Episode Description
David has spent more than a decade walking alongside people who look like they have it all together on the outside — the career, the family, the responsibilities — but who are quietly wrestling with drift, numbness, and the question: is this really the life I'm meant to build?
His own path was anything but a straight line. Born in Saskatchewan. Architecture degree in Winnipeg. A gap year at Bible school in Sweden and Austria, where he met his future wife. Immigrating to Arizona in 1994. Cutting his teeth managing PetSmart construction projects in what he calls a "white collar sweatshop." A bed and breakfast in Jerome. Vocational ministry in Colorado. And a son, Julian, born with hypoplastic lungs and end-stage renal failure who has needed two kidney transplants.
Then came what David calls his season of darkness — three years of anxiety-fueled depression from late 2016 to late 2019. Coming out of it is what produced the book.
In this conversation, we dig into:
- Why he believes people aren't broken, they're just out of position
- A Gen X childhood with a ridiculous amount of freedom in Regina, Saskatchewan
- Bible school in Europe and the question he's spent a lifetime on
- Prototypical architecture and burning out on the career he'd wanted since age nine
- The bed and breakfast, the ministry, and a pattern of "this isn't what I thought it would be"
- Julian's birth, the NICU, and two kidney transplants — both 40 days from clinic to surgery
- The autism diagnosis at 10, and letting go of expectations
- Leaving architecture a second time to become a homeschooling guide
- The season of darkness and what came out of it
- Suffering minus meaning equals despair. Suffering plus meaning equals passion.
- "The Freaking Basics" — sleep, water, food, movement, before the existential crisis
- Working ON your life vs. working IN your life
- Why comfort is the most dangerous thing about a good life
- The sigmoid curve, unconscious competence, and why stasis is a myth
- The biggest lie we tell ourselves when we know we need to change
Please LIKE, SHARE & SUBSCRIBE.