The Bank On The Bed
An excerpt from Abiding Leadership | Available Spring 2027
When I was six or seven years old, I would set up the Monopoly board on my twin-sized bed like it was a bank counter. I'd pull out the adding machine with the long white roll of paper from my mom's desk so I could practice tallying numbers and handing out Monopoly money to my imaginary customers. No one told me to do this. No one assigned it. I was a latchkey kid whose parents were often gone, out working, out building, out making money, and this was my frame of reference, the world I understood. Business. Commerce. Transactions. Making it. Survival.
That little girl playing banker on the bed had one north star as she grew up: get a job, build a business, make money. More money. And then some more. There was always another level to reach, another venture to launch, another ceiling to break through. Even when I became a Christian and walked onto the foreign mission field at twenty-four, the engine underneath the hood, the one driving me from pursuit to pursuit, didn't change. I had shifted from working for myself to working for God, but underneath it was still the same motor: an attempt to repay Him for forgiving me. The currency had changed. My striving had not.
Our beginnings shape us. But they don't have to contain us.
I knew a leader who grew up scrawny, funny, and sharper than anyone in the room, but what no one saw was that his older brother was beating him up at home. So he did what any wounded kid does: he built armor. He trained. He got strong and fast and built a body that no one could touch. And then something unexpected happened. People started affirming him for it. His athleticism earned applause. His physique earned recognition. His expertise in health sciences earned a platform: author, speaker, renowned expert. A lane opened, and he stepped into it, and it paid the bills and built a lifestyle for his wife and family. It came with a big mortgage and responsibilities and all the weight that keeps a person inside the lane they started in, even when God was quietly whispering to his heart about making country music, writing a fiction book series, a pulpit, a comedy stage. The life he created out of self-protection became who he was, even though his heart yearned for so much more. And the truth is, he was (and still is) capable of all of it.
What often happens is we start on a lane and mistake it for a calling. We get good at something, sometimes something born directly from our pain, and the goodness of it, the income of it, the identity of it, forms a gravitational field that holds us in place. We stay in that lane, because we forgot to ask whether we were supposed to be anyone else. Next thing you know your 75 wondering what happened to the visions God placed in your heart while you were busy doing everything else you fell into.
I knew another leader whose father was an alcoholic. He grew up terrified of doing the wrong thing, constantly compensating for his older brother who had gone sideways into gangs and drugs. He became the “good boy”. The peacekeeper. The one who made everything okay. The one who could crack jokes and ease any tension. He carried that posture into adulthood, into marriage, into leadership, never quite delivering on all his goals, not because he lacked talent or expertise, but because the goals were never "enough" in his own mind. Perfectionism kept progress at bay. By any external standard, he was top-notch at everything he did; but never enough by the only standard he heard, the voice installed in a fearful boy trying to keep the peace in a family that never could.
These are not isolated stories. This is the hidden architecture of almost every leader sitting in a church, running a business, or building a ministry. The question is not whether your origin story is shaping your leadership. It is. The question is whether you know how to name it, or whether it will keep naming you.
Reflection question:
What did you build to protect yourself that the world now calls your gift, and have you ever asked God if it's also your assignment?