The Stories God Tells

Reading God's Providence in a World of Ladder-Climbers

Last week, Aaron Renn created quite a buzz with a viral tweet-essay, shortly after expanded to a lengthy Substack post, “What Ladders Are You Climbing?” While ordinarily the metaphor of ladder-climbing has negative connotations, describing a shallowly self-absorbed kind of worldly ambition that is as pathetic to watch as it is unfulfilling to participate in, Renn tried to rehabilitate the concept.

“Everyone, and I do mean everyone, is playing some sort of status game,” he says, and rather than piously wringing our hands about it, we should accept that fact, and be smart about it. “Choosing the ladders to climb, choosing the game and league to play in, has an enormous impact in where you are going to end up in life.”

Well, yes and no.

Renn is quick to clarify that this doesn’t mean that everyone should try to climb the same greasy pole to elite influence; if you want to be a master electrician, fantastic—just start making the kinds of smart career choices that will lead you up that ladder. And there’s a ton of practical wisdom in his column, which could be summed up in the proverb: “Everyone is going somewhere. Be someone who’s going somewhere on purpose.” At every stage of our lives, we are making decisions that will have consequences, but most often these are passive, go-with-the-flow decisions that may have painful or at least mediocre consequences. God gave you talents, so use them, don’t bury them: decide how to deploy them to the best effect. Make smart vocational choices and don’t waste your life.

This is good advice, and especially for young men in a world that no longer offers many of the traditional pathways toward developing and realizing their agency: rather than giving up and numbing the pain with video games or porn, or taking to social media to vent your anger toward a world that’s not giving you what you think you deserve, young men should be smart, disciplined, and strategic in pursuing the vocational paths that are available to them. As a writer, for instance, I should think not merely about what I write but where I write it and when—a lesson I was very slow to learn.

That said, Renn’s amplification of this advice by means of first-person narrative seems to reinforce the negative stereotypes of the “ladder-climbing” rhetoric. He laments that he didn’t think big earlier in life and climbed a mediocre corporate ladder that limited his potential now that his goals have shifted to “wanting to have influence in the world.” “I almost certainly could have gone to Harvard or another elite school,” he muses. “Nobody ever told me to think bigger, and my default choices had a major negative impact on my ability to have public impact and influence.” While he insists that he is “not nursing regrets or what could have beens,” he immediately goes on to say “my choices were a mistake because they made it more difficult to achieve, and continue to limit my progress toward, the level of reach and influence I aspire to have. It’s easy to say that, since in God’s providence we like where we ended up, all of our choices must have been good after all. That’s a cop out. If you can’t look back on your life and think of significant bad decisions that you’ve made, you are deluding yourself.”

Again, he has a point here: there is a certain kind of pious providentialism that refuses to ever take ownership of one’s mistakes. “God works all things together for good,” Scripture shows us, is perfectly compatible with, “we constantly screw things up.” Some people really need to hear the message to get off their asses and own their mistakes (or try not to make them in the first place), so they can maximally use their gifts for God’s glory. But many people, I think, need to hear the opposite message: “Yes, you’re going to screw up and make mistakes at every turn. That’s fine. Don’t try to forecast the future, much less manage it. Stop trying to game out the scenarios. Just try to do the next right thing and God will use it to tell a far bigger story than you can imagine.” 

In particular, I am simply not convinced by Renn’s narrative about how to “influence the world.” The reality is that if you want to be an “influencer,” the best way is to be an 18-year-old on TikTok or Instagram—there are plenty of young men and young women with 100 to 1,000 times the reach of Aaron Renn. But of course, we all know there is a difference between quantity and quality of influence. Most of those catapulted to positions of influence in the world today are way too young for their own good and the world’s. They are simply not ready for that level of influence, because they don’t yet have the wisdom or insight to make good use of it: by and large, their influence is thus a net-negative on the world. It is also a net-negative for them: lacking the maturity, humility, and grounding in the world to deal with the heady drug of likes, retweets, accolades, and interviews, they tend to lose all sense of perspective—and often their spouse and their faith as well. Truly, “what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

I wasn’t so much scandalized by Renn’s post, though, as baffled—it simply resonated so little with my own experience of life. These days I often get questions for career advice from aspiring young intellectuals, so at the risk of boring you with autobiography, I thought I would go ahead and take this opportunity to share my own very different story.

My chosen vocation is quite similar to Renn’s. I am not nearly so far along in it, and not nearly so influential yet, but I’m also a fair bit younger. I’m very content—nay, overwhelmingly grateful—with where I am now, and that’s despite a life marked by what look like a series of boneheaded career decisions at nearly every turn. In comparison to mine, Renn’s narrative looks like the epitome of shrewd elite-level ladder climbing. 

I grew up homeschooled in rural upstate South Carolina—not quite a cultural backwater, but at least back in the 90s, pretty close to one. Like Renn, my teachers and mentors early on recognized my academic potential and encouraged me to pursue an intellectual career, and I was never the quiet scholar type: I wanted to start things, influence things, and change the world somehow or other. The work I’m doing now is the work I was always meant for. But my path here was circuitous.

Rather than going to an elite university (both my parents were Princeton grads), I went to a no-name unaccredited start-up classical Christian college in north Idaho. That college, New Saint Andrews, now has something of a national reputation, and is at the center of a never-ending buzz around “Christian nationalism.” That’s not an altogether good thing, but by virtue of my many years spent in Moscow, I now find myself, in God’s providence, something of a sought-after expert on a movement that’s now making waves in national politics. I also, for the record, got a very fine education that I will always treasure, was shaped by some wonderful mentors, made some lifelong friends, and met my wife, Rachel, without whom it’s hard to imagine the rest of my life being any kind of success.

But my next steps were dubious in the extreme from the standpoint of any career counselor. On the cusp of a global financial crisis that would make the already tight academic job market positively brutal, I decided to pursue my M.A. at…a no-name unaccredited start-up classical Christian college in north Idaho. That’s right, I decided to be the guinea pig in NSA’s master’s program. I did apply to three top-tier Ph.D programs in my field (Duke, Notre Dame, and Cambridge), but I was so naïve and poorly-advised that I applied straight to the Ph.D programs during the first year of my M.A., and was of course turned down as a matter of course (though I probably would have been anyway given the unaccredited status of the degree). Edinburgh, with Oliver O’Donovan serving as the Postgraduate Director that year, was good enough to provisionally accept me if I first finished my M.A. and then first did an M.Th. at Edinburgh before progressing to the Ph.D program.

So off I went, in 2009, to Edinburgh, not realizing that an international doctorate (lacking coursework, comps, and the opportunity to gain teaching experience) was about as useful for the American academic job market as a plumber’s certificate. However, I enjoyed the enviable privilege of being the very last doctoral student of the greatest Christian ethicist of our age, a scholar from a bygone era who has no real successors in the field. I was too young to quite appreciate the gift I had at the time, but it is one that has kept on giving in the years since.

After grad school, with two kids already, a third on the way, uncertain job prospects, and uncertainty about what I even wanted to do with my life (I was disenchanted with the academy, and obviously far too young at 25 to be a public intellectual), I moved back to Moscow, ID, worked part-time with my dad as an investment advisor, and started up a pet project, The Davenant Institute, with grand (but rather vague) dreams and little cash. Oh, and I taught philosophy part-time at Moody Bible Institute-Spokane, a dispensationalist missionary training campus that would be shut down in 2018.

I somehow managed to spend the next five years in Moscow, which seems crazy in retrospect—with no prospect for gaining a platform in the New Saint Andrews sphere of influence, but every prospect of undermining my employability elsewhere due to my perceived closeness to that sphere. In God’s providence, though, I used these years to start learning how to be a proper husband and father (I’d married very young and in grad school), gave my eldest son a great start in a strong church and school community, started to hone my craft as a writer, and built up a network of friends that is the great treasure of my life.

When I moved near Washington, DC in 2018, things started to happen quickly for me on the career front, as one might expect in a super-ZIP. Doors opened for me as a leader and a writer, with one thing after another leading to the dream job I currently inhabit. That said, I took a three-year break from Eliteville from 2021-24 to move my family back to upstate South Carolina to reconnect with our roots and engage in three years of arduous full-time ministry running an organization and a retreat/study center. I made plenty of mistakes, we wore ourselves out, and we’re happy to be back in Loudoun County, but we have no regrets—and I learned a hundred important lessons about leadership.

Now, at age 36, I’m at last where I’ve wanted to be: writing and speaking and “having influence on the world”—at least a little bit. Could I have gotten here sooner? No doubt. Should I have? Heavens no. What would I have had to say to the world? Sure, I like to think I’ve had plenty of bright ideas for awhile, but not one that hasn’t improved and matured with age. No doubt the ones I have now will be a lot better and clearer and sharper ten years from now, but that’s OK: my audience is small enough now, and it will be larger when I am more ready for it. Besides, ten years from now, I’ll probably have only one kid at home. I will be at the stage of life where it’s no longer a painful strain on my family to accept far-flung speaking invitations or drop everything to meet a deadline. In God’s good providence, I like to think that—for all the many mistakes I’ve made—I’m right where I should be now.

Now my story is a bit unusual because I had a built-in advantage: enough family money to jump-start a career and a non-profit, though far from enough to comfortably coast in either. I was able to give my vocation time to mature, and able to absorb the impact of what worldly wisdom at least would call “bad choices” in the short-term. But this points to another point, one that I want to close with: the stories God tells are very long ones. The most important investments you can make are not the ones that will lead to short-term ladder climbing, but that will set up intergenerational ladders. The most important influence you can have is not the big, flashy, splashy influence of the viral tweet or interview, but the quiet, imperceptible leavening of one life on another.

My grandfather was one of the small-town aristoi that Patrick Deneen laments the loss of, as was his father before him: successful small- and ultimately mid-sized-businessmen who served as pillars within their community, warts and all (and my grandfather had plenty!). He built some wealth and more reputation, and invested deeply in the life of his son and his grandson. He gave me a love for history and a sense of place in the world, encouraged my vision of scholarship, and left a legacy that I could build on and carry forward. He never had a national reputation nor sought one (though he probably had the intellectual gifts for it), but most everyone in Spartanburg, SC knew his name, and a lot of them turned out for his funeral.

For six decades, my grandfather taught the 13-year-old boys’ Sunday school class at First Baptist Spartanburg, year after year taking a fresh crop of young men at a pivotal stage of their lives and seeking to drill God’s Word and some hard lessons about God’s world into them. Along with the Bible stories, he offered them memorable maxims that went straight to the point—some a bit saltier than one might expect from the heart of the Bible Belt: “Keep your money in your wallet and your pecker in your pants” was a favorite, one that many older men in the community would remember to me with a chuckle after he had passed on. He also tried to make sure that they would remember God’s words just as well, handing out silver dollars (in an era where they were worth quite a bit!) each week to boys who successfully memorized Scripture passages. Over the decades, around 1,000 young men—some of whom went on to be pastors or pillars of their communities, others of whom ended up in prison but sometimes later remembered the neglected advice and mended their lives—were shaped by his teaching, and went on, in God’s remarkable providences, to shape countless others.

Two weeks ago, when I was working in the mountains of western North Carolina, almost 100 miles north, I kept hearing about a John Mark Redwine, a local pastor who seemed to be a force of nature, mobilizing relief efforts across the area. I’d been put in touch with him by text and he helped connect us with the volunteer group we worked with. When I mentioned his name to my dad, who was out there shoveling mud along with me and my son, my dad said, “No way...I used to be in Sunday school with a John Mark Redwine at First Baptist Spartanburg.” I texted John Mark and he said, “I'm Jr., so that would've been my father. But your grandfather is a legend in our home. He used to give my father silver dollars for memorizing scripture passages. My father then did the same for me and I still have those same silver dollars in my closet."

I do not know what influence my speaking and writing will have in this world. To be honest, I expect most of it will be very ephemeral. Words today are very cheap, and even when I read a killer column and say, “man, this guy gets it,” I’ve usually forgotten it within a month, lost in the ceaseless flow of chatter. And for plenty of words that I’ve uttered, words poured out before the thoughts had fully matured, I’m grateful for that. 

However, “the words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed” writes the Preacher (Ecc. 12:11). Slow-matured wisdom, rooted in experience, anchored in community, and patiently planted in the soil, one seed at a time—that is what will change the world in the end, not the mad scramble up the ladder to grab a megaphone.