What the hell happened to The Opened Box? Yeah, it’s the blunt question I’ve been asking myself and God for about a year now.

You see I assumed that although I was a first-time parent with a full-time job, I would be able to continue growing The Opened Box. Instead, after month three of being a parent, sleep deprivation set in and everything planned for The Opened Box came to a screeching halt.

God blesses other people with what appears to be supernatural energy, where was mine? Pastors, entrepreneurs, entertainers, why couldn’t I have the same ability to grind like they did? Or better yet why couldn’t you just let Tamir sleep through the night?

I mean we were in the middle of building a spiritual movement and our son didn’t start sleeping through the night until he turned 14 or 15 months.  I heard all these success stories during these church planting conferences about people being able to successfully start their churches in situations, my assumption was that we’d be able to do the same. Instead, the sleep deprivation had me feeling like I was in the sunken place. My connection to God was on life support and any momentum we had was completely gone.

Now once Tamir started to sleep through the night I thought OK, it’s on, we are going to get back to this.  Although my mind is ready, my body isn’t there yet and it is frustrating as F*CK!  Unfortunately,  there isn’t much I can do to speed up the process. When my body is off, so is my spirituality. When my body is ready I will be able to re-engage this effort.

Until then, I guess I’m supposed to learn something from all of this right? In looking back I’m realizing I’m spending too much time in the future and past instead of focusing on the current moment. I’m seeing that my stress, tension, and worries stem from a reality or story that doesn’t exist. In this case, the idea that the vision for The Opened Box has to come to fruition now and if I’m not working towards that now I’m falling or wasting time.

So now I’ll focus on taking care of my body. I’ll give what I can until I can give a little bit more. I’ll work on being OK with starting over and whatever happens, happens. And finally, I’ll become less concerned with time.