The Gift of Tension
A few months ago I wrote about the challenges of measuring the things in life that matter most, acknowledging the ongoing tension that exists when attempting to calculate the distance between stagnation and progress.
While writing helped clarify my thoughts, I couldn’t shake the frustration of that ever-present tension. I longed for peace of mind, a sense of certainty that I was allocating my capital appropriately across my various roles and responsibilities.
Yet, the more I wished the tension away, the more it stared back at me—day after day. Wearing out its welcome, to say the least.
At the time I wrote that post, I was wrestling with what felt like two extremes:
On one end: I love my work, and I love reading and learning and exposing myself to new ideas to become even better at what I feel called to do. I had a clear vision for the next 10, 20, even 30 years of my career. But then it hit me—I had more vision for my career than I did for my family.
On the other end: Social media reminders about the fragility of time with our children—while both truthful and powerful—have led me to feel an almost crushing urgency to maximize every moment with them. The awareness of how much they’ll face in their teenage years—and my deep responsibility to guide them through it—weighed heavily on me. Every hour not spent with them, every moment I wasn’t actively preparing myself to be the father they’ll need, felt like a failure. The guilt was relentless, a constant reminder that no matter how much I did, it might never feel like enough.
Because prioritizing family over work seemed like the obvious choice, I felt the only logical response was to starve my career ambition and reallocate all my energy to home life.
It’s not that I was going to turn into some disgruntled worker who just punched the clock each day to collect a paycheck. That’s not my character, nor is that how I was raised.
But it did mean that, outside of work hours, I was essentially going to eliminate anything that was compounding my career ambition—no more business books, no more podcasts, no more email newsletters.
I expected removing career-related inputs outside of work to bring me clarity. And for a while, it did—until I picked up John Mark Comer's book Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human. I wasn’t looking for more tension—I was hoping for resolution.
But instead, I found words that challenged my assumptions and forced me to rethink my approach.
One passage immediately grabbed my attention:
“God doesn’t do cheap, low-grade, half-baked work. He’s not lazy. He doesn’t make junk. He has a value for excellence and artistry and quality of materials.”
That idea aligned with me—if God values excellence in His creation, could it be that my desire to master my craft wasn’t competing with my other callings, but aligning with them?
Then I read this:
“The best way to serve others with our work is to ‘serve the work.’ Meaning, the best way to love and serve others with our job is just to be really good at our jobs.” (Emphasis is mine.)
This challenged everything I had been wrestling with. I had assumed career ambition was something to suppress in order to be fully present for my family. But what if excellence in my work wasn’t a distraction from my priorities—but a way of honoring them?
In a game of tug-of-war, both sides pull the rope with everything they have, trying to drag the flag in their direction. But the moment one side wins, what happens? Both sides collapse. It’s the tension in the rope that keeps everything upright, balanced, and in play.
Maybe life works the same way. The tension I was trying so hard to eliminate wasn’t a flaw—it was the very thing keeping everything from falling apart.
While I viewed the tension as what was hindering me from focusing on my priorities, it was instead the very thing protecting me from over-allocating to a particular area so that my top priorities could continue working in harmony with one another.
It turns out tension isn’t a bug in the system—it’s evidence that we care deeply about getting things right. The challenge isn’t to remove it but to steward it well—because where there’s tension, there’s also purpose and meaning.
I’ve come to realize that a lack of tension often represents the presence of unchecked ambition in my life.
When it’s not present, I may feel like I’m operating within a good rhythm, yet it’s possible—maybe even probable —that I’m drifting out of alignment in a particular area.
Once I embraced tension as a guide rather than a problem, I saw it showing up in many areas of my life:
Spending money on my health to ensure I’m there for my family in the long run—while also maintaining enough financial margin to prioritize meaningful family experiences.
Thinking I need to spend every spare minute with my kids when I’m not working—yet not carving out time to recharge by enjoying a hobby, like playing golf with friends on a Saturday morning every now and then.
Wrestling with how much to prepare for the future without doing so at the expense of enjoying the present.
Wanting to commit to writing on Reframing Capital on a more frequent cadence—yet also wanting it to happen sporadically and from a place of abundance.
Feeling like a hypocrite for even writing all this after having already written this post.
Looking at all these competing priorities, I started to wonder—what if the real problem isn’t the tension itself, but my desire to get rid of it?
What if the tension we try so hard to eliminate is actually proof that we’re holding the right things in balance? Rather than seeking its absence, maybe we should embrace it as the quiet assurance that we’re exactly where we’re meant to be.
After all, maybe the goal isn’t perfect balance, but the wisdom to recognize when we’re drifting and the grace to recalibrate along the way.
(Photo by Barnabas Sani on Pexels)
