I. What We Think Discernment Is (And What It Isn’t)
Many people think discernment begins the moment they choose a path.
It doesn’t.
For some, it begins much earlier.
Not in the choices they make—
but in the choices they refuse.
My life makes the most sense when I look at the negative space.
Not the lines I drew,
but the ones I never let myself draw.
The story beneath my calling isn’t a tale of ambition or achievement.
It’s a record of everything I walked away from
because it would have cost me my agency,
my coherence,
my soul.
II. The First Knowing (Age 12)
I met myself young.
Around twelve, I began to recognize the shape of who I was—
not through ease,
but through rupture.
That year, I was misdiagnosed and treated for symptoms
that weren’t the illness itself.
Medicine for side effects,
treatments for what wasn’t wrong,
a season of being misunderstood
by people who meant well
but didn’t know how to see fully.
And then the truth surfaced:
chronic appendicitis.
I became one of the first laparoscopic surgeries in our hospital—
the procedure broadcast live
to the waiting room outside.
In that strange mixture of pain, confusion, and clarity,
I learned something essential:
Systems can misunderstand you.
People can treat the symptoms around you
without ever touching the truth within you.
And yet—your body, your spirit, your inner knowing
keeps insisting on what is real.
My first knowing came through rupture.
And it taught me to trust the quiet truth inside myself
even when the world could not yet see it.
III. Young Adulthood: The Early Refusals
I said no to professional school,
not out of inability,
but because something in me knew
that pedigree can swallow presence whole.
So I chose hotel management instead—
a path closer to people than prestige.
And when I graduated,
I said no again.
No to the hotel industry and its culture of exploited labor,
no to the hours that would wring the humanity out of me.
So I stepped into BPO—
a service profession with boundaries, dignity, and room to breathe.
Even there, I refused the race.
I said no to competing with peers.
No ladders, no rivalry, no comparison.
Comparison has a way of amputating the soul.
But here’s the truth that matters:
I grew anyway.
I grew in responsibility.
I grew in care.
I grew in presence.
I grew in leadership that didn’t require winning over others.
And the path opened in front of me—
wide enough to carry me across an ocean.
I migrated to the United States
not by strategy or ambition,
but by alignment.
By being myself in a world
that kept expecting me to be someone else.
This was the first proof
that my refusals weren’t avoidance—
they were direction.
IV. Age 25: The Refusal That Changed Everything
I was 25 when discernment sharpened.
When I found out I was becoming a dad,
every fear, every escape route, every what-if lit up at once.
There are whole lives built on that moment of running.
But I stayed.
Not because I was ready.
Not because I was brave.
But because something in me refused to abandon
the life entrusted to me.
And then came the next no—
one just as defining.
I said no to a career that would take me away from home.
No to travel.
No to ambition that required absence.
No to the version of success that demanded I become
a weekend father and a weekday stranger.
I didn’t just choose fatherhood.
I chose a life I could inhabit.
Presence became my first vocation.
Fatherhood my first calling.
Care my first theology.
That decision didn’t make my life easier—
it made my life true.
V. Adulthood: Protecting the Shape of My Soul
Adulthood only deepened the pattern.
I didn’t stay in a marriage where I could no longer be present.
I didn’t let illness steal my spirit.
I didn’t pursue the possibility of future pregnancy once radiation introduced uncertainty into my biology.
I didn’t let leadership turn into extraction.
I didn’t pursue wealth as if meaning could be stored for later.
I didn’t optimize, perform, or harden myself to survive.
I didn’t lose my agency—
even when every system around me rewarded surrender.
I didn’t lose my coherence—
even when drift would have been easier.
Every “no” felt small at the time.
But when I trace them now,
I see a throughline:
I refused to become someone I could not inhabit.
VI. The Grace That Held Me
And this is where another truth lives—
one I cannot pretend I carried alone.
For all the choices I made,
all the refusals that protected my spirit,
there were people who met those choices
not with resistance,
but with grace.
People who chose to hold me
instead of mould me.
People who allowed me to practice agency
even when it made no sense on paper.
People who didn’t force me into ambition,
didn’t shame me into conformity,
didn’t squeeze me into the shapes
they thought would make my life “safer.”
They didn’t treat my refusals as rebellion.
They treated them as becoming.
And in their holding,
they preserved the parts of me
that would one day become pastoral.
Without their grace,
my agency would have turned brittle.
Their presence kept it alive.
My discernment grew in the negative space of what I refused—
but it survived in the gentle space of those
who refused to make me someone I wasn’t.
VII. The Refusal to Disappear
And then came the most recent refusal—
the one that revealed just how far discernment had carried me.
When I stepped away from extraction-driven work,
I didn’t just say yes to the next job.
I was unwilling to return to places
where leaders cared more about control than care,
more about outcomes than people,
more about performance than presence.
So I waited for somewhere aligned—
somewhere coherent—
somewhere that didn’t ask me to trade my agency
for a paycheck or a title.
But while I waited,
I refused to disappear.
I refused to let the quiet season
turn into drift or numbness.
I refused to let stillness become stagnation.
I refused the temptation to shrink.
So I chose to wash dishes.
Not as desperation,
not as resignation,
but as agency—
a daily rhythm of usefulness, presence, dignity.
A simple declaration:
I will keep showing up to life
even when I am between callings.
And in that small, stubborn faithfulness,
seminary revealed itself—
not as rescue,
not as escape,
but as the next right step
for someone who refuses to live a life
detached from care.
VIII. The Yes Beneath Every No (Christ’s Proximity)
But if my life was shaped by what I refused,
it was equally shaped by what I kept saying yes to—
and all of those yeses came from one quiet source:
Christ’s proximity.
A yes to presence,
because Christ stayed present with me.
A yes to responsibility,
because Christ never ran from His.
A yes to care,
because Christ kept showing me how to hold what hurts
instead of escaping it.
A yes to becoming the kind of person
who does not abandon the people entrusted to them.
A yes to work that honors dignity.
A yes to leadership that protects the human spirit.
A yes to coherence when the world demanded performance.
A yes to agency when systems asked for surrender.
A yes to grace—
the grace Christ gave me,
the grace others extended to me,
and the grace I slowly learned to offer myself.
Every no was guarding a deeper yes.
And every yes was drawn from Christ’s presence beside me,
long before I ever recognized it as calling.
IX. What Discernment Really Is
This is the part I didn’t understand until now:
Discernment isn’t seminary.
Seminary is simply the first time anyone else can see
the discernment I’ve already done.
Discernment is the lifelong practice
of protecting the shape of your soul—
through every refusal, every return,
every moment you choose coherence over collapse.
Some people find their calling by chasing a dream.
I found mine by refusing a life
that would have made me someone else.
The long corridor of my refusals
has led me here—
not to escape the world,
but to serve it
without abandoning myself.
Some callings arrive as a revelation.
Mine arrived as a lifetime of quiet, stubborn, faithful no.
And now, at last, a yes.