When Did Mediocrity Become Comfortable?

Tell me the truth—when did you go quiet?

Don’t rush past that.
Sit with what stirs for a second.

Someone recently asked me, “What’s your holy discontent?”
My answer came fast and hot:

The quiet surrender to a lesser life.

I see it everywhere.
People don’t usually notice it.
They drift into it.

High-capacity, good-hearted, faithful people quietly give in—setting for versions of outward success without relational depth and inward integrity.

One leader I coach bristled when I used the word surrender.
“I don’t surrender,” he said, and immediately listed the battles he’d won, the obstacles he’d crushed, the metrics he’d beaten.

So I asked a few different questions.

“How well do you sleep at night?”
His shoulders dropped.

“When did you last laugh at work?”
His face softened.

“On a scale of one to ten—what’s your wife’s sense of worth right now?”
He sighed. “Okay. Okay.”

Outwardly successful.
Inwardly unraveling.

He had traded peace for performance, intimacy for achievement. Financial rewards paired with relational erosion. A lesser life—polished, impressive, and quietly exhausting.

He didn’t stay there.

Over time, we explored who he was becoming—not just what he was producing. He learned to tend his inner life with the same seriousness he brought to his outer one. Character and conduct. Being and doing.

Congruency.

Overflow.

He found something better.

Another time, a couple came to see me—married for decades, devoted church members, deeply knowledgeable, deeply stuck.

She had buried her art career to keep the peace.
He was anxious and controlling, terrified of his own insufficiency.
They spiritualized it. Rationalized it. Normalized their diminished marriage.

Eventually, the tension became too loud to ignore.

We didn’t start with behavior modification.
We went to the roots—unearthing the deepest emotional needs driving them both. I helped each take responsibility for their own formation, rather than blaming or depending on the other as their only source.

A few sessions later, they walked in holding hands.

“You’ve solved a twenty-year problem,” they said.

I hadn’t.
They did.

They stopped settling. They believed there was more. And because they were Christ-followers, they discovered God was already committed to that “more.”

This is my work.
And my holy discontent.

Helping people wake up from the quiet surrender to a lesser life.

C. S. Lewis saw this clearly. In The Weight of Glory, he challenged the idea that Jesus’ call is mainly about grim endurance and noble deprivation—as if sacrifice were the destination.

It’s not.

Sacrifice is the doorway.

The New Testament doesn’t invite us to self-denial for its own sake. It invites us into life with Jesus—full, alive, expansive. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” (John 10:10, NIV11).

Lewis put it bluntly:

“Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak… We are half-hearted creatures… far too easily pleased.”

So—when did you go quiet?
When did mediocrity become comfortable?
What’s keeping you from the life you sense is still possible?

You don’t have to settle.
And you don’t have to do it alone.