What Competence Was Carrying

Two years ago, God began calling me to write.

At the time, I would not have described myself as a writer. If anything, I probably would have described myself as the opposite. Writing was something I did when necessary, not something I believed I was particularly gifted at.

Then one day, while working through my task list, a thought dropped into my spirit: I am a writer.

What surprised me was not the thought itself. It was the peace that came with it.

Over time that conviction continued to grow. Not because I suddenly became confident in my ability to write, but because I sensed God entrusting me with a message. I began to believe there were leaders who needed to hear it.

I assumed the challenge ahead would be learning a new skill. I expected to wrestle with writing techniques, finding my voice, and improving my craft. What I didn't expect was that writing would expose something much deeper.

I thought God was teaching me how to become a writer. Instead, He was exposing what my identity had been grounded in all along.

Many Christian leaders have already learned not to ground their identity in titles, positions, or success. We know those things can change. Organizations grow and shrink. Seasons shift. Responsibilities come and go. Most of us have lived enough life to understand that a title is a poor foundation for identity.

What we may not recognize is how easily we can ground our identity in competence.

I certainly didn't.

For most of my career, competence felt normal. It was simply part of the landscape. I understood financial statements. I knew how to help organizations navigate difficult decisions. I had developed systems that compensated for my challenges. People trusted my judgment because I had spent years earning that trust.

I don't remember ever thinking, I'm grounding my identity in competence. If someone had asked me where my identity was grounded, I would have given the right answer.

What I didn't realize was how much reassurance competence provided. Not consciously. It was just there. A difficult problem landed on my desk, and I knew how to approach it. A client was facing a complicated decision, and I could help them think it through. A board needed clarity, and I knew how to explain what they were seeing.

I never connected those moments to identity. I saw them as part of the job. Looking back, I think that's why I missed what was happening. Competence wasn't just helping me do the work. It was quietly settling questions I didn't realize I was still carrying.

I didn't realize how much weight it was carrying until it was no longer there.

When I began writing, I expected to feel like a beginner. That part didn't surprise me. What surprised me was how much I cared.

I would spend hours working on a piece and then wonder whether anyone would read it. I would compare my writing to others. I would question whether I had anything worth saying. None of that felt particularly spiritual. It mostly felt frustrating.

After all, I believed God had entrusted me with something to steward. Yet my reaction to the response—or lack of response—often felt out of proportion to the moment. It took me a while to understand why.

For years, competence had served as evidence that I wasn't a failure, that I had value, and that I had something meaningful to contribute. Writing took much of that evidence away. The competence I had built over decades in one arena didn't automatically transfer to another. Suddenly I was a beginner again.

Underneath all of that, a question surfaced that I thought I had dealt with years ago:

What if people discover I'm really just a failure waiting to happen?

That question bothered me because I thought I had already settled it. Not perfectly, and not once and for all, but settled enough that I didn't expect it to resurface.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized writing hadn't created the fear. Writing had simply exposed it.

For years, competence had provided a measure of protection—not protection from failure, but protection from having to think about it very often. As long as I was operating in areas where I had decades of experience, competence supplied evidence that I knew what I was doing, that I had something to contribute, and that the voice questioning my value wasn't telling the whole truth.

When I stepped into writing, much of that evidence disappeared.

The interesting thing is that I never would have said my identity was grounded in competence. If someone had asked, I would have pointed somewhere else.

But identity has a way of revealing itself when the things we rely on are no longer available.

That's what writing exposed for me. Not that I lacked competence, but that I had come to depend on it more than I realized.