Thy Will Be Done

In this episode, I want to talk about something that has become deeply personal to me. This past month, my little sister passed away at only fifty-nine after a vicious battle with cancer. Losing someone you love brings a kind of grief that cannot be fixed by working harder, staying busy, or simply willing yourself through it. Family and friends are left carrying an absence that cannot be filled and memories that suddenly become more precious than ever.

For those of us who are accustomed to solving problems, protecting others, or taking action when something goes wrong, grief teaches a difficult lesson: some things cannot be fixed. They must be carried, felt, and eventually placed in hands stronger than our own. My hope in sharing this story is that anyone grieving someone they love might find a measure of peace in knowing that healing does not require forgetting, and moving forward does not mean leaving them behind. We carry their love with us; we honor the life they lived, and through faith in Jesus Christ, I believe separation is not the end.

Sometimes the strongest thing we can do is stop trying to control what cannot be changed, allow ourselves to grieve, and trust God with the person we love and with the broken pieces left behind.

Thy will be done.

Thy Will Be Done - This is the last chapter from my Book “Built By Fire”

There comes a point when understanding is no longer enough. You can examine the past, recognize patterns, trace consequences, and begin to see how one season of life led into another. You can identify the decisions that changed you, the people who shaped you, the mistakes you would correct if given another opportunity, and the moments you would never change at all. Reflection can bring clarity, but it cannot resolve everything. Some losses cannot be reversed. Some wounds do not disappear. Some relationships cannot be restored by regret alone. Some people cannot be brought home no matter how badly you want another outcome.

Eventually, the deeper question is no longer simply what happened or why. It becomes what you are willing to release.

For most of my life, I believed that if I prepared enough, worked hard enough, remained disciplined, and accepted responsibility, I could find a way through almost anything. That belief had not come from theory. It had been tested repeatedly. In military service, Search and Rescue, dive recovery, tactical training, protective work, business, and humanitarian missions, preparation and decisive action mattered. When someone was missing beneath the ice, there was no benefit in standing on shore discussing uncertainty forever. When a team entered a dangerous environment, someone had to assess the threat, decide, and move. When frightened soldiers were surrounded by an angry crowd in Haiti, someone had to keep fear from turning into gunfire. When doctors and nurses were focused on the suffering in front of them, someone had to watch what was happening around them. In those environments, action mattered. Discipline mattered. Effort mattered. Sometimes they saved lives.

The problem came when I began to believe that the same tools could solve everything.

Service had taught me to carry responsibility until the problem was solved. If something was wrong, I worked harder. If a plan failed, I developed another one. If an obstacle appeared, I tried to overcome it. If I was hurt, I pushed through it. If something was unfinished, I returned to it. That mindset helped me survive difficult circumstances and be useful to others, but it also created an illusion that took me years to recognize. Not everything can be fixed by doing more.

There are people you cannot save. There are injuries determination cannot erase. There are decisions made by others that you cannot control. Some relationships require more than one person’s effort to repair. Some moments with your children and family can't be recovered simply because you finally understand how important they were. There are missions that end without the answer you prayed for.

I could not bring back those we lost. I could not find the kidnapped boy in Haiti. I could not undo every absence or reclaim every moment when the mission had received more of me than the people waiting at home. I could not command the nerves in my injured foot to restore themselves simply because I wanted them to. I could not repair everything through force of will. Yet for years, part of me kept trying.

That was one of the most difficult things for me to recognize about myself. When something hurt, I often responded by moving. Another mission. Another business. Another project. Another responsibility. Another opportunity to be useful. Activity created purpose, and purpose helped quiet things I did not yet know how to face.

Action is not wrong when it is needed. There is nothing wrong with hard work, discipline, persistence, or service. They are among the qualities I value most. But more action is not always healing. More responsibility is not always recovery. More effort does not necessarily repair what lies beneath the surface. Sometimes action keeps you from being still long enough to recognize what needs healing.

That lesson came slowly.

Service had given me extraordinary blessings. I had stood beside remarkable men and women. I had watched rescuers risk themselves for strangers, soldiers depend completely upon one another, medical professionals work beyond exhaustion, humanitarian workers enter devastated communities, and ordinary people respond with extraordinary courage when the moment required it. I have been given opportunities to help save lives, recover the fallen, protect people in dangerous places, train warriors, build businesses, and contribute to missions larger than myself. I remain grateful for those opportunities.

The cost does not cancel the blessing, but the blessing does not require me to pretend there was no cost.

Military service, rescue work, disaster response, humanitarian operations, and protection assignments can place unusual demands upon those who answer those calls. They can ask for time, physical safety, emotional reserves, family separation, and exposure to things the human mind was never designed to treat as ordinary. Sometimes the cost appears immediately in blood, injury, or loss. More often it accumulates quietly.

That does not mean the service was wrong. It means we are human.

The people who serve are not machines built to absorb unlimited pressure. Courage does not make someone immune to grief. Training does not make a person immune to trauma. Faith does not prevent every wound. Strength does not mean you can carry indefinitely what was never intended to remain entirely on your shoulders.

I had to learn the difference between responsibility and ownership. Responsibility means doing everything faithfully within your ability. Ownership is the belief that everything depends upon you. For much of my life, I did not recognize how easily one could become the other. Responsibility had served me well. Ownership was slowly exhausting me.

I began to understand that what I had always thought of as control had limits. Control is useful when you are planning a mission, securing a scene, evaluating a threat, managing a team, or deciding whether to enter dangerous water. It becomes something very different when applied to grief, regret, relationships, and the past. You cannot command those things into submission. You cannot outwork them. You cannot intimidate them. You cannot outrun them. Eventually, you have to stop.

For me, that stopping point became deeply connected to my relationship with my Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ.

Faith had always been part of my life. I had prayed before missions, sought direction during difficult decisions, and experienced moments of protection and spiritual prompting that I could not reasonably dismiss as coincidence. I believed in God. I believed in Jesus Christ. I believed God had guided and preserved me many times. But there is a difference between believing in God and trusting Him with the things you cannot fix.

It is easy to speak of faith after the outcome you wanted. It is easy to thank God when the missing woman is found alive, when the warning beneath the ice brings you safely back to the surface, when the bullet passes through without destroying your ability to walk, or when the aircraft lands and you return home. Faith becomes harder when the ending is different.

What does faith look like when the person dies despite everything you did correctly? What does it mean when the child remains missing? What does it mean when a marriage ends, the body remains damaged, the memory remains vivid, or the prayer does not produce the outcome you hoped for? Those questions forced my faith beyond the expectation that belief would protect me from every painful ending.

I began to understand that faith was not a guarantee that God would remove the fire. Sometimes faith was discovering that He was present inside it.

That realization changed the meaning of four words I had heard and spoken throughout my life: Thy will be done.

For someone accustomed to taking action, those words can sound dangerously close to resignation. They are not. “Thy will be done” does not mean giving up. It does not mean refusing responsibility, abandoning preparation, or standing still when action is required. It does not mean accepting injustice, refusing to protect someone, or waiting for God to perform work He has given us the ability to do ourselves.

It means accepting the boundary between my responsibility and His.

I prepare. I act. I protect. I serve. I accept accountability for my choices. I give the moment everything honestly required of me. Then, when I reach the place where effort can go no farther, I trust Him with what remains.

That was one of the hardest forms of surrender I ever learned.

I had spent years training myself to resist surrender. In dangerous environments, surrender can get people killed. You keep going. You fight through fatigue. You solve the next problem. You refuse to quit. But spiritual surrender is something entirely different. It is not surrender to the enemy. It is surrender to God.

It is recognizing that He sees what I cannot see, understands what I cannot understand, and holds a perspective beyond the narrow window through which I experience my own life. For me, that became the beginning of healing. Not forgetting. Not denying. Healing.

I could acknowledge a mistake without allowing shame to become my permanent identity. I could grieve someone I could not save without assuming that grief was proof I had failed. I could acknowledge that service had sometimes taken me away from my family more than I now wished it had, without pretending the past could simply be rewritten. I could accept physical injury without concluding that my usefulness had ended. I could finally separate what had happened from what I was still capable of becoming.

That is where redemption became more than a religious word to me.

Through Jesus Christ, I came to understand that redemption does not require the past to disappear. It changes what the past is allowed to do with the future.

There are things in my life I would change if I could. There are decisions I would make differently, moments when I would listen longer, remain home, speak more carefully, or recognize sooner what someone close to me was carrying. Good intentions do not erase consequences. Service does not make every decision righteous simply because the purpose behind it was honorable. Grace does not require us to pretend otherwise. Grace allows us to tell the truth and still move forward.

That distinction mattered deeply to me because I had spent years believing strength meant pushing through whatever stood in my way. The answer to weakness was effort. The answer to pain was endurance. The answer to uncertainty was preparation. Those qualities are valuable, but none of them is redemption.

You cannot redeem yourself through sheer effort. You cannot heal every wound by becoming tougher. You cannot make yourself worthy of peace by accomplishing enough good to outweigh everything you regret.

At some point, the rescuer must accept rescue.

That may have been one of the most difficult truths of my entire life.

I knew how to enter the water for someone else. I knew how to stand between danger and another person. I knew how to carry a broken body, move toward a threat, guard a medical team, build a plan, organize people, train warriors, and keep functioning when the environment became chaotic. I was much less comfortable admitting that I needed help carrying what had accumulated inside me.

Christ asked me to let Him into the places where effort had failed, not because effort was meaningless, but because it had reached its proper limit. His invitation was not to become weaker. It was to stop confusing self-reliance with strength.

The Savior already understood the weight I was carrying. He knew the sorrow, the regret, the fear, the injuries, the things I could not repair, and the names and faces that remained in my memory. He knew them before I had words to explain them. I did not have to convince Him that I had tried hard enough. I didn't have to prove I was strong enough. I simply had to trust Him.

That trust changed my understanding of service, too.

For much of my life, service meant going. It meant responding to the pager, deploying, entering the water, stepping into the wreckage, moving toward the threat, or accepting the difficult assignment. I still believe deeply in that kind of service. Men and women will always be called to go.

But I no longer believe that the most difficult assignment is automatically the most righteous one or that sacrifice must always be measured by pain. Wisdom sometimes means going. Sometimes it means staying. Sometimes it means acting immediately. Sometimes it means listening. Sometimes the person who needs you most is thousands of miles away. Sometimes he is sitting across the table from you.

That understanding did not end my service. It made it more deliberate. Today I continue serving through teaching, writing, podcasts, mentoring, and other forms of communication that allow me to pass along lessons learned through military service, Search and Rescue, tactical training, protection work, humanitarian missions, business, faith, failure, and recovery. I still want people to be safer, better prepared, more aware, and better able to help those placed in their care. I also want those carrying unseen wounds to understand that injury, age, loss, or failure does not end usefulness, and that service close to home is not somehow less meaningful than service performed in distant or dangerous places.

But this final chapter is not really about me. It is about all of you who go.

It is about the soldier who leaves a family behind because the orders came, the police officer walking toward a call without knowing what waits behind the door, the firefighter climbing the stairs while everyone else is coming down, the rescuer clipping into the rope, the diver descending beneath black water, the medic kneeling beside someone whose life is slipping away, the humanitarian worker entering a devastated community, the protector watching the crowd while everyone else is focused on the principal, the spouse who remains at home carrying responsibilities no one sees, the family member answering the late-night phone call, and the countless people who serve quietly without uniforms, medals, headlines, or recognition.

I know something of what service can give you. It can give purpose, brotherhood, perspective, faith, and the knowledge that your life was used in the service of someone besides yourself. Those are profound gifts.

I also know what service can sometimes ask from you. It can take time you never recover. It can change the way you sleep. It can alter your body. It can place images in your mind that do not leave when the mission ends. It can teach you to function so effectively in crisis that ordinary stillness begins to feel foreign. It can create a habit of carrying everything yourself because other people have spent years depending upon you to do exactly that.

If you recognize yourself in those words, understand that the qualities that helped you survive the fire may not be the same qualities that help you heal from it.

There is a time to push, and there is a time to stop pushing. There is a time to take control of the situation, and there is a time to release what was never yours to control. There is a time to carry another person, and a time to allow yourself to be carried.

Healing does not dishonor the mission. Rest does not erase courage. Accepting help does not cancel strength.

Acknowledging the cost does not mean you regret the service. Surrendering something to God does not mean you quit.

For me, healing began when I stopped believing that another mission, another accomplishment, another business, another physical challenge, or another act of endurance could finally solve what effort alone had never been able to reach. I had to stop trying to rescue myself.

That did not happen in one dramatic moment. It happened slowly, through faith, reflection, repentance, forgiveness, humility, and a willingness to accept that some things would remain unanswered in this life. The fire had already taught me how to endure. Christ began teaching me how to release. That was the greater lesson.

The scars remain. Some are physical. Others are unseen. There are people I still miss. Some are physical. Moments from decades ago can return with astonishing clarity. Healing did not erase any of that. It changed my relationship with it.

The past no longer has to demand another mission in payment. Regret no longer has to become punishment. Pain no longer has to prove itself through more pain.

We can honor those we lost by living well. We can honor those we served beside by remaining connected. We can honor our families by becoming more present. We can honor the opportunities God gave us by using what we learned with greater wisdom. And we can honor the Savior by finally accepting the redemption we claim to believe He offers.

That is where I stand now. Not finished. Not perfected. Not untouched by the road behind me. But redeemed enough to know that the fire does not get the final word.

Service was one of the great privileges of my life, and the cost was real. So were the blessings. The wounds were real, and so is healing. The failures were real, and so is redemption.

For all who go when others need help, for those who stand watch, protect, rescue, heal, carry, and sacrifice, I hope you never lose the willingness to serve. But I also hope you learn sooner than I did that you were never meant to carry everything alone.

Prepare well. Serve faithfully. Love deeply. Accept responsibility for what is yours and release what is not. When effort has reached its limit, when there is no additional mission that can repair the loss, and no amount of strength can change what has already happened, trust the One who can reach where you cannot.

For most of my life, I believed the answer was to keep moving. Now I understand that sometimes the most important act of courage is to stop long enough to place what remains into the hands of God.

The fire built much of the man I became. Grace taught me what to do with what survived. After a lifetime of trying to carry the mission myself, I finally understand the freedom contained in four simple words.

Thy will be done.