Deliver Us, Lord, From the Startup Life

This content was originally published here by Wired.

— by Kathryn Joyce

In 2012, Chad Reynolds found himself on a South Carolina beach at midnight. He was there for a destination wedding, sitting on the sand with friends, when he decided to wade into the ocean alone. As he floated in the dark water, he had what he describes as his first real conversation with God. What was he doing with his life? he asked. Why wasn't he with someone? Why did he feel so empty?

Reynolds, a 36-year-old designer and startup founder from Cincinnati, Ohio, had been fending off burnout, in fits and starts, for years. He'd started a company designing websites for movies and other products right out of college, and managed to land big clients like Warner Bros. But he worked relentlessly, rarely taking vacations, ignoring his health, and neglecting his family and friends.

In 2008, as he was contemplating leaving his first company, Reynolds set aside a few months “to sit still.” During his hiatus, he went with a friend to a Sunday service at Cincinnati's Crossroads Church—which was, at the time, a megachurch of about 9,000 members. Sitting in the back row of the cavernous auditorium, Reynolds felt something igniting inside him. “You could tell there was something extremely creative and entrepreneurial happening in that church,” he remembers. It occurred to him that if he could somehow incorporate his budding faith into his next venture, “it could be different.”

But after starting a second company, in 2009, he found himself slipping back into a familiar pattern: maintaining a frenetic pace, traveling to multiple cities per week, constantly doing more. By the time he ended up on the beach at night in South Carolina, he was feeling lost, unable to enjoy the quiet of the barrier island, fretting about Wi-Fi signals and missed work appointments, and wondering what was wrong with him.

As he bobbed in the dark Atlantic, Reynolds says, he heard a message in reply: that God had given him talents and gifts so they could be put to use helping other people, and that he needed to be more aggressive about doing so—that, in effect, he had to take a leap of faith. God's side of that midnight conversation was half encouragement, half dare: “Even though you can't see the bottom, I've got you; I'm going to protect you; I'm going to help you.”

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[Special thanks to MICHELLE GROSKOPF on Wired for the cover photo]