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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
When the suit no longer fits. I'd like to begin with a poem. This one is called Shift. It's from tour day nine eighty two. Running on empty, pursuing and striving, been sold a tale, a path for thriving.
Winston Faircloth:Months, years or decades later, ladders we are still climbing. One day comes crashing down, dreams forgotten, purpose dying. An end is near, we cannot deny, deep within a stirring. We know, we understand, a new life possible is brewing. To release what has been 'tis never an easy task.
Winston Faircloth:Holding the familiar, the known, only maintains our mask. This one life is precious. Cannot afford to stay adrift. Take a step to reunion, wholeness. It all begins with a downward shift.
Winston Faircloth:That poem came from a season when I was starting to feel it. Not just the restlessness, wrongness. The sense that everything I had built my days around was producing less and less of what I actually needed. I didn't have the words for it yet. But the phrase I've come to use is this, the suit no longer fit.
Winston Faircloth:That's what today is about. I wanna tell you about the suit before I tell you about the moment it stopped fitting. Gained a lot and lost a lot of weight over the years. So maybe you can relate to a story about clothes that once fit you well, but no longer does. Because the suit wasn't a bad suit.
Winston Faircloth:That's the part people miss when they hear a story like mine. They assumed the identity that collapsed must have been wrong from the start, a mistake, a detour. It wasn't. It worked. For a long time, it worked beautifully.
Winston Faircloth:I was a builder, a launcher, the kind of person who could walk in a room with a problem and walk out with a plan. I had what I can only describe as a golden touch when it came to creating things, starting things, getting traction where others couldn't. I'd started several successful ventures. I'd led teams. I had a track record that says, hey, this guy delivers.
Winston Faircloth:And that identity, the achiever, the builder, the one who always finds a way, it didn't arrive out of nowhere. It was forged. In a life that had plenty of reasons to reach for self sufficiency. I'd uprooted my life more than once. Started from the ground more than once.
Winston Faircloth:And every time, the golden touch had come true. Every time, I found a way forward. So by the time I was in my fifties, that identity just wasn't what I did. It was who I was. It was the ground I stood on.
Winston Faircloth:The one thing I knew, no matter what else was uncertain, I could always fall back on. And that suit fit perfectly. I had tailored it for over thirty years of my career. And then I put it on one morning, and it was all wrong. When it stopped fitting.
Winston Faircloth:October 2019. I'd left the for profit corporation I had been with and decided to go out and launch my own consulting practice. I had promises. I had relationships. I had a plan.
Winston Faircloth:And I had the absolute confidence of someone who had done this before and done it well. And then the pandemic happened. And I want to be careful here. The pandemic is not the story. It's easy to use a global crisis as the explanation for a personal collapse, but that's not being honest.
Winston Faircloth:The pandemic was merely an accelerant. The kindling was already there. Six months in, eight months in, crickets. Not one client. The promises to launch did materialize.
Winston Faircloth:The relationships didn't convert. The traction I'd always been able to generate simply wasn't there. And here's what I want you to understand about what that felt like. It wasn't primarily financial, though that was real. I was draining my $4.00 1 k.
Winston Faircloth:I was in very concrete terms going backwards. But the financial pressure was almost secondary to something deeper. My coping mechanism had stopped working. Because when things had gotten hard in my life before, and there'd been many hard seasons, I'd always had a fallback. I can get to work.
Winston Faircloth:I can launch something. I can build my way out of this because that's what I do and that's who I am. And for the first time in my adult life, in my career, that coping mechanisms produced nothing. It's a little like what happens in recovery. When the thing you've always used to manage pain stops working, you don't just lose a strategy, you lose a footing.
Winston Faircloth:You don't know what to stand on. Now, at the same time, I was in a mastermind that I was desperate to leave. I had more money going out every month than coming in. And I began to look at how I could steward my precious resources and manage my way out of this financially. So I reached out to the leader honestly and humbly.
Winston Faircloth:This isn't working. I need to bow out. And the leader held me to the contract. No grace, no flexibility. This was a leader that talked about transformation and growth, holding me to the letter of financial agreement while I was drowning.
Winston Faircloth:I don't blame them. It was another accelerant on my way to transformation. But I filed that away. And I said to myself, whatever I build, it will have grace in it. It will always have an open hand.
Winston Faircloth:But that's a small detail. But I wanted to name it because it really mattered to me at the time. Because sometimes the sharpest clarity about who you want to become comes from watching who you refuse to be. By the end of that season, I was negative in every financially, professionally. I had no roots.
Winston Faircloth:I had lived a life mostly in motion, always launching, always building. And when that motion stopped, there was no ground beneath it. And that's when I began to understand that I wasn't dealing with a business problem. It was an identity problem. And when you've spent thirty years in a suit, you forget what you look like without it.
Winston Faircloth:And that was the work of the next several years. Not rebuilding, not relaunching, not finding a new strategy or a new program, just looking. And what was actually there underneath the achiever, the builder, the one who always finds a way. And what I found slowly through spiritual direction and lament, and nearly a thousand poems written one day at a time was this. Somewhere in my story, I can't really pin down exactly when, maybe early, maybe in the wake of the very first hard thing as a child, I had made a vow.
Winston Faircloth:Not out loud, not consciously. I didn't sit down and write it, but it was real and it was binding. And the vow was something like, no one, and I mean no one, is ever gonna do that to me again. I'm gonna be self sufficient, and I am going to take things into my hands so that no person, no circumstance, no loss can take that away from me. And I did.
Winston Faircloth:As I left college, I built that thing. I became the achiever, the launcher, the golden touch guy that was keeping my vow to myself. And here's what I want you to hear. Listen carefully. That bow of self sufficiency, it served me.
Winston Faircloth:It protected me. It generated real things, real work, real value, real contributions. And I'm not embarrassed by that person, the person I was for thirty plus years of my career. I honor him. But that vow made in fear, even one that produces good things, is still a prison.
Winston Faircloth:And the prison I had built was very comfortable, nicely tailored with a great track record up on the wall. And yet, when that coping mechanism stopped working, when the golden touch went quiet, what was actually happening, though I couldn't see it yet, was that prison door was beginning to open. Every valley is going to be useful in God's kingdom. This phrase spoken over me by Sybil Towner, my spiritual director, was the key to opening that door for me. I'm gonna say it again.
Winston Faircloth:Every valley in your life is going to be useful in God's kingdom. But when Sybil first said that to me during those early years, it made me angry. It also gave me hope both at the same time. Because I didn't choose the valley. But I came to understand that being in the valley is not punishment.
Winston Faircloth:It's preparation. It was doing the one thing I'd never been able to do for myself. It was making me stop. And in the stopping, in the silence, in the failure, in the honest reckoning with what I had built my identity on, I began for the very first time to hear something else. Not a plan, not a strategy, Something much quieter than that.
Winston Faircloth:A question. Who are you when your role or title falls away? Who are you when a role or title falls away? I certainly didn't have an answer, but I started to want one. And wanting to answer, that was the beginning.
Winston Faircloth:So let me describe the gift that no one wants, and I want to speak directly to someone listening right now. Maybe you're listening because something in episode one stirred your soul. Maybe you found this show at midnight and something in the description recognized you. Maybe someone who loves you sent it because they saw you in it. Whatever brought you here, I want you to know something.
Winston Faircloth:What you're experiencing now is not a malfunction. The restlessness, the hollowness, the sense that the thing that you built your identity around has gone quiet, that is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that something true is trying to get your attention. I personally know how disorienting it is when a coping mechanism stops working. I know what it feels like to reach for the thing that's always steadied you and find it isn't there.
Winston Faircloth:I know what it's like to be negative in every direction and not know what you're standing on. I also know now from the other side that the valley you're in is not a detour. It's the road. The gift that no one wants is the gift of having that ground removed. Because as long as you have something to stand on that isn't true, as long as a suit still fits well enough to keep wearing, you won't take it off.
Winston Faircloth:For many of us, it takes a crisis or a slow accumulation of smaller crisis to allow you to finally set it down. I'm not gonna tell you that it's comfortable. It isn't. I'm not gonna promise that it's quick. It's taken me so far five years, and I'm still on the journey.
Winston Faircloth:But I will tell you this. The person you find on the other side of that threshold, the one who's been waiting underneath all that achievement, striving, self sufficiency is worth the walk. God has known that person all along, and that person's been waiting for you to come home. So I'd like to close today's conversation with the poem. This one's called Unfolding.
Winston Faircloth:It's from day tour day eight sixty one. Unfolding. As we turn the page on a beautiful chapter, we recall and remember what made this so special. Special. Without a purposeful pause, we can rush into the next and miss what is here now, the lessons freely available.
Winston Faircloth:My desire to know what's next can become an idol, controlling, missing out on your mystery, and a better plan perfectly suited. Open handed, expectant, trusting, awaiting. In the darkest valleys and mountain peaks alike, I will surrender and pursue what you desire in the unfolding. Open handed, expectant, trusting, awaiting. That's not a technique.
Winston Faircloth:That's not a program outcome. That's a posture. One I had to be broken open to receive. And if today's conversation put language on something that you've been carrying, if the suit you've been wearing is starting to feel wrong and you're not sure what to do with it, I want to invite you to take one small step. Visit myreuniontour.com.
Winston Faircloth:Spend five minutes on the home page. You'll see eight examples of identities that no longer fit, and you might recognize yourself in one of them. And if you're ready for more than just listening, why don't you schedule a conversation with me? It's not a sales call. It's a real conversation about where you are and whether this is the right season to go deeper at myreuniontour.com.
Winston Faircloth:Also, I'd like to invite you to subscribe to begin again wherever you listen to podcast. And if this episode describes someone you love, someone who's wearing a suit that no longer fits and doesn't quite know why, share it with them. It'd be a real gift to them. I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.