isolated in my brain, which, in this case, was a good thing. We ended up spending the night because we were waiting to hear from the neurosurgeon whether or not he wanted to perform surgery as quickly as possible.

Eventually, I met with my neurosurgeon, who explained that he would be the one to perform brain surgery on me to remove as much of the tumor as he safely could. He did not feel there was any benefit to immediate surgery, so after spending only one night in the hospital, I was released to go home and await my surgery date of December 14, 2023.

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We spent the week leading up to the surgery preparing for the unknown. We celebrated Christmas early with the girls, had family portraits done, and spent time preparing things around the house for being in the hospital. We wanted our girls to be as comfortable as possible while Mama and Daddy were away in the hospital for a few days.

Two nights before my surgery date, our pastor and other leaders from our church came to our house to pray for us. Many prayers were prayed that night; it was one of my life's most incredible and meaningful events. I've genuinely never in my life heard such powerful and bold prayers. One specific prayer that stuck out to me was a prayer that the neurosurgeon performing the surgery would be amazed at the outcome of my surgery and be so incredulous at the results that they wouldn't be tempted to take any credit for it.

The morning of December 14 rolled around, and I arrived at the hospital ready for surgery. Our morning was filled with family and friends who had all come to be with and support Rachel while I was in surgery. As I recount this story, a theme you will see unfold is how truly blessed our family is. We are loved so well by so many people that it is overwhelming (In the best way!)

The surgery took about 3 hours, and in the recovery room, our neurosurgeon came by to give Rachel the report that the surgery was extremely successful. He removed as much of the tumor as he safely could have without significant risk to my cognitive or mobility functions. And then he said, get this, it was nothing short of a miracle the surgery went so well. Please remember that this comes from a man who does this for his full-time profession. Rachel and I were blown away. God is clearly still in control, loves us, and only wants what is best for his children.

I spent one day in the ICU recovery room and two days in the general hospital and was then released to go home with light restrictions: no lifting, exercise, or any strenuous activity until Jan 29th. I had a gnarly scar, a partially shaved head, a mostly removed brain tumor, and a heart filled with gratitude as we left the hospital to come home.

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Sometime after the surgery, we received confirmation from all of the various tests that the tumor I had was an Oligodendroglioma Grade 2. It is a big word, but it basically means a slow-growing but aggressive brain tumor that should respond well to conventional cancer treatment methods. Our next step was meeting with our two Oncology doctors - one for radiation and one for chemotherapy. I'll never forget the comment made by one of my Oncologists - about my tumor and the treatment of - "If you're going to have a brain tumor, this is the one you want. This is bread and butter oncology". Even in the midst of our suffering, good news was still pouring in.

Surgery recovery lasted through Jan 29th, when I was released to light exercise and removed all lifting restrictions. I felt like myself again! This is the date I could start rucking again, and I began thinking about starting this IG channel. I will never forget one additional comment: As we were leaving the Neurosurgeon's office on Jan 29th, the Neurosurgeon commented that he would never forget me. Rachel and I were convinced that this was not just a platitude. This doctor was still so impressed by how dangerous my initial tumor had been, how well the surgery went, and how well my initial recovery had gone amongst all the cases he had seen over his lifetime. Of all of the surgeries he has performed, mine stood out. How humbling. How great our God is.

Many people have asked me if I could tell any signs of having a tumor leading up to my initial seizure. The short answer is no. I have never experienced any headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, or any other symptom you might typically associate with a head injury of some type. The only symptoms I had experienced were symptoms that my primary care physician and others had diagnosed as anxiety or panic attacks. I now know that these were called partial or focal seizures, which I had experienced for several months leading up to my Grand Mal seizure. When I mentioned these symptoms to my neurosurgeon, he confirmed that the symptoms sounded like panic attacks and that we were right to treat them as such without knowing more. Thankfully, I am now taking medication that controls these partial seizures completely.

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Once I had fully recovered from surgery, the next step was cancer treatment. The idea and goals behind the treatment are that the surgery was able to remove as much of the tumor as safely possible, and the radiation and chemo are intended to kill and/or stop the growth of any remaining pieces of my tumor. So, on Feb 12th, 2024, I began my first of 30 daily radiation treatments. Radiation honestly wasn't terrible. The worst part was the monotony of daily having to make a trip to the hospital for my treatment, but even that was made much easier by friends and family who were either able to take me to my treatment or watch our kiddos. My last radiation treatment was on March 22, 2024.

The final step in my cancer journey to date is chemotherapy, which brings us to the present day. As I alluded to in previous posts, I have chosen a chemo drug that comes in a pill format, so I thankfully will not need a port put in, nor will I have to go into the hospital for chemo infusions. However, my chemotherapy treatment will last for an entire year. The treatment is broken into 12, month-long cycles. I will take a chemo pill the first five days of each cycle, then recover for the remaining three weeks of the cycle - and then go again.

Cycle 1 started on April 22, 2024, and cycle 2 started on May 20, 2024. I should finish about 11 months from now, in April/May 2025.

Beyond chemotherapy - it sounds like it is simply a wait-and-see approach. I will have regular MRI scans to check the status of the tumor, but our hope and prayer is that the tumor will not start to re-grow for many, many years — hopefully never. If it were to start re-grow, all of these same treatment options would be back on the table.

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I want to make sure to mention how incredibly grateful we are for the support of our friends and family. Getting a life-altering medical diagnosis is not easy. There are moments when you wonder how you might get through the day, but knowing that God has placed so many incredible people in our lives to walk this road with us makes it much more manageable. The incredible support we have received over the last six months has felt like the very real and tangible hands and feet of God supporting us through this. You all have brought us meals, watched our children, finished yard projects around our house, prayed for us, walked with us, cried with us, talked with us, and just generally loved our entire family so well. If this is not a beautiful picture of the body of Christ at work, I don't know what is.

I wanted to start this channel to share my journey and connect with many of you I don't see regularly. I pray you will see God's faithfulness shine through my posts.

I am far from perfect in my daily walk with the Lord, and I struggle every day with this diagnosis and what life looks like living with it. Honestly, one of my struggles is being prideful and portraying this journey as being easier than it actually is. But God has also shown himself to be Good many times over the last six months, and even though I still struggle, the following truths have been tremendously helpful to me.

As hard as this journey is, I remain confident in Romans 8:28: "God is working all things for good for those that love him." I don't know what the good is in my cancer journey—and I may never know—but I have faith that God knows, so I will trust him.

My salvation and everlasting happiness don't depend on me beating cancer but on God's promise to love and save me. God has already fought and won the battle that actually matters for my salvation.

I know that I'm in the fight of my life, and only a sovereign God will get me through. Thankfully, I serve a God who will bring glory to himself through my cancer, work it for my good, and never abandon me. This assurance is carrying me through my cancer journey, and I pray that it will carry you through whatever suffering comes your way.

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Chemotherapy finished in January 2025. The MRI brain scans are clean. The rest is in God's hands.

I am still walking this story...

Before your eyes glaze over with thoughts of high school grammar class, please stick with me here. It’s going to be helpful to follow some of our conversations to know some basic terminology.

A “ruck” could refer to the actual backpack style bag (NOUN) that you carry on your back that is generally loaded with weight of some type, but it also can refer to the act of taking said ruck and going for a walk with it, which is then called a ruck (VERB).

So while it might sound a bit silly, you could accurately say “I am going to go grab my ruck (NOUN) and go for a ruck (VERB) and anyone regularly reading this blog should know exactly what you mean. 😁

Faster is not always better.

In fact, I'd argue that in our modern world of speed and efficiency, we've created an entire generation of people who suffer from a complete lack of patience.

The worst part is that we don't even realize it.

We don't see anything wrong with it. We don't know — or can't remember — anything different.

We don't know how to be still.

We don't know how to wait.

For anything.

Instant gratification has become so ingrained in our culture that five seconds of slow Wi-Fi feels like an eternity. Five seconds for a website to load on a phone that lets us find a ride, pay for it, and watch it make its way to our exact spot on a map (sometimes without a human even driving it) — all from a small, magical slab of glass with no buttons and no cables. Five seconds, and we grumble. We never step back to marvel at what's actually happening, or at how astonishing it is that any of it is possible at all.

We've lost all sense of perspective.

And we are worse off for it. Our lives are worse for it. Our souls are worse for it.

I've been trying to find small ways throughout my day to slow down and intentionally build patience. Because as often as I tell my kids, "Just be thankful you have the internet — when I was a kid…" (yes, I'm old enough to say those things now), I suffer from the very same impatience. I'm easily frustrated waiting for almost anything.

Which brings me to slow coffee.

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Much has been written about coffee, and I'm not the one to add to it. There are many who are infinitely more qualified to talk about the merits of coffee than I am. So I won't debate one brewing method over another or get into tasting notes, flavor profiles, or bean acidity. I use a glass French press because I love the taste of the coffee it produces, but you can use any pour-over method you like and enjoy the same benefits.

What I do want to tell you about is how transformative it's been to set aside eight minutes each morning to make my coffee.

Four minutes for the kettle to boil, while I grab a spoon, measure and scoop the grounds into the press, and take down one of my two favorite mugs. The water comes to a boil. I pour it slowly over the grounds and watch them bloom — that first swell of foam as the hot water wakes the coffee up and the smell fills the kitchen. I stir gently, set the lid and plunger on top, and wait.

Four more minutes for the grounds to steep. Then I press the plunger down slowly, until the filter has pushed everything to the bottom, and pour a hot cup.

Those four minutes of waiting — and the four before them — are often one of the highlights of my day. Not because anything happens. Because nothing has to.

There is nothing productive about them. I can't speed them up. The coffee will steep in its own time, no matter how I feel about it, and for once, I'm not trying to bend the clock to my will. In our world that asks every minute to earn its keep, doing one small thing slowly, with my hands, for no reason but to do it well, turns out to be quite powerful. And in that deliberate slowness, something opens up.

I pray. Not eloquently — usually it's little more than thanks and a few requests. I think. I sit in the quiet. And somewhere in those minutes I remember, before the inbox and the demands and the running list of everything I'm already behind on, that the day in front of me is a gift.

I'm not earning anything in those minutes, and that matters to me. I'm not building spiritual credit or checking a box that makes God think better of me. He could not love me more than He already does in Christ; no amount of stillness adds a thing to that. The quiet is not the price of His presence. It's only that the noise of a hurried life makes His presence so easy to miss, and slowing down clears enough space to notice what was already true — that He is here, that He is near, that "in [His] presence there is fullness of joy" (Psalm 16:11). The joy was never something the coffee produced. It was Christ's all along, waiting to be received by a heart slow enough to hold still and take it.

Brother Lawrence, who wrote "Practicing the Presence of God," was a monk who learned to know the nearness of God not in the cathedral but in the monastery kitchen — elbow-deep in dishwater, he found that the God worshiped on Sunday is just as present on a Tuesday over a sink. Or a French press. The sacred isn't reserved for the sanctuary. It meets us in the ordinary, in the most unremarkable corners of an unremarkable day, if we will only slow down long enough to encounter it.

I won't pretend it always works. Some mornings, my mind races ahead to the day's problems, the prayer comes out distracted or not at all, and I press the plunger down, already gone from the moment. Grace covers those mornings, too. I'm still learning. But more often than not, those eight minutes set the whole day on a different footing. Not because the coffee is magic, but because I've begun the morning by remembering who God is and who I am before Him.

Dallas Willard once warned that hurry does more to corrode the soul than almost anything else. Eight minutes is my small act of resistance — a daily, deliberate refusal to be rushed. A way of saying, before the world has its chance to make demands, that I belong to Someone, and that the day is His before it is ever mine.

And then I pour the cup.

Joy.