Living in Healthy Tension

Something was off—just not quite right—and it had been for a while.

Then I started having a strange feeling in my chest.

It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t dramatic. It came and went for months and I couldn’t discern any pattern or cause. It was bad enough I finally went to the doctor. Bad enough to run cardiac tests including a full cardiac stress test. It had me sitting in waiting rooms wondering whether something serious was building beneath the surface.

The tests came back normal.

That feeling that something was wrong lingered anyway.

Around the same time, other stuff began shifting too. Fatigue deepened. Joint pain hovered at nuisance level but never resolved. Headaches arrived more often than they used to. My thinking felt slightly slower, as if I were trying to walk through fog.

I was running my business. It was doing fine, though never as well as I wanted. There was nothing abnormal about the stress or pressures, though. My relationship with my wife was strong — it always has been. She’s my best friend. We talk about everything.

But outside of her and God, I had no close relationships.

No consistent friendships. No regular check-ins. No embodied community that required me to show up. Just work, responsibility, and whatever lever I could try to pull next to make life run more efficiently—and get rid of this gnawing feeling.

As the months passed, something else started happening.

There were days I couldn’t motivate myself to get out of bed.

If something absolutely required me to show up, I could force myself. But on days I didn’t have to, I often stayed under the covers for most of the day.

Motivation dulled. Enjoyment flattened. Projects began but didn’t finish. I would lose a line of thought mid-sentence.

Eventually the internal instability showed itself externally.

I corrected employees for doing something “the wrong way,” only to be told I had asked them to do it this way months earlier.

I was incredulous and frustrated with them. When they both said the same thing, I decided to believe them even though I didn’t remember what they were talking about.

After that incident, I asked Sherra (my wife) if what they said was true. She said she had been dealing with the same problem recently.

I was crushed. The parts of me I had always depended on were failing me in ways that made me mad at them and bewildered at what was happening.

That’s when I decided it was more than just stress.

Changing Everything and Staying the Same

When something feels unstable, you look for things to change to get back to stable ground.

Sherra and I tried to figure out what might bring my stability back—and end the struggles.

I tightened my diet. I began walking more consistently. I tracked sleep patterns. I prayed more deliberately. I tried to discipline my thoughts. I listened to worship music.

Some of it helped.

The walking helped. Nutrition helped. Structure helped. Prayer helped. Sometimes.

But the underlying wobble remained—and continued to worsen in some areas.

I would improve one area and still feel that low-grade uneasiness underneath.

Eventually I sought therapy. That’s when medication entered the picture for me. It didn’t change me overnight, but over time it steadied the edges enough to bring back positive thoughts and hope.

Yet even as these pieces came into place, a realization pressed in.

Most of my effort — even the good effort — was only aimed inward.

I was trying to fix myself like I was an old car or project.

Support Through Tension

In therapy, I learned a simple analogy: a stool with three legs.

For mental health, those three legs are: behavior, relationships, and medication.

I realized I could reframe the model to fit my overall health by simply changing the legs of the stool to be physical health, mental health, and relational health.

Unlike a stool, though, life is never permanently balanced. We’re in a continual state of maintaining balance without ever achieving it.

When we lose focus on one leg of the stool, though, the others start to give way. They can only stand so much stress they weren’t designed to handle.

Research supports what we all intuitively know: social isolation and loneliness are associated with increased mortality risk and poorer health outcomes.[1] Chronic loneliness has even been linked to elevated stress responses and cardiovascular strain.[2]

I knew that—intellectually.

But I hadn’t ever applied it practically.

The effects of neglecting relationships don’t usually announce themselves loudly. They accumulate an overwhelming debt quietly. Subtlety. But eventually, when ignored long enough, the bill comes due and has to be paid in ways that can’t be hidden.

Falling Apart from the Inside Out

The problem is, we don’t think maintaining and developing relationships is urgent.

We get busy. We manage life’s responsibilities. And we often assume connections will stay close and meaningful without deliberate attention. At least that’s the pattern I’ve seen in my life.

For me, it meant that outside of my wife, I was largely living alone.

When fatigue deepened and motivation thinned, there was no one consistently close enough to notice changes. No one regularly asking hard questions. No one sharing their own burdens in a way that reminded me I wasn’t uniquely unraveling.

The consequences for me weren’t dramatic arguments. They were subtler.

Increased irritability. Emotional fragility. A sense that everything rested on me. Overwhelming dread and a feeling like there was no way out.

By the end of that season, Sherra and I made a difficult decision.

We stepped away from the business.

It wasn’t failing. It wasn’t collapsing.

But I was.

We decided it was time to put my mental and physical health ahead of what had unwittingly pushed them to the rear.

That decision carried weight. It also brought a lot of relief.

Relief from some of the dread and overwhelm for me and from helplessly watching a loved one suffer for Sherra.

In hindsight, that decision marked the moment I stopped pretending I could manage this alone.

Stability Through Vulnerability and Consistency

Around that time, something else started too. Something that helped more than I ever imagined.

I began weekly conversations. Check-ins.

A weekly call with my brother and brother-in-law. A weekly lunch with a close friend. And a weekly meeting with one of my sons.

Nothing dramatic. Just consistent, in-person connection.

A lot of weeks, I don’t feel like going. Some weeks I considered canceling.

I went anyway.

And, every time, I was glad I did.

Over time, I began noticing something I had previously missed.

When I was focused on myself — fixing my symptoms, how I was feeling physically, how I felt emotionally — my anxiety rose.

But when my focus widened toward God and toward other people — listening, serving, bearing burdens — the pressure eased.

Not vanished. Eased.

Biblical counseling literature has long described this human tendency to turn inward when we’re afraid or uncertain. Heath Lambert writes about the way anxiety intensifies when life becomes focused inward—especially to the exclusion of others.[3] Ed Welch writes about how fear can shrink our world down to where we aren’t concerned about anyone else.[4]

None of that felt theoretical.

It felt like what I was living every day.

God began reframing my thinking in another three-legged way about how I need to relate to others and myself.

God first.
Others next.
Myself last.

Putting myself last does not mean tolerating harm or refusing care. It means I choose the other things first whenever possible.

When my first instinct is to remember I am not sovereign or in control — that my life should not be centered on me — something shifts.

When my second instinct is to ask how I can serve, listen, encourage, or simply show up for others, something else shifts.

And, in most ordinary situations, when I can put those two relationships first, the third never has to be considered.

I guess it’s more like a saying I often heard when I was in the Air Force than it is like a three-legged stool. Leaders around me used to say: “take care of the people, and the mission will take care of itself”.

It sounds simple. And it is. And seeing it work out right in front of you is inspiring.

I’m finding that in my own life, when priority one and two receive attention, priority three rarely needs any attention at all.

It Takes a Village

Don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t adding these weekly check-ins and being more intentional about my relationships that changed everything.

Proper worship helps. The medication helps. Therapy helps. Regular walking helps. Good nutrition helps. Time helps.

Each strand matters. Each piece of the puzzle is important.

But the common thread beneath them all was this: I stopped trying to repair myself in isolation.

Hope has returned gradually.

Stability grew slowly.

Not because anxiety vanished. Not because I perfected my habits. Not because I solved myself.

But because I allowed God’s perfect design and daily mercies to restructure how I fight the fight.

Weekly conversations. Shared burdens. Honest words spoken aloud to others instead of rehearsed in a never-ending internal doom loop. A deeper dependence on God rather than on my own knowledge or abilities.

The stool still requires daily attention.

But it wobbles much less violently now.

Good Tension Needs Maintenance

I know I’m not finished learning this.

There are still days when motivation dips. Still moments when I drift inward. Still areas of physical discipline I need to rebuild.

This is not arrival.

It is attention.

When I focus primarily on myself, my world narrows and my anxieties expand.

When I orient first toward God and then toward others, hope and stability grow.

Not perfectly. Not permanently.

But reliably.

And over time, that consistent orientation will lead to much more stable life than chasing the perfect diet or exercise plan ever could.