The Life I Am Still Living
Achievement mattered. Then the questions changed.
On the morning of September 28, 2026, I reached the end of a book that had been asking me to look honestly at the fourth quarter of my life. At 6:51 a.m., I underlined a passage about knowing what matters most and making this season rich for the people I love. Beneath it I wrote one word: “Amen!”
That was not a declaration that I had figured everything out. I was still working, still making plans, still caring for family, and still asking God what came next. It was simply a response to a question that had been following me for some time: If the years ahead are a gift, what will I do with them?
When Achievement Stopped Being Enough
I have spent much of my life solving problems and building relationships. My career moved across technology, infrastructure, energy, consulting, and cybersecurity. I sold, led teams, managed operations, opened opportunities, and worked with executives making consequential decisions. I enjoyed the energy of a good business conversation - the moment a room changes because people realize they have been heard.
For years, achievement was easy to measure: the role, the target, the client, the next opportunity. But life has a way of changing the questions. A career can be full of accomplishment and still leave a person wondering whether accomplishment is the whole story.
Family, Faith and a Different Measure of Success
Family has always been where the deeper story lived. When I list the great celebrations of my life, I begin with my marriage to Connie. Then come our children, their milestones, the grandchildren, family gatherings, hard seasons, and the ordinary moments that never make a resume. The older I get, the more I understand that legacy is not only what people say about us later. It is what they experience from us now.
In 2019, my body interrupted the capable version of me. After chest tightness and shortness of breath, I ended up needing five stents in three procedures. Even then, part of my mind was on work. I worried that admitting what was happening might make me look weak. I was proud that I could keep performing. Looking back, I am more interested in what that performance was costing me - and what it revealed about my definition of strength.
Learning to Listen Differently
That question followed me into the Holy Name Passionist Spiritual Direction Program. I began learning a different way of being with people. In business, I had spent years learning to listen quickly, identify a problem, and recommend the next step. Spiritual direction taught me that sometimes the most important thing is not to fix anything. It is to make room for a truthful conversation.
My capstone explored spiritual direction in the corporate workplace, especially for men who are expected to lead, deliver, absorb pressure, and keep functioning while carrying fear, fatigue, grief, ethical tension, or questions of purpose that rarely appear in a meeting. I did not choose that subject from a distance. I knew that world from the inside.
In May 2026, I completed the Passionist Spiritual Direction Program and became a certified spiritual director. That formation did not make me less interested in work, leadership, or building something useful. It changed the way I see the person carrying the responsibility.
Why the Fourth Quarter Matters to Me
Then came the Fourth Quarter questions. What matters most now? Who needs my attention? What do I still want to build? What do I need to release? What have I learned that should be given away? What is God asking of me in this season?
I do not believe the fourth quarter should be treated as a countdown. I am still a husband, father, grandfather, worker, friend, Aggie, Catholic, and man with ideas I want to make real. I still value ambition. I simply want ambition to serve something larger than itself.
That is why I began developing the Fourth Quarter work. I am not offering a perfect formula for aging, retirement, work, or faith. I am walking through the same questions. What I can offer is experience, honest conversation, spiritual formation, and a willingness to help another person listen more carefully to what this season may be asking.
One morning after finishing the autobiography work that helped shape this page, I heard a homily on Jesus' words to Nathanael: before Philip called you, I saw you. The message stayed with me. God sees the whole person - gratitude and grief, faith and fatigue, competence and fear, the face presented to the world and the prayers that are hard to say aloud.
That is where I want this work to begin: with the whole person. Not the title. Not the resume. Not the retirement account. The person.
I have been fortunate, and I have been hurt. I have succeeded at some things and failed at others. I have loved people imperfectly and been loved more generously than I can explain. I have worked hard, searched for meaning, and discovered that being seen changes how I want to see others.
I do not know exactly what every year ahead will hold. I do know the question I want to carry into them: Lord, what are we going to do today?
