Celebrating a Win, Letting Go & Moving Forward!
I’ll warn you up front — you may want to grab a cup of coffee or a cold drink before diving in. My usual “brevity” has officially been thrown out the window, and I’m not sure where it landed… LOL. Seriously though — do you have a to-do list? The kind that never seems to end? Maybe you check off the urgent things but keep putting off the heavy ones — the important-but-not-urgent tasks that are so easy to push aside. You tell yourself, “I’ll get to it soon.” But then life happens. New commitments pile on. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and before you know it those old to-do’s have been shoved so far down the list they’re almost forgotten — except they’re not. Because every time you sit down to do something new, something you want to be excited about, the unfinished things creep back in. Instead of joy, you feel guilt. Instead of freedom, you feel pressure. That was me back in January. Some of you know parts of my story: how I got very sick with COVID, how in 2020 my wife and I had to close our businesses, how bankruptcy followed, and how depression crept in during those long months of recovery. What I haven’t talked about as much is the backlog that came with all of it — boxes and boxes of equipment, paperwork, invoices, receipts, records to digitize, equipment to dismantle, and over 85 hard drives holding more than 50 terabytes of data. Millions of files that needed sorting. It wasn’t just clutter. It was the weight of lost dreams and unfinished business. And it sat in storage like a shadow over everything new I wanted to build. You see, before I got sick, I had always been someone people could count on. If George said he was going to do it, you could take it to the bank. But after COVID, I simply couldn’t keep up anymore. That reality was a crushing blow. In those early months of recovery, I gave myself permission to set the to-do list aside and focus on healing. And slowly, I began to dream again. Out of that season came Alderpen Media — the for-profit ministry my wife and I launched in May of 2021, and finally brought to life in January 2024. We knew it would be the last business we ever start. A way of giving back. A way of paying forward the blessings we’ve received.