{"id":567,"date":"2026-08-01T07:10:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T12:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=567"},"modified":"2026-08-01T07:10:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T12:10:17","slug":"what-i-am-taking-into-next-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/08\/01\/what-i-am-taking-into-next-week\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Am Taking Into Next Week"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"rtd-wrap\">\n<style>\n@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@500;600&family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400;0,600;1,400&display=swap');\n.rtd-wrap{background:#F1EBDD;color:#2B241D;font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;padding:36px 30px;max-width:760px;margin:0 auto;border-radius:4px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-kicker{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:12px;color:#6E5540;margin:0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-title{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:600;font-size:34px;line-height:1.15;margin:8px 0 0;color:#2B241D}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-soil{height:2px;background:#6E5540;margin:18px 0 22px;opacity:.55}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-verse{font-style:italic;font-size:19px;line-height:1.6;border-left:4px solid #46633C;padding-left:18px;margin:0 0 26px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-cite{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-style:normal;font-weight:500;font-size:13px;letter-spacing:.08em;color:#6E5540;display:block;margin-top:10px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-body p{font-size:18px;line-height:1.75;margin:0 0 18px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep{background:rgba(110,85,64,.09);border-left:4px solid #6E5540;padding:20px 22px;margin:28px 0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep-label{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:.16em;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:12px;color:#6E5540;margin:0 0 12px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep p{font-size:17px;line-height:1.7;margin:0 0 14px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep p:last-child{margin-bottom:0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:22px;line-height:1.35;color:#46633C;border-top:2px solid #DBB569;border-bottom:2px solid #DBB569;padding:18px 0;margin:30px 0;text-align:center}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-close{font-size:18px;line-height:1.75;margin:0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-foot{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:12px;letter-spacing:.16em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#6E5540;text-align:center;margin:30px 0 0}\n@media (max-width:600px){.rtd-wrap{padding:26px 20px}.rtd-wrap .rtd-title{font-size:28px}.rtd-wrap .rtd-body p,.rtd-wrap .rtd-close{font-size:17px}}\n<\/style>\n  <p class=\"rtd-kicker\">Rooted \/ Week 4 \/ Recap<\/p>\n  <h2 class=\"rtd-title\">What I Am Taking Into Next Week<\/h2>\n  <div class=\"rtd-soil\"><\/div>\n  <blockquote class=\"rtd-verse\">I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.<span class=\"rtd-cite\">&mdash; Philippians 3:14 (ESV)<\/span><\/blockquote>\n  <div class=\"rtd-body\">\n    <p>I have spent a lot of years asking God to speak and then not building a life where I could actually hear Him. That is the honest version of my week.<\/p>\n    <p>Five places. His Word. His People. Our Trials. His Church. Prayer. I went back through all five and the one that got me was Wednesday.<\/p>\n    <p>I do not like the idea that God allows hard things on purpose. I would much rather have a God who only hands out good weather. But I have four sons, and the version of me that would have been useful to them at twenty five did not exist yet. The only reason he exists now is that God let some things break. He was not careless with any of it. He was not absent in any of it. He also did not spare me from it, and somewhere along the way I stopped asking Him to.<\/p>\n    <p>Solomon called our years a striving after wind. James called us a mist that appears for a little time and vanishes. That used to sound bleak to me. Now it sounds like relief. If this is not the whole story, then the hard chapter is not the whole story either.<\/p>\n    <p>Here is what happens when God speaks, and I watched most of these show up somewhere this week. Faith comes alive. We become focused. There is provision. We are on a mission. Doors open. There is a price to pay.<\/p>\n    <p>I am not going to pretend I want that last one. I want it anyway, because the alternative is a life where nothing ever costs me anything and nothing ever grows.<\/p>\n    <p>So here is the whole assignment for next week. Not arrive. Press on.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n  <div class=\"rtd-deep\">\n    <p class=\"rtd-deep-label\">In the Original<\/p>\n    <p>The verb Paul uses in Philippians 3:14, press on, is dioko. It means to pursue, to chase down, to run something to ground. The New Testament also uses that same verb to mean persecute.<\/p>\n    <p>Paul knew both meanings personally. He had spent years aiming that exact energy at the church, hunting Christians from house to house with everything he had.<\/p>\n    <p>Nothing about his intensity changed on the road to Damascus. The target did.<\/p>\n    <p>That is a more honest picture of sanctification than most of us carry around. God rarely removes our drive. He redirects it. The man writing press on is the same man who once pressed on in the other direction, and he is not pretending he became a calmer person. He became an aimed one.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n  <div class=\"rtd-deep\">\n    <p class=\"rtd-deep-label\">What Gets Diluted<\/p>\n    <p>Everything around us sells arrival. The milestone, the promotion, the number, the breakthrough, the season where it finally gets easier. Even church language does it. We talk about people who have arrived spiritually as though that is a place.<\/p>\n    <p>Paul wrote this letter near the end of his life, from custody, after decades of ministry that most of us could not survive a year of.<\/p>\n    <p>And what he says is that he has not arrived. He is still pressing.<\/p>\n    <p>If he had not, we should stop expecting to. The goal was never arrival. It was direction, held for a lifetime, in a world that keeps offering us a place to stop.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n  <div class=\"rtd-pull\">Downward first. Upward after. He has not stopped speaking.<\/div>\n  <p class=\"rtd-close\">\u201cI press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.\u201d (Philippians 3:14, ESV)<\/p>\n  <p class=\"rtd-foot\">Stumble Up &middot; www.thestumbleup.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rooted \/ Week 4 \/ Recap What I Am Taking Into Next Week I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.&mdash; Philippians 3:14 (ESV) I have spent a lot of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rooted"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/SU_20260801_BLOG.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":569,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions\/569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}