Love the Life That God Gave You
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” — John 10:10
In 2013, Dave Nemetz, founder of Bleacher Report closed the deal of a lifetime. After seven years of grinding — missed sleep, investor meetings, near-death moments — he and his co-founders sold Bleacher Report to Turner Sports for a reported $175 million. The day the deal closed, he sat with the weight of everything they had built and finally arrived at the finish line he had been sprinting toward since college.
He felt depleted.
“It should have been one of the best days of my life,” he later wrote. “And yet on the day the deal closed, I felt depleted.”
Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar has a name for this. He calls it the arrival fallacy — the false belief that achieving a significant goal will finally deliver the life we’ve been waiting for. Founders, executives, and high-performers are especially vulnerable to it, because the stakes are so high and the wait is so long. We tell ourselves: when the Series B closes, when the team is built, when the exit happens — then real life begins.
But the finish line keeps moving. And life keeps waiting.
Here is what the arrival fallacy really reveals: we have quietly accepted a lie about where abundant life comes from. It is not a psychological problem. It is a theological one.
The fullness of life you are looking for does not come from what you have built. It comes from who has come. Jesus did not arrive after you hit your milestone. He arrived first — before the exit, before the breakthrough, before you had anything to show. Abundant life is not unlocked by your arrival at a goal. It is already present because He came.
The enemy’s strategy is precise: steal your attention from the present, kill your capacity for gratitude today, destroy your joy in the current assignment by convincing you the real one is still coming. John 10:10 is not describing two distant forces. It is describing two competing narratives about the life in your hands this moment.
I heard this question in a sermon recently, asked by a pastor after a door had closed on something she deeply wanted: “Are you willing to lay down what you want most if God could do more with your life through that?”
Sit with that for a moment. Not — will God eventually give you what you want? But: what if the gospel goes further precisely because you did not get it?
That is a disorienting question for a marketplace leader. You are trained to close gaps, hit targets, and secure outcomes. The idea that God might do more through the unresolved, the delayed, the withheld — runs against every instinct that made you effective. But it is deeply biblical. It is the logic of the cross. The moment that looked most like defeat was the moment that changed everything.
This does not mean ambition is wrong or that desire is suspect. It means the life God has assigned to you — including its constraints, its unanswered prayers, its current season — is not a detour from your calling. It may be the very shape of it.
You are not behind. The life God has assigned to you in this season is not the consolation prize while you wait for the real opportunity. The company you are leading right now — with its limitations and its people and its particular pressures — is the specific field God placed you in to bear fruit that lasts.
Fall in love with the life God gave you. Get healthy in it. Name it for what it is: a gift. Not because it is painless, but because He is in it. And because the One who came to give life abundantly — did not come to give it later.
Reflection Questions
- Where in your professional life are you living in “when/then” thinking — and what has that cost you in the present?
- Looking at your current season honestly: what does this assignment make uniquely possible that a different role, a different stage, or a different life could not?
Prayer
Lord, forgive me for treating the life You gave me as a waiting room. You came to give life — and You came already. Open my eyes to the abundance that is already here. Teach me to inhabit this season with full attention, to ask not “when will my life begin” but “what are You doing right now?” I receive the life in my hands today as a gift from You. Amen.