As Fast As I Can
Since before I can remember, if I was going somewhere, I was going as fast as I could go.
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As Fast As I Can - Part 1
Since before I can remember, if I was going somewhere, I was going as fast as I could go.
Literally running.
I am sure this started before I was ten years old. Walking rarely seemed necessary when I could run. The problem was that the world was full of obstacles, and I found most of them with my feet. I tripped. I fell. I came home with bloody knees.
I was also the shortest kid in class with the biggest head. The only person I knew with bigger ears than me was Alfred E. Neuman.
I was the geek. The oddball. The kid with the inhaler.
Yes, I have been asthmatic all my life. I have managed to become less asthmatic later in life than I was back then, but anything that looked like physical stimulation could trigger it.
Running and asthma do not really go together.
But I wanted to kick the ball. I wanted to play soccer. I wanted to go fast.
At the time, all of this was literal. I was a small kid trying to move through the world faster than my lungs and coordination could comfortably support.
As I grew older, I realized it was something deeper.
It was primal.
It lived at the core of who I was.
I am either all in or all out. I tend to be extreme. Some people are naturally risk-averse. I have always leaned toward the other end of that spectrum.
Risk-tolerant might be the polite description.
That instinct followed me into every stage of my life.
When I joined the Army at sixteen and a half, I left that out during the entrance examination at the MEPS center. I did not indicate that I had asthma. Somehow, I slipped through.
Physical training was difficult. I struggled. My lungs frequently reminded me that I had no business doing what I was doing.
But somehow, I became the second-fastest guy on the two-mile run. I ran two miles in ten minutes flat. I still do not know how I managed that. But the accomplishment has always stayed in the back of my mind.
It proved something to me before I had the language to explain it. I could struggle and still move fast. I could carry a disadvantage without allowing it to decide the outcome. I could be poorly suited to the challenge and still go all in.
In the early 1990s, somebody introduced me to the phrase “high-speed individual.” I do not know who coined it. I believe it was an extension of military slang, a way of describing a go-getter, someone who moved quickly, took initiative, and did not need to be pushed.
I loved that phrase. I wanted to be a high-speed individual. In many ways, I still do. The behavior changed as I grew older, but the cadence did not.
My posting cadence is as fast as I can.
My idea cadence is as fast as I can.
My cadence for responding to others is as fast as I can.
When someone needs me, I want to show up as fast as I can.
There has always been an inherent urgency in me. I want to move. I want to build. I want to answer. I want to help. I want to get there before hesitation has a chance to take control.
That urgency is not always good. I have rushed into things I should not have. More times than I can count, in fact.
I have committed before I fully understood the terrain. I have acted before the cost was clear. I have confused motion with progress. I have moved aggressively in directions that later proved unnecessary, expensive, or wrong.
There are exceptions to every success story, and mine has plenty.
Still, when I step back and look at the larger pattern, this instinct to go all in, no holds barred, aggressive, and fully committed has served me well.
I do not know how else to say it. It may be the secret to whatever success I have had. Do not misunderstand me. I am not the most successful person I know. I am not the smartest person I know. I am not the most talented, polished, disciplined, or naturally gifted person I know.
But I measure success differently than many people do.
Success, to me, is not simply the highest title, the most money, the safest career, or the cleanest path.
Success is the willingness to commit yourself fully to something that matters.
It is the willingness to take the road less traveled, knowing that the road less traveled is rarely the easy one.
That is what everything we are doing at HirePerspectives.com is about.
It is about refusing to let a career, a calling, or a life be managed passively. It is about questioning the path everybody else takes simply because everybody else takes it. It is about making deliberate decisions, accepting responsibility for them, and understanding that a meaningful life is rarely built through hesitation.
That same instinct reaches beyond work.
Even my friends at church look at me strangely sometimes.
“Why do you have to call yourself a radical Christian, Jamie?”
“Can’t you just be a normal Christian like everybody else?”
No.
Ever since I read David Platt’s Radical, that word has stayed with me.
I want to be a radical Christian.
It is easier said than done.
Much easier.
Wanting to live radically and actually living radically are not the same thing. Faith has a way of exposing the difference between enthusiasm and obedience, between intensity and surrender, between saying you are all in and living as though you are.
It is like running when you are asthmatic.
The desire is real.
The resistance is real.
The struggle is real.
And you still keep moving.
That is the part of this story I understand better now.
The point is not that speed is always good. It is not.
The point is not that every risk should be taken. It should not.
The point is not that urgency should replace judgment, patience, discipline, or wisdom.
I have enough scars, literal and otherwise, to know better than that.
The point is that I have always shown up uniquely all in, even in the face of adversity, fear, uncertainty, and the possibility of failure.
There are people who spend their lives waiting to feel completely qualified. They wait for certainty. They wait for permission. They wait until the risk is gone, the path is clear, the timing is perfect, and nobody can criticize the decision.
That moment does not come.
My life has not been built on perfect timing.
It has been built on movement.
Sometimes reckless movement.
Sometimes poorly informed movement.
Sometimes movement that ended with bloody knees or worse.
But movement nonetheless.
The shortest kid in the class kept running.
The geek kept running.
The oddball kept running.
The asthmatic kept running.
The sixteen-year-old who probably had no business passing the entrance physical kept running until he finished two miles in ten minutes.
The adult version of that kid is still here.
Still creating ideas as fast as I can.
Still responding as fast as I can.
Still trying to show up when someone needs me as fast as I can.
Still taking the road less traveled, not because it is easy, but because it leads somewhere worth going.
I am learning to direct the urgency instead of allowing it to direct me.
I am learning that being all in does not require being careless.
I am learning that speed becomes more powerful when it is paired with judgment, patience, discipline, faith, and purpose.
But I do not want to lose the instinct.
I do not want to become so measured that I stop moving.
I do not want to become so concerned about falling that I forget how much I love to run.
So I keep going.
Not because there are no obstacles.
Not because there is no fear.
Not because my lungs, my circumstances, or the people around me have always agreed that I should.
I keep going because that is how I have always met the world.
As fast as I can.
As Fast As I Can
Part Two: Under New Power
For most of my life, I believed that going all in was enough.
Move quickly. Learn what you need to learn. Step into the moment before you feel ready. Make the mistakes. Pay the consequences. Get up and keep moving.
In the beginning, much of it was fantasy.
I was a kid with ideas of grandeur. I imagined all the things I would do with my life. Rocket ships. Technology companies. Becoming the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. There was almost no relationship between my circumstances and the life I imagined, but that did not seem to matter.
I could see something that did not yet exist.
More importantly, I believed I could somehow pull myself out of the difficulties of life and build it.
I am saving the details of those difficulties for the autobiography I may write one day. For now, it is enough to say that the vision mattered.
Vision gave me somewhere to run.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” is how Proverbs 29:18 is often quoted. The NIV renders the idea more precisely: “Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.”
The verse is ultimately about God’s revelation, not personal ambition. But the principle underneath it has always been visible in my life. When people cannot see beyond their current circumstances, they begin living as though those circumstances are permanent.
I never believed mine were permanent.
That belief was not always rational. Sometimes it was not even realistic. But it served me well.
Slowly, over a long period of time, the fantasy became capacity.
I learned how to enter a situation without knowing everything and consume the information necessary to accomplish the goal. I learned how to observe, ask questions, study the system, and become useful. I learned that feeling unqualified and being incapable were not the same thing.
People call that “fake it until you make it.”
The phrase was popularized in business culture by companies such as Groupon and countless people before and after them. It is often used to describe pretending to possess confidence or competence that you do not yet have.
That is not exactly what I mean. I do not mean lie about what you know.
I mean step into the responsibility, then do the work required to become the person who can carry it.
Every meaningful milestone in my life came because I was willing to step into the moment, consume the information needed to accomplish the goal, make the mistakes necessary to learn, and pay the consequences when I got it wrong.
That last part matters.
Failure is not an unfortunate interruption on the way to success.
Failure is often the price of admission.
You do not become capable by avoiding every situation in which you might be exposed as inexperienced. You become capable by entering difficult situations, learning faster than the problem can defeat you, and remaining present when the consequences arrive.
That is where contrast begins to matter.
How could you fully understand love without having experienced hate?
How could you understand light without having known darkness?
How could you appreciate stability if nothing in your life had ever fallen apart?
How could you understand grace if you remained convinced that you had earned everything yourself?
Contrast gives meaning to experience.
It is difficult to understand rescue when you still believe you are the one saving yourself.
For years, that was precisely what I believed.
I occasionally look at Elon Musk and say something ridiculous such as, “I could have easily been in Elon’s shoes.”
I know that is foolishness.
No part of me possesses what Elon Musk possesses. I did not build the companies he built, take the risks he took, develop his technical range, create his access to capital, or sustain his level of execution.
I am not confused about that.
But I recognize something in the energy.
The energy that pulled him from his circumstances toward an almost impossible vision could not have been entirely unlike the energy operating inside me.
I could see farther than my circumstances. I believed movement could close the distance. I believed that if I ran hard enough, learned fast enough, and refused to stop, I could become almost anything.
There was power in that belief.
There was also a fatal flaw.
I fought God the whole way.
All the way until I was about forty-five years old.
I was willing to surrender to the goal. I was willing to surrender to the work. I was willing to surrender comfort, stability, sleep, money, and sometimes common sense.
But I was not willing to surrender myself to God.
Then the circumstances of life caught up with me.
Poor choices collect compounding interest.
A decision does not disappear simply because the moment in which it was made has passed. It continues producing consequences. Those consequences join other consequences. Eventually, the structure that once appeared stable begins carrying more weight than it was designed to hold.
That was happening in my life.
My own decisions, combined with uncertainty in the economic conditions of the world, brought me to another crisis.
It was not the first crisis of my life.
By that point, I had already survived three midlife crises. I have literally had more than my share.
The fourth was structurally no different from the first three. There was uncertainty. There was pressure. There was fear. There were consequences I could not outrun.
Spiritually, however, it was wholly something else.
This time, I surrendered.
I finally realized that I could not do this under my own power.
I realized that I had focused on the wrong things.
Even when some of the things I pursued were good, my reasons for pursuing them were often wrong. I wanted success to prove something. I wanted accomplishment to settle an argument inside me. I wanted movement to keep me from confronting what was broken.
I had spent my life trying to pull myself out of the difficulties of life. I finally understood that I needed to be rescued.
When I surrendered my life to Jesus, healing began.
It was not instantaneous.
The Church of the Nazarene teaches entire sanctification, the work of God through which a believer is fully surrendered and filled with love for God and others. My pastor has testified that he experienced an immediate and profound change.
Scripture certainly describes conversion as something radical.
Paul writes that “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV).
Romans 10:9 teaches that we are saved when we declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead.
Jesus speaks of being born again in John 3. Paul describes dying to the old self and being made alive in Christ throughout Romans 6.
I believe those words.
I knew that something fundamental had changed in me.
Who I was had changed.
But I also knew something else.
I was still me.
I was still extreme. Still impatient. Still capable of rushing ahead. Still capable of turning even Christianity into another all-in project driven by my own strength.
My heart had changed, but my habits had not disappeared.
My allegiance had changed, but my nature still needed to be confronted.
I was a new creation who still had years of old patterns stored in my mind, my reactions, and my way of moving through the world.
That is where my experience of sanctification has been less like a switch and more like a journey.
I am continually being sanctified.
I am continually being reminded of my nature and my need for Christ.
Philippians 1:6 says that the One who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
That verse makes sense to me.
The work began.
The work is real.
The work is not finished.
I still wrestle with the concept of entire sanctification. I am not saying that I reject it. I am saying that I do not know whether I will experience it in the same way others describe it before I enter heaven to be with Jesus.
What I know is that I am grateful I do not have to perfect myself before I can belong to Him.
Jesus did the hard work.
That does not remove responsibility from my life. Grace is not permission to remain unchanged. Paul asks whether we should continue in sin so grace may increase, then answers plainly: “By no means” (Romans 6:1–2).
But my salvation is not dependent on whether I can finally run fast enough.
That may be the most important thing I have ever learned.
I spent decades believing that every distance could be closed through effort.
Then Jesus showed me the one distance I could never close myself.
He closed it.
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith,” Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8–9. “And this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.”
Not by speed.
Not by intelligence.
Not by risk tolerance.
Not by reinvention.
Not by the number of times I fell, got up, and kept going.
Grace.
I can run as fast as I can toward Jesus, or I can walk slowly beside Him.
The distance between us is not determined by the speed of my feet.
It can change with a shift of my mind, a turn of the heart, a decision to stop running ahead and recognize that He is already there.
“Be still, and know that I am God” may be one of the most difficult instructions in Scripture for someone like me (Psalm 46:10).
Stillness feels like inaction. Waiting feels like failure. Walking feels too slow. But Jesus did not tell His disciples to sprint ahead and ask Him to catch up.
He said, “Follow me.”
I am entering the next chapter of my life with the practical recognition that this is simply part of who I am.
I live life as fast as I can.
I do not expect that instinct to disappear, and I am no longer convinced that it should.
But fast is now a metaphor. Fast means engaged at the optimal level. It means fully present. Fully committed.
Responsive when someone needs me.
Willing to learn.
Willing to act.
Willing to fail.
Willing to accept correction.
Willing to stop when God says stop.
Willing to move when God says move.
For most of my life, I ran toward whatever vision I had created for myself.
Now I am learning to submit the vision before I begin running.
Proverbs 16:9 says, “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.”
I still plan.
I still dream.
I still imagine things far beyond my present circumstances.
I still believe that vision matters. People need a picture of a life beyond the one they are currently living. They need to believe that adversity is not a permanent identity, that failure is not a final verdict, and that their present limitations do not have unilateral authority over their future.
But vision without surrender can become idolatry. Intensity without wisdom can become destruction. Speed without direction only gets you lost faster. The practical lesson is not to become less ambitious. It is to become more deliberate about what your ambition serves.
Do not stop dreaming because your current life does not support the dream.
Do not wait until you possess every qualification before beginning the work.
Do not treat failure as evidence that you were never supposed to move.
Do not confuse the pain of learning with the judgment of God.
But do not make an idol of your own ability to overcome.
There will be obstacles you can climb.
There will be problems you can study.
There will be skills you can develop.
There will also be distances you cannot close under your own power.
Wisdom is learning the difference. Faith is admitting it. Grace is discovering that Jesus has already done what you could not.
Actions and Outcomes
Action: Wait until you feel completely prepared before accepting responsibility.
Outcome: Remain protected from failure and separated from growth.
Action: Step into the responsibility, acknowledge what you do not know, and consume the information necessary to become capable.
Outcome: Build real competence through execution.
Action: Treat every mistake as evidence that you are not qualified.
Outcome: Become cautious, defensive, and increasingly unwilling to attempt difficult work.
Action: Treat mistakes as tuition, accept the consequences, and extract the lesson.
Outcome: Convert failure into judgment, capability, and resilience.
Action: Build a vision limited by your present circumstances.
Outcome: Reproduce your present circumstances.
Action: Build a vision beyond your circumstances and begin developing the capacity required to reach it.
Outcome: Create movement toward a life that does not yet exist.
Action: Use “fake it until you make it” as permission to misrepresent your ability.
Outcome: Eventually be exposed without having built the competence to carry the responsibility.
Action: Enter the challenge honestly, then learn aggressively enough to grow into it.
Outcome: Become the person the opportunity requires.
Action: Measure success by titles, money, comparison, or the visibility of someone else’s accomplishments.
Outcome: Spend your life running someone else’s race.
Action: Define what a meaningful, obedient, fully engaged life requires from you.
Outcome: Build according to purpose rather than comparison.
Action: Respond to adversity by blaming your history, limitations, resources, or circumstances.
Outcome: Give the obstacle authority over the outcome.
Action: Recognize the obstacle, account for it, and determine what remains within your responsibility.
Outcome: Develop ownership without denying reality.
Action: Run harder whenever life begins falling apart.
Outcome: Compound poor decisions with more speed.
Action: Stop long enough to examine the direction, the motive, and the cost.
Outcome: Preserve your intensity while improving your judgment.
Action: Assume that effort can solve every problem.
Outcome: Eventually encounter a distance you cannot close and mistake exhaustion for failure.
Action: Recognize where discipline ends and surrender begins.
Outcome: Stop demanding that your own power accomplish what only grace can provide.
Action: Turn faith into another performance measured by intensity.
Outcome: Remain consumed with your own effort, even while claiming to follow Christ.
Action: Follow Jesus at the pace obedience requires.
Outcome: Discover that closeness to Him is not earned by speed.
Action: Ask God to bless a vision you have already decided to pursue.
Outcome: Run quickly in a direction He never established.
Action: Submit the vision, the motive, and the next step before moving.
Outcome: Allow intensity to become directed purpose.
Today the main difference in my life is that I no longer believe the power comes from me at all or even did. I am learning to run under new power.
Sometimes that means moving before I feel ready.
Sometimes that means standing still when every instinct tells me to charge ahead.
Sometimes it means running toward Jesus as fast as I can.
Sometimes it means walking beside Him slowly enough to listen.
I am still living life as fast as I can. I am simply allowing Jesus to lead.
If this article has helped you in any way, I would love to hear about it. If I can help you in any way, I would love to have the conversation. If can help you I will tell you and if i cannot help you i will tell you that too.
Have a blessed day!
James Beine
#Faith #ChristianTestimony #PersonalGrowth #AsFastAsICan
