Building a Life on Rules and Regret - Part One

Building a Life on Rules and Regret – Part 1

I built a life that looked right.

That’s the simplest way to say it now, but at the time it felt like so much more than that. It felt like faithfulness. It felt like obedience. It felt like I had figured out what it meant to live for God in a way that was clear, structured, and dependable. I believed that if I did everything right, everything would turn out right.

That belief didn’t feel naive. It felt logical. It gave me a sense of control in a world that had never really felt steady. Growing up, I had learned how to read the room, how to adjust, how to perform in ways that brought approval and avoided conflict. So when my faith came with clear expectations and visible standards, it didn’t feel restrictive. It felt like relief. Finally, there was a system I could trust.

Follow the rules. Stay faithful. Keep your convictions. Separate from what’s wrong. Lean into what’s right. If I stayed inside those lines, God would bless my life, protect my family, and give meaning to everything I was building.

I didn’t see that as legalism. I saw it as obedience.

And for a while, it worked, at least on the surface. I was trusted. I was leading. I was teaching. I was consistent. I showed up. I said the right things. I did the work. From the outside, there was no reason to question anything. It looked like a life that honored God.

But what no one could see, including me at first, was what it was costing me to keep that life in place.

There was a quiet pressure that followed me everywhere. It wasn’t loud enough to stop me, but it was steady enough that it never left. I lived with the sense that I had to stay sharp, stay disciplined, stay in control. There was always something to measure, something to improve, something to tighten up.

And over time, I stopped noticing how tired I was becoming. Not physically. Deeper than that.

I was tired in a way that didn’t have a clear cause and didn’t have a clear solution. I could take a day off and still feel it. I could accomplish something meaningful and still feel it. It sat underneath everything, quietly growing.

Looking back, I can see what I could not see then. I wasn’t building my life on faith. I was building it on rules.

Rules gave me something I could measure. They told me when I was doing well and when I wasn’t. They gave me a way to evaluate my standing, not just with others, but with God. And without realizing it, I began to trust that system more than I trusted Him.

That shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly.

Rules started as a guide, but they became the goal. And once they became the goal, everything else started to orbit around them. My identity, my leadership, my sense of worth all became tied to how well I stayed within those boundaries.

The problem is that rules can shape behavior, but they cannot transform the heart. They can keep you in line, but they cannot keep you close.

They can help you build something that looks strong, but they cannot hold you together when life begins to press in.

I knew how to look the part. I knew how to lead, how to speak, how to carry myself in a way that reflected conviction. But underneath all of that, there were parts of me I had never learned how to deal with. Fear. Insecurity. The need for approval. The quiet question of whether I was enough.

Instead of facing those things, I learned how to manage them. And managing them worked, until it didn’t.

Because the more your life is built on performance, the less room there is for honesty. You can admit the small things. The safe things. The expected things. But the deeper struggles, the ones that would call everything into question, those stay buried.

That’s where I lived.

I could talk about faith while quietly depending on a system. I could preach truth while avoiding my own. I could lead others forward while feeling something inside me starting to slip.

But I didn’t stop. Because stopping felt like failure. So I kept building. I kept leading. I kept doing everything I knew to do.

And all the while, I was constructing a life that looked strong on the outside, but had very little underneath that could actually hold the weight of real life.

I didn’t know it yet, but that kind of life doesn’t break all at once. It cracks slowly.

And the cracks don’t show up where everyone can see them. They start underneath, in the places you’ve learned to ignore, in the parts of your life you’ve trained yourself to manage instead of face.

At the time, I thought I was being faithful. Now I can see, I was just really good at performing. And that difference would eventually change everything.