You didn’t lose those years chasing the call. You were being carved into someone who could carry it.
Three in the morning. The phone rings.
You already know who it is. It has your number, and it never gives up. It just keeps dialing, patient and relentless, from the other side of the dark. Your purpose. Calling. And answering it never once meant picking up a receiver and sitting still. Answering it meant moving. Getting up off the bed. Walking toward the ring even when the ring led you away from the door you were supposed to walk through, away from the people who were still awake and wanting you, away from the prayers you kept meaning to say and never did.
I know that phone. I answered it for years before I understood I was answering anything at all.
I stayed up too late. I read things at random that had nothing to do with the assignment due Monday. I let projects rot on my desk while I chased some thread in my own head. Friends would call to pull me out into the night, and I would let it ring. Not out of cruelty. Out of a pull I could not name yet. And you already know how that story ends, because you have lived a version of it. Sooner or later the calls slow down. Sooner or later they stop. And then one day you look up and the phone is quiet on that side too, and the only line still ringing is the one at three in the morning.
The Restlessness Was the Compass
Augustine wrote one line sixteen hundred years ago that has followed me around like a shadow. “You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” I used to read that as a sentence about heaven. Now I read it as a diagnosis of my twenties.
Because I could not sit still inside my own life. When I was home, I wanted the world. I wanted noise and people and streets and the electricity of being out. And the second I got out there, all I could think about was going home, shutting the door, and disappearing into a screen by myself. I did not know if I was coming or going. Giving or receiving. I enjoyed dinner with friends, and I enjoyed being alone, and here is the cruel part. I only ever enjoyed each one while I was in the middle of doing the opposite.
That is what I called the Two-Sided Coin in my book, and back then I was sure it was a defect. Proof that something in me was broken and could not be satisfied. I want to tell you what I did not know then. That restlessness was not a malfunction. It was a compass needle refusing to settle for a north that was not true. You are not broken because you cannot get comfortable. You are being kept from settling in the wrong place.
I Buried Myself in Attention Purgatory
Here is the part I am not proud of. God was in the room the whole time. Present. Available. And I never reached for Him, because I had decided I was the victim of my own life.
I thought He was against me. I thought everyone was against me. I told myself my pain came from other people not letting me choose what I wanted, and when I could not make up my own mind, I did the coward’s thing. I stopped showing up. Not with a bang. With a slow fade. I pulled back from the people, from the work, from the room where the decision was waiting for me, and I buried myself in what I now call Attention Purgatory. The comfort of your own discomfort. That warm, familiar misery where nothing is asked of you because you have already told yourself the deck is stacked.
The Courage Constraint is real, and it is quieter than fear looks in the movies. It does not announce itself. It just whispers that you are owed an easier road, and that until the road gets easier, standing still is understandable. It is not. It never was. I threw rocks at everyone who supposedly held me back, and the whole time the only thing holding me back was the story I kept telling about being held back.
Then I Saw What I Had Actually Been Building
There is a man in Scripture named Joseph. Sold by his own brothers. Thrown in a pit, then a prison, for years, on charges that were not true. Every chapter of his life reads like a subtraction. Take away the family. Take away the freedom. Take away the fair outcome. And at the end of it he stands in front of the same brothers who sold him and says the line I keep coming back to. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
He did not say the pit was pleasant. He said the pit was purposeful. Those are not the same sentence, and the difference is everything.
Because one night it landed on me the way it must have landed on him. Everything I went through, even the ugly parts, even the restlessness and the isolation and the years I thought I was wasting wanting to be somewhere I was not, all of it was my purpose being built. I always planned on building something. I told myself the planning was what kept my mind alive, and it was. But I never noticed the obvious thing. While I was busy drawing up the blueprints for the life I dreamed of, I was already standing inside the construction. I was not waiting to build. I was being built.
The Courage Constraint. Attention Purgatory. The Two-Sided Coin. The Echo Chamber. Every piece of me I once wrote off as stupid, forgettable, and broken turned out to be load-bearing. Romans says all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose. All things. Not the highlight reel. The dropped calls too. The lonely dinners. The prayers you fumbled and the ones you never started.
It was not a sacrifice. It was a foundation.
The Cost You Feared Was Never a Cost
So let me hand you the reframe that cost me a decade to earn. You have been keeping a ledger. On one side you wrote down everything the call took from you. The friendships that faded. The nights you spent alone while the world went on without you. The version of you that could have been lighter, easier, more present. And you have been grieving that column like a loss.
Read it again. That was not your invoice. That was your inventory. Those were the materials. Nothing that God allowed into your story was wasted, and nothing you endured while walking toward the ring was subtracted from you. It was poured underneath you, in the dark, where foundations always get poured. You will never see the concrete once the house goes up. You are only supposed to stand on it.
Stop mourning your foundation. Start building on it.
The Midnight Move
Tonight, take out the ledger you have been keeping in your head. The list of everything you believe your purpose has cost you. Write down the three heaviest items, the ones you have quietly grieved for years. Then next to each one, write the single sentence you have been refusing to write. “This was not taken from me. This was poured into me.” Say it out loud once, to God, in your own words. Not as a performance. As a man finally telling the truth about his own foundation.
What’s forged at midnight cannot be broken by the dawn.
— Gabriel Vangelatos, The Midnight Visionary