The Week I Almost Did Not Show Up

The week I sat down with Dustin, I almost did not want to talk to anyone. It was one of those heavy weeks where the honest thing to admit is that part of you wants to lie down in the ditch, pull the dirt over the top, and call it. If you have built anything, led anything, or tried to put your work into the world, you know exactly the kind of week I mean. So I want to tell you what Dustin told me, because it has not left me since.

The Fear You Respect

He started with fear, but not the kind you are picturing. We talk about fear like it is always the enemy, the thing that freezes you, the thing that has to be beaten. Dustin made a distinction I have been chewing on ever since. There is a fear you carry, that you wear, that walks around with you and quietly runs your life. And then there is a different kind, the kind he described as respect. Not “I am scared,” but “I respect that what I do, or fail to do, puts food on the table.” That second fear is not a cage. It is fuel. For anyone leading anything, there comes a point where you have to learn to dance with the fear instead of letting it lead. You step into it, and you use the energy.

What You Do When You Do Not Know What to Plant

There is a phrase that sits on Dustin’s desk, and it carried him through his hardest season. Work hard and trust God. We work hard because of the passion and the vision in front of us, but the results were never ours to control. The job is to be faithful, to show up, to put in the work. He framed it as planting. When you find yourself standing in a new field and you have no idea what to plant, you do not freeze. You plant something. It either grows or it does not, and either way you learn, and you move. Every time he reached out to a contact on his phone, that was planting. Some of it produced nothing. But, as he put it, we have not because we ask not.

The Only Way Through the Valley

I told him this reminded me of my own hardest season. If you know any of my story, you know I walked through a divorce, the kind of thing that flips your entire life upside down. I remember sitting in my brother’s office one day, completely defeated, and he said something that still haunts me in the best way. The only way through the valley of the shadow of death is to keep walking. You cannot go around it. There is nothing clever to do. You just keep walking. And the worst move you can make is to lie down in the ditch and wait for it to take you.

Here is what I had to learn, and what I think you might need to hear today. There is a guaranteed outcome in quitting. If you shrink back, if you lie down, the result is certain. There is no other possibility. But if you keep walking, if you go through the storm, there is at least the possibility of a different outcome. That possibility is the whole game. Quitting closes the door. Walking leaves it open.

Why the Buffalo Runs Straight at the Storm

This is where Dustin told me about the buffalo. A friend of his preached on it years ago, and people still talk about the message. When a buffalo sees a storm coming, it does not run away from it, and it does not try to go around it. It runs straight at it, because the fastest way out of a storm is through it. And when you picture a buffalo, you do not picture something fragile. You picture sheer mass, strength, muscle. One of the strongest creatures on the planet is the one built to run into the thing everything else runs from. So the logic is simple. If charging the storm is the move the strong thing makes, there must be something better on the other side. Retreating is not the best path. Going around is not the best path. Going through is.

I know that sounds almost too simple when you are the one standing in the storm. When the week is heavy and every part of you wants to shrink. But simple is not the same as easy, and the buffalo does not wait until it feels ready. It moves because moving toward the thing is what it was made to do.

The Pull You Feel Is Not an Accident

Here is the part that matters most for you, especially if you are someone carrying a craft, an expertise, or a calling that you have been sitting on. The pull you feel to start the thing, to build the thing, to use your voice, is not there by accident. It is not a glitch in your wiring. It is the wiring. So when you lean on everyone else instead of stepping in, when you hold back instead of going all the way through, you are not protecting yourself. You are refusing to be fully you. And the cost of that is not only yours to pay. The people who need what you carry are still out there, still looking, and right now they are finding someone with less expertise and less care, for the simple reason that the other person showed up and you did not.

So if this is a heavy week for you, here is the honest charge. Do not lie down in the ditch. Plant something, even when you have no idea what will grow. Respect the fear, then dance with it. Run at the storm like the strongest thing in the field, because the only guaranteed outcome is the one quitting hands you. And when you are in it, do not hold anything back.

Go down swinging.

Create your art. The world is waiting.

Watch the full conversation, and if it moves you, send it to one person who needs to hear it. If you want to build a thought leadership platform of your own, visit 1898creative.com.

#createyourart

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Full Transcript

Darren: For entrepreneurs, for those leading anything in any way or form, there is going to have to be a time that you learn how to dance with the fear. You have to step into it and not allow it to control you, to dictate you, to fight against it, but to dance with it. That is where you begin to use that energy in some really cool ways. And it sounds like that is a little bit of what you did.

Dustin: Yeah. And I will say too, it is not necessarily the type of crippling, I am afraid. It is the kind of fear we read about in scripture, where there is a level of respect to it. It is not something I carry. I am not walking around in fear. I do not carry it with me. But it is the thought that if I do not do this, we do not eat.

Darren: Yeah, for sure.

Dustin: To me, that is not an “I am scared” kind of fear. It is a level of respect. I respect that my actions, or my lack of actions, help produce food on our table. If we get primitive about it, that is the way it was. Back in the caveman days, there was no showing up to the office to fart around on your stone, on your tablet. (See what I did there?) You could not play solitaire on your tablet, punch out, go home and say, all right, I made money today. No, you had to go out and make it happen. And if you did not, you did not eat.

Darren: That is pretty good.

Dustin: There is a phrase that sits on my desk, and it is the number one thing Will taught me during that season. I always come back to it. Work hard and trust God. We work hard because of the passion and the vision that has been set before us, but the results are not ultimately up to us. It is up to us to be faithful, to show up, to put in the work. It is up to us to plant. When you find yourself in a new field and you do not know what to plant, you just plant. Then you trust God for whatever grows up out of that field, whatever he has for you next. That is how we operate as believers anyway.

Darren: I love that analogy, because so often fear puts me in the fetal position. You want to bury yourself in the ground instead of planting. You decide to dig a hole and then climb into it. But the question is, what is the next right thing? Like you said, if you are in a new field and you do not know what to plant, you plant something, you learn from it, and you move. It either grows or it does not.

Dustin: And so me reaching out to my contacts on my phone, every time I do that, it is planting.

Darren: You are planting.

Dustin: Yeah. And it may produce nothing. But we have not because we ask not.

Darren: That reminds me, and this is a little off topic, but if you know any of my story, you know I walked through a divorce. The hardest time of my life, everything flipped upside down. I remember sitting in my brother’s office one day, just defeated, walking through the whole thing. And he said something that haunts me in a good way to this day. The only way to make it through the valley of the shadow of death is to just keep walking. You cannot go around it. There is nothing you can do. You just keep walking. And I think a little bit of what you are saying is that you cannot lay down in the ditch and go, take me. No. We have to get some work going. We have to get a little uncomfortable. We have to put ourselves out there in a way we maybe have not before, and do the thing that scares us most. So, Dustin, talk to me about this. You get past the initial shock, the initial grief of everything. You start getting into it. You have that moment where you go, I think I could do this. Was there ever a time you made that decision and then thought, I have made a terrible mistake?

Dustin: Oh man. It would be better for this podcast if I had that moment, but honestly, no. I never had that. For me, every day was further confirmation that I was doing the right thing. And just because it does not fit the narrative that some people think needs to be there does not mean it is not powerful.

Darren: It was basically what you said. You go, here are the couple of things I know I need to do. I need to start planting. And as you planted more, and the seedlings popped up, you went, yes, I can do this.

Dustin: Yeah. A good friend of mine gave a sermon years ago that a lot of people still talk about. He talked about going through the storms, and about the buffalo. When buffalo see a storm, they run toward it, not around it, not away from it. They run toward it, because the quickest way out of the storm is through it. And when I close my eyes and picture a buffalo heading into a storm, all I think about is sheer mass, strength, and muscle. One of the strongest creatures on earth is the one that goes through the storm, not the one that goes around it or away from it. So I look at that and think, there must be something better on the other side. Retreating is not the best for me. Going around it is not the best for me. So the best thing for me must be to go through it.

Darren: That will preach. That is a great message. I am sitting here thinking about what you and I were talking about before the cameras turned on. Like you said, I think you opened the podcast with it. This week is just heavy. It is hard. It is one of those weeks where you want to shrink back, or lay down in the ditch and pull the dirt over the top and call it.

Dustin: There is a guaranteed outcome in that, though.

Darren: Yeah, you are right. There is a guaranteed outcome of quitting. There is no other possibility.

Dustin: Going through the storm, there is the possibility of another outcome.

Darren: Yeah. What is on the other side of that?

Dustin: And I think that is anybody who starts something. Entrepreneurs, ministry leaders, anyone in charge of something and leading it in some way. You have to go through the storm, because the minute you shrink back, the minute you lay down, yes, there is an outcome, but everything you were built for, the reason you feel that pull to start or do or create the thing, is because that is how you were wired. That is something inside of you, and it is not there by mistake. That is what I keep coming back to when I find myself in these heavy days and I have to get through the storm. Leaning on somebody else, or not stepping into it fully, that is me not being fully me. So at that point, you go down swinging.