There is a moment I keep returning to my memory.
I was standing in the middle of a noisy gathering, voices competing, music pressing against the walls, conversations pulling in every direction. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I noticed something unsettling: I had become a different person. Irritable. Closed off. Reactive. The John who had prayed that morning and felt the quiet peace of God’s presence was nowhere to be found.
It was not the noise that troubled me most. It was the realisation that followed: I had let it in. The outside had walked through a door I had not even known was open, and it had rearranged everything inside.
That moment became a teacher. It was the beginning of my understanding that the holistic life I longed for could not be built from the outside in. It had to be built from the inside out.
Two Battles, Every Single Day.
As I walk this journey, I have come to recognise two running battles that do not cease, not on good days, not on productive days, not even on spiritual days.
The first battle is outside me
It comes in the form of people, their words, their opinions, their expectations. It comes in the form of circumstances: the plans that fall apart, the disappointments that arrive uninvited, the noise of a world that never seems to stop demanding my attention. It comes in the form of parties and gatherings where the social pressure to perform can quietly strip a man of his own centre.
These are not evil things in themselves. People are gifts. Community is life. But when I am not rooted, even good things can destabilise me.
The second battle is within me.
This is the deeper war, and the more honest one. It is the battle of impulse over intention, of reaction over reflection. It is the place where fear whispers before courage can speak. It is where old wounds shape new responses, where pride disguises itself as principle, and where the gap between who I want to be and who I actually am becomes painfully visible.
The within is where everything is decided. The outside merely reveals it.
How Jesus Navigated Both.
I have spent time sitting with the Gospels, not just for inspiration but for instruction, watching how Jesus moved through the world without being consumed by it.
He was not untouched by the outside. He wept at Lazarus’ tomb. He turned over tables in the temple. He withdrew to lonely places when the crowds pressed in too hard. He was fully present to the human experience, not above it.
But here is what strikes me: the outside never defined Him. When the Pharisees tried to trap Him with questions, He answered from a place no trap could reach. When the disciples panicked in the storm, He slept, not because He was indifferent, but because something within Him was not moved by what the waves were doing. When the crowd wanted to make Him king by force, He simply withdrew. Their agenda could not redirect His.
He lived from the inside out. And the inside He lived from was love.
Not sentiment. Not politeness. Not the kind of warmth that disappears when someone disappoints you. The love Jesus described and embodied was agape: a chosen, cultivated, costly orientation of the heart toward others. He said it would be the defining mark of His followers. Not their theology, not their performance, but their love for one another (John 13:35).
That love does not come from outside circumstances. It is sown from within. And it grows or withers depending on what we feed it.
The Mirror I Could Not Look Away From.
The more I have grown, the more I have been confronted by an uncomfortable truth: I had been letting the outside define me for most of my life.
The moods of others determined my mood. The approval of people I respected determined my confidence. The absence of expected outcomes determined my peace. I was not living I was reacting. And I was reacting from a place within me that had never fully been surrendered.
Searching deeper, I began to find something I had not expected: a reservoir of power I had not fully accessed. Something placed within me by the Spirit of God, a capacity for love, for resilience, for steady presence that circumstances had no authority over. Paul called it ‘the Spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2 Timothy 1:7)’ . I had read that verse many times. But I had not lived it.
I was beginning to understand why. The power was real. But I had been sowing to the wrong field. Sowing to the outside chasing validation, avoiding discomfort, managing impressions and wondering why I felt so empty at the end of each day.
To sow to the Spirit (Galatians 6:8) means to feed the inner life deliberately: through prayer, through Scripture, through stillness, through the slow and unglamorous work of letting God examine what is actually happening inside you.
Prayer That Became a Posture
There came a moment quiet, unremarkable when I stopped trying to manage my two battles and instead offered them both.
‘Lord, I give all of this to You. Keep searching my heart. Lead me in the right path.’
It was not a one-time prayer. It became a posture. A way of beginning each day with open hands rather than clenched fists. A way of saying: ‘I am not the whole story here. You are.’
And slowly, still slowly, I am learning what it means to live from that place.
What I know now is this: God does not want pieces of me. He does not want my Sunday self or my ministry self or the version of me that has it together enough to be seen. He wants the whole person, the reactions and the impulses, the strength and the fear, the love that is growing and the bitterness that still needs uprooting. He wants all of it, because He wants to make something whole out of it.
Wholeness, I am learning, is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of a love strong enough to hold you through it, a love that was planted within you before you were even aware of the battle.
That love is the foundation. Everything else gets built on top of it.
And I am still building.