I Have Felt Like a Fraudulent Purchase

Someone tried to do the math on me once and decided I was a multimillionaire. I laughed. I wish.

The truth runs the other way. A person buys a guide, reads the whole thing in one sitting, then tells their bank it was fraud, so the money comes back to them. The work gets taken, and the pay gets clawed back the same afternoon.

Here is the part I have not said out loud. I know what that feels like from the inside. I have felt like a fraudulent purchase most of my life.

I was an army brat. We moved, and we moved. By the time I learned a place, I was gone from it. I never built the kind of friendships other kids had. I had a few odd ducks like me, and I was grateful for them, but I was never in the room that mattered. Never the respectable kind. I was the weird one. The freak. The kid who got the look that says you do not belong here.

So I have spent a lot of years asking the same question. What am I even doing here.

Later, I got close to some big names. Real accounts, real brands, the people everyone wants to stand near. And standing next to them taught me one thing fast. I was not one of them. I was the odd duck who got let in the door for a minute and then watched it close.

I will tell you what that did to me. I started chasing it. I wanted to show up in your inbox and be seen on Substack. I wanted the in crowd to finally count me in. And to chase that, I let other voices get loud enough to drown out the only One who has never once made me feel less than.

The dearest friend I have, outside of my wife, is the Lord Jesus Christ.

“A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” Proverbs 18:24

He has been calling the whole time. And I have let lesser things screen His calls so I could go knock on doors that were never going to open for a man like me.

Most mornings now, I am at my desk by quarter to six. Blank screen. Birds outside. The street starting to wake up. And I feel it. The crack. The quiet dread of sitting in a prison I built myself.

My son gets up and heads to work. My grandson wakes. My wife and I steal a few minutes together, and then I come back to this little room and write into the void again, wondering if any of it lands.

Some of you will read this and say there he goes again, the marketer, always selling something.

Maybe. But hear me. A year ago, I jumped off a cliff. I left the steady thing and bet everything that this is what I am supposed to do. I am a man. I do not know the future. I cannot see the bottom. I only know Him.

Peter knew that feeling. He sat in a boat in the dark with the wind against him, and the Lord told him to come. So he put one leg over the side and stepped onto water that had no business holding a grown man up.

“And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.” Matthew 14:29

He did not walk because the water was solid. He walked because the One calling him was.

So that is where I am. At the end of my rope. Odd duck. Never fit. Still here. And done letting His calls go to voicemail.

It is time to walk.

If you want more of the honest kind of writing, then walk with me. Become a paid subscriber and help me keep getting up at quarter to six to do it. No tricks. Just a man, a Bible, and a blank screen he keeps showing up to.