Didn't See It Coming

Didn't See It Coming Plot Summary

Introduction

I remember the day I discovered my blind spot. It wasn't dramatic - just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon meeting when a colleague gently pointed out something about my leadership style that everyone seemed to know except me. My immediate instinct was defensive dismissal, but something in her tone made me pause. What if I couldn't see what others could? The revelation wasn't comfortable, but it changed everything about how I approached my work and relationships moving forward. Life's most significant challenges often catch us by surprise not because they appear without warning, but because we've developed blind spots that prevent us from seeing the signs. These blind spots emerge in our most successful moments, in our comfortable routines, and in the midst of our greatest certainties. Whether it's the slow drift toward cynicism, the subtle compromise of character, the increasing disconnection in our relationships, or the emptiness that follows achievement, these challenges come to everyone. The question isn't whether you'll face them, but whether you'll recognize them before they fundamentally alter your path. Through revealing stories and practical wisdom, this journey through life's unexpected challenges offers not just identification of these common blind spots but compassionate guidance for navigating through them toward a life of greater purpose, connection, and authentic success.

Chapter 1: The Silent Creep of Cynicism: From Optimism to Disillusionment

Roger and Mary walked through the church doors one Sunday morning, clearly carrying the weight of life's struggles. As the pastor noticed them, he felt immediately drawn to help this couple who seemed to represent exactly the kind of ministry opportunity he had entered pastoral work to pursue. Their needs were evident - financial struggles, relationship challenges, and a general sense of life's overwhelming demands. With genuine compassion, he invested countless hours visiting their apartment, praying with them, helping them navigate crises, and mobilizing church resources to meet their practical needs. For months, the pastor poured himself into this relationship, spending more time with this family than any other in his first decade of leadership. When their two-year-old niece began attending with them, running up and down the aisles during services, he even defended the family against complaints from older church members. His investment was total and sincere. Then came the Sunday when everything changed. Roger grabbed his niece and stormed out of the church, loudly announcing, "This place isn't for us anymore. You don't care about us! We're leaving!" When the pastor followed up, Roger's accusations cut deep: "You haven't done enough for us." Despite all the time, resources, and personal investment, Roger insisted the church had abandoned his family at their lowest point. The couple left the church permanently, leaving the pastor shocked, angry, and heartbroken. In that moment, the pastor felt cynicism welling up inside him. An inner voice whispered: "Everything you invested was a total waste. If he did that to you, others will too. Don't care like you used to. Don't invest in people like you used to. People will just use you and reject you in the end anyway. There's no point." Most cynics are former optimists. The pastor had entered ministry with hope, enthusiasm, and genuine care for people. But experiences like this one with Roger and Mary, followed by other disappointments and betrayals, began to erode that optimism. The pattern of cynicism typically follows three stages: first, you know too much (your experience has shown you the darker side of humanity); second, you project past failures onto new situations (assuming new people will hurt you like previous ones did); and finally, you decide to stop trusting, hoping, and believing altogether. This progression explains why many older people seem to land firmly on either the happiness or misery side of life. Cynicism, if left unchecked, eventually wins or loses - but you won't just be a little cynical or a little hopeful. The die is cast as you age, and the concrete hardens. The battle for your soul is whether hope or cynicism will prevail, and understanding this struggle is the first step toward ensuring that hope, not cynicism, defines your future story.

Chapter 2: When Character Falters: Success on the Outside, Compromise Within

During my first summer as a law intern, I experienced something I can only describe as supernatural. I was working at my hometown firm under a senior partner I'd known since childhood - a man who shared my faith and whose ethical standards had attracted me to the position. The firm was passing my ethical test, and by August, they had indicated they would invite me back after graduation. My career path seemed clear and promising. One afternoon in late summer, I stood in a partner's empty office working on a file. Looking up from the desk, I had a vision of myself twenty years in the future. In this vision, I was forty-four years old with a thriving law practice. I was extremely successful by external measures, but morally bankrupt. My marriage and family had fallen apart, my values were compromised, and I wasn't anything like the person I had thought I would become despite my outward success. I knew instantly that this vision meant I wasn't going to practice law, though I had wanted to be a lawyer since I was eight years old. Stunned, I walked to the boardroom to put some books away. Looking out the bay window, I felt prompted to look down the street where I could see the window of the pastor's office in the church I grew up in. Inside my spirit, I heard: "You should be in there." This was the beginning of my call to ministry, something I had never previously considered. Beyond redirecting my career path, this experience revealed a tension almost everyone eventually faces: the potential disconnect between who we are and who we know we should be. This pull has been constant in my life, even in ministry. You would think being in ministry would inoculate me from moral compromise, but it doesn't. All of us can cheat our values anywhere. Most of us know people who have sold out, who've given in to greed, self-absorption, blind ambition, or ruthlessness. But how does a person get there? How does one end up successful on the outside but corroded on the inside? The path usually involves a thousand little compromises: the half-truths, the rationalizations, the excuses. You're not a terrible person, but you're certainly not at your best either. And if you got dead honest with yourself, you'd say that although you haven't sold your soul to the devil, you've rented it. As a young leader, I was convinced that competency determined capacity and success. I believed that if I continued learning, sharpening my skills, and developing myself, my potential would be unlimited. But a few years into adult life, I began to notice highly competent people disqualified from leadership - smart, skilled individuals with impressive credentials who resigned or were forced out because of addictions, affairs, embezzlement, or simply being insufferable to work with. Their competency couldn't compensate for their character failures. The truth I eventually discovered transforms everything: character, not competency, determines capacity. Your character is your lid. And character becomes your legacy - your competency leaves the first impression, but your character leaves the lasting one. When you're no longer breathing, people won't be reciting quarterly results at your funeral; they'll be remembering whether you loved well, forgave easily, served others, and lived with integrity. The good news is that this story isn't over yet, and progress in character, even after failures, becomes part of what people remember about you.

Chapter 3: Digital Disconnection: Why We're More Connected Yet Feel More Alone

I remember getting my first smartphone when BlackBerry was king. My model was the first color screen the company ever released, and I was mesmerized. Suddenly, I could be connected anytime, anywhere - even at dinner, during family night, and on vacation. My family wasn't nearly as enthralled with my new phone as I was. As the only one with a device in my house, all I could see was my perspective. I ignored people with great abandon while I scrolled and clicked, thinking my new technology was the best thing ever. Everything changed when, a few years later, my loved ones all got phones and screens of their own. Suddenly, I began to feel ignored. I couldn't believe my wife would text a friend while sitting next to me in the car rather than engage in conversation with me. I was mystified that during meaning-of-life conversations with my son around the kitchen island, he would only occasionally look up and grunt poorly timed affirmations while smiling at whatever his friends were saying online. Nothing feels quite as strange as people treating you as poorly as you regularly treat them. It brings out an indignation that only the hypocritical can truly appreciate. How little did I realize that what I began to experiment with back then would soon become the new normal for nearly everyone. It's easy to blame technology for this disconnection. Parents worry about their children's addiction to gaming or social media. Spouses blame five-inch or sixty-five-inch screens for marriage problems. But is technology really the villain? What if, despite its challenges and dangers, technology isn't good or evil but simply reveals and amplifies what's already there? Saying technology is evil is like saying paper is evil. Paper has been used to craft love letters and issue death threats, to write constitutions and declarations of war. Is paper evil? Technology does a good job of revealing what's already inside you. If you're narcissistic by nature, social media gives you a new platform for your self-centeredness. If you lean toward workaholism, you'll always have access to your office as you carry your devices everywhere. Technology didn't create these issues; it just reveals and amplifies them. My tendency to disconnect from people goes back to childhood. I moved frequently growing up, attending three schools in three years. I distinctly remember making a decision in fifth grade: I wouldn't make new friends anymore. It was too painful. I could make it on my own. Though we eventually settled and I finished school with the same kids, I felt like I never fully belonged. I was a permanent outsider, and my tendency to keep people at a distance was set. Technology has simply given me a more convenient way to maintain that disconnection. Two vital elements seem to be disappearing in our increasingly disconnected culture: genuine conversation and confession. Conversations are devolving into exchanges of monologues among people who don't seem genuinely interested in one another. And confession - the practice of honestly acknowledging our shortcomings to God and others - is becoming increasingly rare as we develop a collective allergy to the very idea that it's necessary. Without these essential practices, the perfect storm for disconnection forms, leaving us holding the illusion of connection through our devices while remaining fundamentally alone.

Chapter 4: Embracing Change: How to Stay Relevant When Culture Shifts

When Toni and I got married, we were students in our mid-twenties with no money. We accepted any furniture anyone gave us - an ugly avocado-green couch from my friend Alyson, dilapidated seventy-year-old church chairs that I glued back together and painted. We knew none of it would win design awards, but free beat chic every time. As we moved into our thirties and forties, those hand-me-downs eventually left our home. When money became available, we replaced them piece by piece with items we actually liked. When you sink a few thousand dollars into a well-made living room set, you value it differently than the purple chair from your uncle's garage. There are two reasons for this attachment: first, you chose it intentionally; second, because it's better made, it doesn't wear out. And if it's perfectly good and still works, why would you get rid of it? This explains a trend that puzzled me for years: why do elderly people often have furniture and decor that's twenty to thirty years out of date? When I started ministry in our little churches as a thirty-year-old, one of my perplexing questions was exactly this. Home visits immersed me in sixties and seventies design - acres of shag carpet, teak furniture museums, and olive-green appliances. It was like stepping into a time machine. Now that I've hit my forties and purchased my own things, my perspective has changed. I find it harder to replace perfectly functional items just because they're growing outdated. But furniture is one thing; your life is another. Irrelevance costs you far more when it permeates what you do, how you communicate, and whom you influence. Irrelevance happens when the language, methods, or styles you use no longer connect to the culture and people around you. You end up speaking a language people no longer understand or appreciate. The once-sharp leader finds himself out of work at fifty and almost unemployable. The filmmaker everybody watched a decade ago shows her reels to an audience that grows smaller and older every year. The entrepreneur who had several thriving businesses in his thirties now peddles ideas that just get blank stares or looks of pity. Rick Warren captured this perfectly: "When the speed of change around an organization is faster than the speed of change inside the organization, the organization becomes irrelevant." That's also true for people. The gap between how quickly you change and how quickly things change is called irrelevance. The bigger the gap, the more irrelevant you become. Therefore, the fastest path to irrelevance is simple: stop changing. Most of us live in the decade where our tastes, knowledge, and experiences were shaped. We pick an era we love and, for the most part, stay frozen there. The past has a nostalgia that the future never does. We're more comfortable living with what we know and like than living in what we don't know. This helps explain why cultural change catches so many people off guard - culture never asks permission to change. It just changes. Nobody knocks on your door to ask if it's okay to make middle seats on airplanes less desirable or to shift acceptable terminology for describing ethnic groups. The question becomes: How do you fight irrelevance? The answer is both simple and challenging - you keep changing, learning, and evolving. You learn to love the mission more than the methods. When mission and methods compete, change your methods. The challenge is that far too many people love their methods more than they love their mission. If the methods are more important than the mission, you die.

Chapter 5: The Pride Paradox: When Insecurity Drives Arrogance

A few years ago, I embarked on a twelve-month spending fast. I had been inspired by my assistant, who decided she would not spend discretionary money on herself for a year. I thought this would be good for me, given my appetite for spending. My basic rules included no new clothes (only secondhand), no new technology, and no new optional items. Three months into my fast, I was about an hour from home heading to an appointment when hot tea spilled all over my pants. The stain was in an extremely awkward location, making it look like I'd been unable to reach the bathroom in time. My immediate thought was: "I need to buy new pants. This definitely qualifies as an exception to my spending fast." As I drove into a Walmart parking lot, I began debating with myself: "You could wear those pants, you know. They're just stained." "No, that would be embarrassing." "If you bought pants at Walmart, that doesn't even qualify as breaking a spending fast, right?" Eventually, I realized what was really driving my decision: "Basically, you want to protect your image. You're too embarrassed to be the guy with the big stain in an awkward location. And now you're an elitist about Walmart because you're too stylish to shop for clothes there." Pride pushed me through the door of Walmart. But as I walked in, I became increasingly convicted. Instead of going to the clothing section, I went to the men's restroom where I spotted a turbo hand dryer. I spent ten minutes at the dryer, which was positioned slightly outside the door, giving customers at several checkout lines a front-row view of me trying to dry my pants. The stain largely disappeared, and I left the store mostly dry. My lesson that day? I realized how proud I am. I didn't want to be seen with dirty clothes or leave anyone with the impression I'd become incontinent. I was afraid people would judge me or think less of me. I didn't have the humility to risk being misunderstood, judged, or seen as uncool, not even for an hour until I could get back home. Pride is insidious, creeping up on us uninvited and unnoticed. It's so easy to spot in others but much harder to see in ourselves. While the most obvious form is narcissism - people who genuinely think they're God's gift to humanity - most of us experience pride in more subtle ways. In fact, pride often emerges out of insecurity rather than inflated self-importance. How do you know if insecurity is driving your pride? Several signs indicate this: you constantly compare yourself to others; your self-worth fluctuates with your latest performance; you can't genuinely celebrate someone else's success; you squeeze gifted people out of your life; and you want some say in everything. These behaviors reveal an unhealthy focus on yourself, whether from feeling superior or inferior. Left unchecked, pride hardens your heart. It makes you feel superior to others, becomes increasingly judgmental, avoids accountability, and ultimately leads to isolation. The only person your pride impresses is you. Nobody else is attracted to your arrogance or self-absorption. People will peel away from you as quickly as they can, or maybe they'll tolerate you because they have to. A life devoted to self ultimately leaves you alone - that's exactly where pride leads you. The antidote to pride is humility, which can be cultivated through specific practices: maintaining gratitude no matter what you achieve; taking the low place and serving others; keeping your notebook open to learn from anyone; pushing other people into the spotlight; and getting ridiculously honest with yourself and God. Through these practices, you'll discover that humility wins you what pride never will: the affection of others and a richer, more fulfilling life.

Chapter 6: Burnout: Falling Off the Cliff and Finding Your Way Back

It was 2006. My family and I had just landed back in Toronto after being at North Point Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. I had just delivered what many considered a "grand slam home run" keynote speech to twenty-five hundred leaders from around the world. In many ways, I felt like I was at the top of the world - speaking at one of the most influential churches in America, leading the fastest-growing church in our denomination in Canada, attracting national and international attention. When the plane touched down in Toronto, I felt like I fell off a cliff. Throughout my thirties, people warned me about burnout, but I wasn't the best listener. I thought I had come to the edge of burnout a few times but had always managed to pull myself back with some rest, a vacation, or scaling back my hours. I thought I could do that forever. Until I couldn't. That's the thing about burnout - once you fall off the cliff, there's nothing to grab onto anymore. You're in free fall. I spiraled down for about three months before hitting bottom. Within a month after returning from Atlanta, my energy dropped to historic lows, along with my motivation and mood. The drive that used to get me up early disappeared. My productivity tanked. I found sermon writing difficult, connecting with people challenging, and even basic tasks like answering emails nearly impossible. Most disturbing was my transformation from natural extrovert to someone with an almost anthropophobic reaction to people. I became deeply antisocial, resisting going out and not wanting to talk to anyone other than my wife and kids. When we did go out, I would park the car in the driveway and beg my wife to let me not go in. When forced to attend, I would try to hide my six-foot-two frame behind my five-foot-three wife, hoping she would shield me from humanity. Perhaps most frightening was the loss of hope. As an optimistic person by nature, I found hope hard to come by during this period. I lost hope that God could ever use me again. I began to wonder if I could ever be of use to anybody. By late summer, for the first time in my life, I began to seriously think that suicide might be the best option. If I had lost hope and was no good to anyone, perhaps the best solution was to be no more. Burnout is complicated, with physical, spiritual, relational, and emotional components. Physically, I had been running hard for decades. Spiritually, I never lost my faith, but I couldn't feel it anymore - my prayers seemed to bounce off the ceiling. Relationally, it felt like people had been taking small slices out of me for years without my replenishing. Emotionally, counseling had revealed how much of my interior life was skewed by insecurity, jealousy, fear, and a deep misunderstanding that love was earned through performance. Recovery came slowly through the love and assistance of my wife, church board, leadership team, close friends, family, counselor, and God. The process included telling someone about my condition rather than keeping it to myself; developing a circle of support; continuing to lean into God even when I couldn't feel Him; extensive rest (including ten hours of sleep daily for a month); finding activities to distract from the pain; doing what I could rather than focusing on what I couldn't; avoiding big decisions; grieving accumulated losses; reopening my heart; and learning to live in a way that would help me thrive tomorrow. Today, more than a decade later, I have more energy and enthusiasm in my fifties than I've ever had. I've come to see that God was doing something profound through my burnout - getting rid of parts of me that worked against myself, against Him, and against others. He was opening new parts of my soul I had never seen, forgiving me, and helping me to forgive myself. If God wants to go deep in your life, it's because He wants to take you far. And though it may take years to reach this point, you may one day look back with gratitude for the breaking and rebuilding process that made you whole.

Chapter 7: Beyond Empty Success: Finding Purpose When Dreams Come True

I know exactly how I felt on June 29, 2015. It was the day my internet dreams came true. On that single day, 436,000 people showed up on my blog in a twenty-four-hour period. For an average mortal like me, that's equivalent to every person in Minneapolis or Tulsa reading what I'd written. By the end of the week, the post had reached over a million readers and had over a quarter million shares. So how did that kind of success make me feel? Surprisingly, the high didn't last nearly as long as I thought it might. Most readers didn't return the following week. It created a sense that perhaps I had peaked or that the traffic was a fluke. And it made me wonder what kind of egomaniac I was to care so much about numbers. Overall, the experience left me feeling far emptier than I expected. This wasn't the first time I'd felt empty after achieving success. It happened after graduating from law school, after our church became one of the largest in our denomination, and after completing multimillion-dollar building projects. Most of us have this notion that "Once I get to a certain place or achieve a certain thing, life will truly start in full, and I'll finally be happy." But it doesn't work that way. You graduate, get married, have kids, land your dream job, reach savings goals, and still there's a quiet-but-real gnawing inside that says it's not all you imagined it would be. Three thousand years ago, a man named Solomon experienced this emptiness at the highest level possible. As the richest and most powerful person alive, he had everything imaginable - wealth beyond measure, unparalleled wisdom, architectural achievements, musical talent, global recognition, and every pleasure available. If anyone had it all, Solomon did. World leaders came from around the globe to sit at his feet, and when they left, they said, "This was even better than the reports we heard." Yet toward the end of his life, Solomon reflected on it all with shocking honesty: "Everything is meaningless...completely meaningless!" He chronicled his journey through knowledge, pleasure, possessions, and achievements, concluding that none of it satisfied the deep longing in his soul. "The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief," he observed. "To increase knowledge only increases sorrow." Solomon tried everything possible to fill the emptiness. He pursued pleasure and self-medication: "I said to myself, 'Come on, let's try pleasure. Let's look for the good things in life.'...I decided to cheer myself with wine." He accumulated possessions on an unimaginable scale, following the familiar progression from "more" to "better" to "different" that characterizes most people's relationship with material things. But his conclusion remained the same: "As I looked at everything I had worked so hard to accomplish, it was all so meaningless—like chasing the wind." What fuels this cycle of emptiness and self-medication? Underneath is an appetite that makes us discontent with what we have while convincing us that what's next will satisfy. "No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied," Solomon observed. The challenge with "more" is there's no finish line - there's no end. How much work, money, food, sex, or power will it take? If your answer is simply "more," you need a better answer. The antidote to emptiness is finding a mission that's bigger than yourself. As long as you keep making your life all about you, you'll experience one round of emptiness after another. Jesus proposed this radical solution: "If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it." In the process of trying to find life by building, acquiring, and succeeding with self-fulfillment as the goal, we lose it. But in the very act of surrender, of giving up our lives for something greater, we find life. The alternative to living for yourself is dying to yourself. Though terrifying in concept, it's actually a good deal because the only thing more terrifying than dying to yourself is living for yourself. A life devoted to self ultimately leaves you alone, while a life devoted to something greater connects you to others and to lasting purpose. When you die to yourself, something greater rises - and in the process of giving your life away, you finally find it.

Summary

Life's unexpected challenges reveal themselves through subtle signs long before they become crises. Cynicism begins not because you don't care but because you do care and got hurt in the process. Character falters through a thousand small compromises that create a widening gap between who you are and who you aspire to be. Disconnection flourishes not primarily because of technology but because of our human tendency to isolate. Irrelevance creeps in when we stop evolving while the world continues changing around us. Pride manifests not just as arrogance but often as insecurity-driven self-focus. Burnout arrives when we ignore our limits and neglect self-care. And emptiness appears paradoxically at the height of success when we've made our own fulfillment the ultimate goal. The common thread through all these challenges is a journey from self-focus to something greater. Whether it's choosing curiosity over cynicism, character development over competency alone, genuine connection over digital distraction, mission over methods, humility over pride, sustainable rhythms over burnout, or purpose beyond personal success - the path forward always involves getting over ourselves. When we stop making life all about us and instead embrace a mission larger than ourselves, we discover that what we feared losing - our comfort, our control, our recognition - pales in comparison to what we gain: authentic relationships, lasting impact, and the profound fulfillment that comes from contributing to something that will outlast us. By recognizing these challenges before they overtake us and responding with wisdom rather than reaction, we transform potential crises into catalysts for our most meaningful growth.

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Carey Nieuwhof

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