The Day I Stopped Trying to Be God

It wasn’t a mystical mountaintop that undid me.

It was a pew in Oregon.

My wife—thirty-two, fragile, in a wheelchair—sat beside me.

The kids squirmed like caffeinated Pentecostals.

Then came the toy.

It hit the floor with a sound like cymbals crashing—shattering the Eucharistic silence with a clatter fit for Sinai.

I felt my chest tighten, heat rising like a tide.

This was Mass, for heaven’s sake.

Couldn’t we just have one moment—just one—of sacred stillness?

I gave them the look.

You know the one.

That parental death-stare that somehow says both, “You’re embarrassing me in front of God,” and “We’re definitely talking about this in the car.”

But under the surface, I was unraveling.

Frustration curdled into shame.

And not just at them—at me.

At my inability to hold it all together.

At the slow collapse of the scaffolding I’d built—the control, decorum, duty—now wobbling under the weight of real life.

I was mad that my wife was sick.

But I was more mad that the burden I carried had really just outgrown my strength.

This wasn’t mere irritation.

It was a slow-motion collapse of the soul.

And then it happened.

Right there in the Eucharistic Prayer—while the priest lifted the host—something inside me broke open.

Not loudly.

Not all at once.

Just… open.

And I heard it. 

Not with my ears, but in the stillness underneath all the noise:

They’re not yours. They’re Mine.

That was it.

Not a command. Not a rebuke.

A gentle reminder.

I wasn’t so much their father. I was their caretaker. For Him.

Their true Father—the One who knit them together, who counts every hair on their heads—He was already holding them.

And for the first time—I let go.

I handed them over.

Not as idealized, well-behaved little humans.

But as they were: noisy, needy, toy-dropping, and beloved.

And in that surrender, something lifted.

Not the weight of responsibility.

But the crushing lie that I had to be God for them.

I didn’t.

That moment wasn’t an instruction.

It was a revelation.

A rupture in the illusion of self-sufficiency.

I had been living as if it all depended on me.

But it never did.

It depended on grace.

And always had.

The Gospel isn’t just good news.

It’s power.

Right there in a wooden pew, buried in sound and struggle, I was given peace.

Not by silencing the chaos—

But by surrendering it.

And yet—why is that so hard to believe?

I submit that it’s because beneath our daily anxiety, there’s something deeper going on.

Not just stress.

A kind of spiritual dislocation.

We’ve forgotten who God is.

And therefore, we’ve forgotten who we are.