Years ago, in the middle of building our faith-based game studio, the door I had been praying for finally opened.
I walked away from it.
We had the chance to take investment from one of the biggest players in the video game world, with deep ties into the Chinese market. If you know that industry, you know what that means. Capital. Speed. The kind of name attached to yours that makes every conversation after it easier.
On paper it was fantastic.
Let me be honest with you, because I think the honest part matters more than the tidy part. I was tempted. I would love to tell you I read it over, felt nothing, and made a clean spiritual decision. That is not what happened. The capital, the recognition, playing with the big dogs — all of it was genuinely appealing to me.
But the more I prayed about it, the less peace I had.
It was not doubt exactly. It was not a red flag I could point to in the documents. It was deeper than that. Deep down inside, deep in my knower, I could feel that something was not right.
And one image kept coming back that I could not shake. The potential that a platform I built could be used to identify Christians in China.
Nobody said that to me. Nobody in that room ever suggested such a thing, and I am not accusing anyone of anything. This was about where a platform can end up, not about the people across the table. It just kept floating up every time I got quiet, and it would not leave me alone.
So we worked it. A few rounds of discussion with my board. More time in prayer. And eventually I turned the offer down.
Then came the part nobody prepares you for. I had to go back to the man who made the introduction and explain why. When someone spends their own relational capital to open a door for you and you close it, you cannot hand them a spreadsheet. All I had was that I did not have peace. That is not much to offer a friend who went out on a limb for you.
Every framework I have ever taught a business owner would have told me to sign that deal. The numbers worked. The strategy worked. The timing worked. The only thing that did not work was something I could never have put on a slide.
That no cost us real money, real speed, and a relationship I valued. I have never once regretted it.
If you are sitting on something right now that looks right on paper and sits wrong in your chest, I am not going to tell you what to do. I will tell you this: do not dismiss it just because you cannot defend it yet.
Peace is not a mood to manage around. Sometimes it is the only warning you are going to get (Colossians 3:15).
In Christ,
Chad