I turned 41 this year.
And I never thought that at this age I would write what I’m about to write.
This year I lost my job. Started a new one. Finances at home got tight. The car started breaking down. Expenses, stress, changes, new beginnings. A year of constant pulling in every direction that left me, more than once, staring at the ceiling not knowing which way to go.
But there’s something else. Something I don’t usually talk about, because when you’re in ministry, you’re supposed to have everything together. In my 41 years, I had never felt depressed. Until this year. For the first time in my life I experienced what it feels like to feel like a failure, without direction, carrying the weight of everything at once. And I say it without shame, because I believe honesty is worth more than appearance.
Despite all of that, I made a decision: I decided to have an attitude of gratitude. Not because I wanted to feel grateful — there’s an enormous difference between wanting and deciding — but because I chose it intentionally. In the darkest moments. In the most stressful ones. In the happy ones too. Gratitude not as an emotion, but as a posture.
But this story isn’t about gratitude. It’s about a cube.
The Toy Aisle
One day I went with my wife and son to a Chinese discount store. My 6-year-old was going wild in the toy aisle. So was I, if I’m honest. Pure nostalgia: chess, Snakes and Ladders, plastic cars.
And then my eyes landed on a section with about 50 types of Rubik’s cubes.
I walked out with 4.
I thought: “I’m over 40 now. Time to build some new neural connections.” And also — though I didn’t say it out loud — I wanted to prove something to myself.
The process went something like this:
- Day 1: disassemble the cubes.
- Days 2–4: try to solve one face.
- Day 4: actually solve one face.
- Days 5–8: try to solve two faces… and discover that solving two destroys the others.
- Day 15: decide to actually learn. Because come on — at 41, how hard can it be?
- Day 15: find a 12-year-old on TikTok teaching it step by step. And learn from him. A 41-year-old man learning from a 12-year-old kid. And I learned a lot.
- Day 25: get so frustrated that I scrambled the cube worse than it already was. I thought: “This isn’t for me. I’m too old for this.”
- Day 45: solve the first complete cube.
- Day 50: be able to solve any Rubik’s cube, no matter how scrambled it was.
What the Cube Taught Me
Solving a cube can happen in different ways: by coincidence, by insistence, by learning, by practice. What I learned is that it takes a few specific things.
Faith. Believing I’m going to make it. Seeing myself holding that finished cube before I actually have it in my hands. Having the conviction that even though I can’t physically see it yet — and neither can anyone else — I will eventually see it solved. Without that image in the mind, the process never starts.
Decision. And here’s something I want to make clear: the decision is not just the moment you begin. The decision is the commitment to start — and in that same decision, the commitment to keep going until you get there. It’s not two decisions — it’s one. Starting halfway is not having decided yet. The day I bought those four cubes, I didn’t just decide to try. I decided I was going to finish. That’s the difference.
Humility. The humility to understand that I don’t know everything. That there are people who know more than me. And to be willing to learn from them, even if that person is a 12-year-old on TikTok. On day 25, when frustration took over, I lost that humility for a moment. And the cube made me pay for it.
Investment. Time, money, energy. I call buying those 4 cubes an “investment” because that’s how it felt — an intentional bet on something I believed in.
Failing. This might have been the most important lesson. Victories don’t come from victories. They come from failing, from learning the ways things don’t work, and from coming back. Day 25 was one of the most important moments in the entire process, even though in that moment it felt like the darkest one.
Adapting. Every time I failed, I learned to look for a different perspective. To change the move. Life, like the Rubik’s cube, rarely gets solved from the same angle.
Consistency. Keep going, keep going, keep going. No matter how frustrating it gets. Discipline: return to the faith and the original decision to start and to keep going. Practicing. Failing. And coming back.
Where the Bible Comes In
There’s a verse in James 1 that has resonated with me all year: “when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow.”
What we’ve always been taught is that God sends trials. And that may be true. But we’re rarely taught that we can also enter those trials ourselves. That we can — like I did with that cube — intentionally step into a process that will test what we believe, who we are, and what we decide.
Faith under trial is not a momentary event. It is the beginning of a process. A process of failures, setbacks, humility, decisions, adaptations, and changes in perspective. And it’s there — only there — that endurance grows. Not in easy victories. In the long road of going back to the cube every day, even on the days you destroyed it out of frustration.
There’s something else I don’t want to leave out.
In Greek, the word the Bible translates as “heart” is kardia. But for the Greeks, the kardia wasn’t the center of emotions. It was the center of thoughts, intentions, and will. The place from which life flowed. That’s why Jesus said that where your kardia is, that’s where your treasure is.
On day 25, at the peak of my frustration, instead of getting where I wanted, I scrambled the cube worse than it had been. And I thought: “This isn’t for me. I’m too old.”
That thought was my kardia in that moment. And if I had stayed there, I never would have made it to day 45.
We are the result of what we think. And we act from our thoughts. It is our actions — not our intentions — that take us where we want to go.
Day 50
On day 50, my wife said: “You can solve that cube because you’re really smart.”
The truth? No. I solved it because I decided I was going to. Because I put my faith to the test — I didn’t wait for someone else to do it for me. Because I failed many times and came back. Because I learned to be humble and to adapt. Because I kept going, and kept going, and kept going, even on the days the cube and I couldn’t stand each other.
That is what builds endurance. Not perfect conditions. The imperfect process that you decide to sustain.
My Question for You
What’s the Rubik’s cube you want to solve?
What is it going to require of you? What’s your investment — whether that’s time, money, energy, or humility?
Have you already seen that cube finished in your mind? Do you believe you’re going to make it even though you don’t have it in your hands yet? Do you have the conviction that even though you and no one else can physically see it, you will one day see it solved?
This year hasn’t been easy for me. It’s been a year of losses, adjustments, dark nights, and questions without immediate answers. But it’s also been the year I learned to solve Rubik’s cubes — and with them, something about faith, endurance, and the kind of person I want to keep becoming at 41.
The cube is still here. And every time I solve it, I remember that I also got through this year.
You can get through yours too.