Chasing after wind.

Nobody wakes up one day and decides to drift from God.

It starts with wanting something. A better version of your life. A career that means something. Recognition from people whose opinion you've decided matters. The feeling of moving forward, of being ahead, of finally becoming the person you've wanted to become.

None of that feels dangerous. It just feels like life.

The mind starts measuring everything. Every opportunity — is this moving me forward? Every relationship — what does this person think of me? Am I ahead or behind? You start checking. Comparing. Calculating. The hunger for success, for validation, for winning — it doesn't stay in one corner of your life. It spreads. It becomes the thing you think about when you wake up and the thing you're still turning over when you sleep.

And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, God gets quieter.

The things we chase aren't wrong. Wanting to grow, to build something, to be known and loved — these are human things.

The problem is what we do with them.

We start asking them to answer questions they were never made to answer.

Am I enough? Do I matter? Is there something in me worth loving beyond what I can produce?

And they answer. That's the thing nobody warns you about — they actually answer. Success says yes, you're enough, look at what you built. Validation says yes, you matter, look at who noticed. And in these moments, those answers feel real. They feel like they're coming from somewhere solid.

So you go back. Again and again. You give more time to the things that make you feel good, and less to the things that don't. Quietly, without noticing, your whole life is based around whether you're winning. And winning stops being something you do occasionally — it becomes something you need, consistently, just to feel like yourself.

That is what you've handed your peace to.

Solomon is the most uncomfortable version of this story, because he can't be dismissed.

He wasn't weak. He wasn't ignorant. He was given wisdom by God directly — and he knew it. He started well, prayed well, built the Temple. There was a moment early in his life where God asked him what he wanted, and Solomon asked for wisdom to serve his people rather than wealth or power for himself. God was so pleased He gave him all three.

And then, slowly, Solomon turned that abundance into a project of self.

He built. And built. Palaces, gardens, estates, the greatest collection of wealth and achievement the ancient world had seen. He pursued everything — success, pleasure, legacy, the kind of life that would make people look and say he really did something. He denied himself nothing. He refused his heart no pleasure. He accumulated, competed, constructed — and he did it all while still knowing God, still writing scripture, still carrying the anointing.

That's what makes it so unsettling. The drift and the belief existed at the same time.

"I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve — everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind." — Ecclesiastes 2:10–11

He arrived. He got everything the pursuit promised. And he sat down at the end of it and wrote one of the most honest things in all of Scripture — that it was all empty. Not some of it. Not the parts he did wrong. All of it. The achievement, the pleasure, the legacy, the winning. Chasing after wind.

Solomon didn't write Ecclesiastes from the bottom of a failure. He wrote it from the top of everything he had ever wanted. That's the point. The fullness itself was the problem. Not because building and achieving are wrong — but because he had handed them his soul, and they had nothing to give it back.

The question isn't whether you believe in God. The question is what you actually run to when you need peace — and whether that thing has anything real to offer you when it counts.

Because a person can believe in God genuinely, attend church faithfully, speak the right language — and still be living as though their stability depends entirely on how their life is performing. Solomon is proof that the belief and the drift can coexist for a very long time without the contradiction becoming visible.

That's the drift. Not a crisis. Not a dramatic falling away. Just a quiet, gradual handing over of the interior — until the pursuit is running everything, and God is somewhere in the background, present in name, but not where in heart.

Here is what none of it will ever tell you though: it doesn't hold.

The achievement that was supposed to settle the question of your worth doesn't settle it. It just raises the bar. The validation that was supposed to make you feel secure makes you need the next piece of it. The ego that's been fed by years of competing and winning becomes terrified the moment it looks like losing. You build and build and build — and then one day you're standing in the middle of everything you achieved and it feels airless.

You realise you were leaning on something that was never actually holding you. And in that moment — when everything falls apart — something becomes visible again.

God was never the one who left. You just couldn't hear Him over all the noise.

This is why the return feels like a discovery. It isn't. It's just the first time in a long time you've been quiet enough to notice what was always there.

"He came to himself." — Luke 15:17

The prodigal son didn't find something new in that far country. He just stopped being blind to what had always been true. The father hadn't moved. Only his ability to see clearly had.

But here's the question worth sitting with before moving on.

When you go back to God after a living for everything else — what are you actually going back for?

Are you going back to Him? Or are you going back hoping He'll restore the life that just broke — the career, the relationship, the version of yourself you were building?

Because those are not the same thing. And it's easier to confuse them than most people want to admit.

There's a version of returning to God that is really just the same chase wearing different clothes. The remorse is real. The need is genuine. But underneath it — quiet and unexamined — is the same hunger: fix it. Give me back what I had. Make the pursuit work this time. God becomes a means to an end. The relationship resumes until the next season of fullness, when it quietly fades again.

Nothing changes. Because nothing was actually surrendered.

The older brother in the parable is the version of this that stays at church. He never left. He served, obeyed, did everything right — and was furious when mercy was given to someone who hadn't earned it. Because underneath his faithfulness was a ledger. He wasn't there for his father. He was there for what being there would eventually get him. His religion was its own form of ambition.

The father runs to the returning son before the rehearsed speech is even finished. Mercy isn't waiting for the performance to be convincing enough. But the question of what the son actually wants — that still matters. It shapes everything that follows.

What moving forward actually looks like.

Not a formula. But a few honest things.

01

Come as you are, not as you think you need to be. The son came home with a whole speech prepared. The father interrupted it. You don't need to have it together before you return. You just need to return.

02

Be honest about what you're actually asking for. If the prayer is really just "fix my life" — sit with that. There's nothing wrong with bringing it to God. But notice it. Name it. And then ask if there's something deeper underneath it that you're afraid to want.

03

Don't rush out of the emptiness. It's uncomfortable. Every instinct says fill it. But the breaking is doing something important. The things that were never holding you have been exposed. That's not punishment — that's mercy. Let it finish what it started.

04

You don't have to feel worthy to come back. That's not the condition. It never was. The return isn't the reward for having cleaned yourself up — it's the beginning of being made clean. Come from wherever you are. That's enough.

05

Let this change what you're building toward, not just how you feel right now. The same cycle will repeat if God goes back to being the emergency contact the moment things stabilise. Something different is possible — a life where your sense of self isn't hostage to how things are performing. It's quieter. It looks like less, from the outside. But it doesn't break the same way.

His mercy isn't a reset back to before. It's a door into something more honest than before.

We don't come back because God left.

We come back because everything else eventually does — the career, the image, the version of ourselves we were so carefully constructing.

The real question is what we choose to build on, in the returning.

To sit with

What's the first thing your mind moves toward in the morning — and what does that tell you about where your sense of self actually lives right now?

Have you been so consumed by building something — a career, an image, a life that looks a certain way — that God has become background noise?

When you see someone ahead of you, what do you actually feel? What does that feeling cost you?

If everything you're currently building were taken away tomorrow — would God be enough?

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