I Climbed the Wall in the Rain

There's a walled medieval city in Portugal called Óbidos.

Stone walls. Narrow streets. Whitewashed houses with blue trim. Orange tile roofs. The kind of place that looks like someone dropped a Tuscan village onto a Portuguese hill seven hundred years ago and forgot to come back for it.

Just a few weeks after my surgery, Prudence and I drove there.

It was raining. Steady, quiet drizzle. The kind that doesn't demand attention but changes the texture of everything.

Inside the walls, the streets were busy. Vendors. Tourists. Umbrellas. Pastry stands. Kids running. People navigating puddles and each other.

At ground level, it felt urgent. Reactive. Crowded. Your attention always on the next step so you don't slip, the next person so you don't bump into them, the next distraction so you don't miss something.

Halfway down the main street, there's a stone staircase that leads up to the top of the wall.

Most people walk right past it.

We didn't.

We climbed.

Two Perspectives. Same City.

On top of the wall, everything changed.

I could see the entire layout. The curve of the streets. The placement of the gates. Where the wall was strongest and where it looked more fragile. The storm rolling in from the west. The patterns of people below.

Inside the walls, you see ten feet ahead.

On top of the walls, you can see for miles.

I stood there in the rain, looking down at the crowds below, and one thought hit me harder than I expected.

This is leadership.

This is faith.

This is most of what we're missing.

Inside the Walls

Let me describe what "inside the walls" living looks like, because you've probably lived there.

Your day starts with your phone. Before your feet hit the floor, you're scrolling. Your brain is already inside the city before your body leaves the bed.

You sit down at your desk and open your inbox. You never really close it again.

You jump from email to text to meeting to Slack to crisis to "got a minute" conversation. You answer questions. You fix problems. You approve things. You give feedback. You react.

You feel productive.

You're exhausted.

At the end of the day, if someone asks what you actually built, you struggle to answer. You did a lot. You moved constantly. But nothing foundational shifted.

You were inside the walls.

Jesus Walked the Walls

Read the gospels with this lens and you'll see it everywhere.

Mark 1:35. "Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed."

Luke 5:16. "But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed."

Matthew 14:23. "After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray."

Notice the pattern. Jesus had the most important assignment in human history. People were lined up needing healing. The disciples had questions. The Pharisees were watching. The crowds wouldn't stop coming.

And He kept walking away.

Not because He didn't care. Because He couldn't lead from inside the walls.

He needed altitude. He needed perspective. He needed time with the Father where the noise didn't reach.

If Jesus needed to walk the walls, what makes you think you don't?

The Brain Was Built for This

Here's something modern science has confirmed about how God designed your brain.

When you stop. When you genuinely disconnect from the constant input. When you step away from the demands and let your mind have space, a different network in your brain comes online.

Neuroscientists call it the Default Mode Network. It activates when your external workload drops. And it's responsible for big-picture thinking, future planning, creative problem-solving, and connecting ideas that seemed unrelated.

In other words, your brain does its best strategic work when you're not actively grinding on the problem.

The breakthroughs happen when you're walking, showering, sitting in silence with God, or apparently walking the walls of a medieval city in the rain.

If you never stop, your brain never starts thinking at that level.

Most believers are starving their own clarity. They wonder why they can't hear God speaking and miss the obvious truth: He's not the problem. The noise is.

"Be still, and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10)

That's not a suggestion. That's a leadership principle.

Three Habits That Change Everything

Let me give you three rhythms I've built into my life since Portugal. They're the difference between leading from the street and leading from the wall.

Weekly: One Hour. Alone. No Phone.

One hour a week. Same time every week. Notebook only. No laptop. No inbox. No meetings.

Three questions:
- What actually mattered this week?
- Where did I feel most aligned with my design?
- What pattern keeps showing up that I keep ignoring?

That's it. One hour. It will change how you lead the other 167.

Quarterly: A Real Audit.

Every ninety days, I look at my whole life. What's drifted? What commitments are draining me that don't fit my design anymore? What needs to be released? What needs to be picked up?

Drift is sneaky. You don't wake up one day misaligned. You drift there slowly. The quarterly audit is your chance to correct course before drift becomes disaster.

Annually: A Real Stop.

Once a year. Not a vacation where you sneak in emails. A genuine pause. Three or four days. Somewhere different. With as few inputs as possible.

You go in with questions, not answers.

What season am I in?

What is my work actually building?

What do I need to release?

"I Don't Have Time For This."

I know. I used to say it too.

Here's the truth I had to face.

If I have time to be reactive, I have time to be strategic.

The hours I spent cleaning up avoidable fires were bought on credit from the time I refused to invest on the wall.

There is no version of leadership where you get to be fully reactive and also build something stable.

Every leader pays. You either pay in advance with time on the walls. Or you pay with interest cleaning up preventable messes inside the city.

Pick your payment plan.

The Book

Everything I've shared across these last eight emails (the lie of pressure, the rewiring of defaults, Pause-Pivot-Advance, the foundation question, knowing your design, the descent, the alliance, walking the walls) all of it is in my upcoming book.

Peace Not Pressure is the most complete framework I've ever built for living and leading from peace without sacrificing effectiveness. It's part neuroscience. Part leadership. Part scripture. And it was forged in the most disorienting season of my life.

If you want to be the first to know when it releases, and get a free chapter early:

Click → Peace Not Pressure Book
 
Thank you for walking through this series with me. I don't take your time lightly. And I genuinely believe that something in these emails has been God's invitation to a different way of operating.

You don't have to keep running yourself into the ground.

There is a better way.

It starts when you climb the stairs.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Standing on the wall in Óbidos in the rain, after surgery, after the trailer season, after almost three years of God stripping away everything I thought I needed, one thought wouldn't leave me alone: most leaders never get above the noise long enough to hear God speak clearly. Don't be most leaders. Climb the stairs. He's already on the wall, waiting for you.