I Didn’t Set Out to Build a Ministry
My name is Daniel Lafleur.
I am the author of Renewing Your Mind and the founder of Renewing Your Mind Discipleship Ministry.
But this ministry didn’t begin with a business plan, an academic credential, or a lifelong ambition to become an author.
It was born out of my own experience with many of the struggles I now write and teach about.
For years, I knew what Scripture said.
I believed it was true.
But there came a point when I began wondering why so much of what I believed seemed so distant from the life I was actually living.
I Knew What the Christian Life Was Supposed to Produce
I had spent decades in Christian environments.
I read Scripture. I heard sermons. I accumulated biblical knowledge.
I also knew what Scripture said about the fruit of the Spirit.
Love. Joy. Peace.
Those weren’t unfamiliar biblical concepts to me.
The problem was that when I looked at my own life, I wasn’t seeing growth in them.
For years, my spiritual growth seemed to have stalled. And whatever love, joy or peace I may once have known seemed to have been crushed beneath everything that had happened.
Life had become very difficult.
There had been divorce, family struggles, repeated court battles, financial collapse and other painful circumstances.
And then I made things worse by doing something I would later write about in Renewing Your Mind.
I played the comparison game.
I looked at other Christians whose lives seemed polished.
They seemed happy.
They seemed peaceful.
Many appeared to have the very things Scripture told me should increasingly characterize the life of a believer.
And I was envious.
From where I stood, Christianity seemed to be working in their lives very differently than it was working in mine.
That comparison didn’t make me question them. It increasingly made me question me.
I Began to Feel Like an Outsider
Rejection was not a new feeling for me.
It had been a common thread throughout much of my life.
Over time, it had become more than a collection of painful experiences. It had helped form a lens through which I interpreted myself, other people, and what was happening around me.
I expected rejection because rejection had become familiar.
So when I looked at other Christians and compared their lives with mine, that old lens had somewhere new—and much more painful—to go.
I began feeling like an outsider among the very people to whom I thought I should belong.
Then that feeling began reaching into the most important relationship in my life.
I knew what Scripture taught about God’s love.
Intellectually, I believed it was true.
But emotionally, what I was living and feeling seemed to tell a very different story.
Eventually, the question became painfully personal:
Does God actually love me?
Not:
“Does the Bible teach that God loves His children?”
I knew the answer to that.
The question beneath it was much more personal:
Does that truth actually apply to me?
I could argue with what I was feeling using Scripture.
I knew what I believed.
But the feelings were difficult to deny.
Looking back, I can see how destructive the lie had become.
The enemy did not need me to stop believing the Bible was true.
He only needed me to begin wondering whether it was true for me.
Jesus said:
“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”
John 10:10 NKJV
Alongside years of painful circumstances, loss and rejection, that lie was taking me somewhere very dark.
Eventually, I Reached a Place I Never Thought I Would
After years of struggle, I reached a point where I didn’t want to live anymore.
I became suicidal.
I had made a plan.
Before following through with it, I decided to call a friend.
He answered.
And I got help.
I don’t tell you that because it is easy for me to talk about.
And I certainly don’t tell you because I want that moment to define my life.
I tell you because if you are going to understand why this ministry matters so much to me, you need to understand something about where I came from.
There was a time when I knew what Scripture said about life in Christ and yet had reached a place where I no longer wanted my own.
That was not the end of my story.
If you are in that place today, please reach out now. In Canada and the United States, you can call or text 988.
God Had Not Forgotten Me
God continued meeting me in those difficult years.
There were moments when truths I had known intellectually became deeply personal.
I began learning that peace does not have to wait for circumstances to become peaceful.
I began understanding in a different way what Paul meant when he wrote about:
“…God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand.”
Philippians 4:7 NLT
I began discovering the biblical reality that God was still present when I felt alone.
He saw me.
He knew where I was.
He knew my pain.
And He had not abandoned me.
The circumstances around me didn’t always change when I wanted them to.
But God was beginning to change me.
Then God Called Me to Write
At some point in that journey, I became convinced God was calling me to write.
There was one rather obvious problem.
I wasn’t a writer.
I have ADHD.
I have dyslexia.
I failed Grade 12 English.
But there was another problem that seemed much more immediate at the time.
I was broke.
And I was getting more broke.
So I prayed for provision.
My response to God was essentially:
“I would love to have the luxury of writing. When You provide the finances that make that possible, I’ll write.”
It seemed reasonable to me.
After all, I had bills to pay. I needed to survive. Writing required time, and time wasn’t going to pay those bills.
So I waited for God to provide the circumstances that I thought would make obedience possible.
He didn’t.
In fact, over the next seven months, my financial circumstances went in exactly the opposite direction.
I prayed for provision.
Things got worse.
I prayed again.
They got worse still.
And in the middle of all of that, the instruction I believed God had given me hadn’t changed.
Write.
Looking back, I can see something I couldn’t see clearly then.
I wasn’t waiting for God.
I was asking God to meet my conditions before I would do what He had already asked me to do.
I had decided what obedience needed to look like.
“Give me enough money.”
“Give me enough time.”
“Make this make sense.”
“Then I’ll obey.”
We battled that out for seven months.
And given everything I had already lived through, the apparent silence only reinforced some of the questions I had struggled with before.
“Why aren’t You helping me?”
“Why aren’t You providing?”
“Do You see what is happening here?”
“Do You actually care?”
I had asked God for provision so I could obey Him.
Instead, He was teaching me something about obedience.
Eventually, I understood:
Delayed obedience is disobedience.
I didn’t need God to make obedience comfortable before I responded.
I needed to respond.
And when I finally did, there was another problem.
I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to write.
So I Just Started Writing
I didn’t begin with a book outline.
I didn’t have chapter titles.
I didn’t even know that what I was writing would eventually become a book that looked anything like Renewing Your Mind does today.
I just started.
I would read Scripture and something would stand out to me.
So I wrote about it.
Sometimes it was only a few sentences.
Sometimes several paragraphs.
A particular passage of Scripture would lead somewhere, and I would write down what I was learning and thinking.
And because this was how sophisticated my writing operation was at the time:
I wrote it all in Notes on my iPhone.
One entry became another.
Then another.
And another.
Eventually, I had accumulated a large collection of these individual pieces.
There was still no real book.
Just a growing collection of thoughts and reflections around Scripture.
Eventually, even I could see that the collection had become far too large to keep managing in Notes.
So I copied everything into Pages.
Then I began going through what I had written.
I would read one piece and give it a title.
Then the next.
And the next.
As I worked through them, I began noticing something.
Common threads were emerging.
Some pieces belonged together.
Certain themes kept appearing.
So I began grouping them.
Those groups eventually became sections.
And those sections eventually began becoming chapters.
Then came the much larger task of taking years of individual writing and organizing it into something another person could actually sit down and read as a book.
The process took years.
There was no moment when a finished manuscript suddenly appeared.
The book grew.
Piece by piece.
Scripture by Scripture.
Thought by thought.
Lesson by lesson.
And somewhere along the way, a collection of notes written on an iPhone by a man with ADHD and dyslexia who had failed Grade 12 English became Renewing Your Mind.
And God Was Teaching Me While I Wrote It
What I didn’t fully anticipate was how much God would teach me through the process.
I was studying.
I was writing.
I was returning to Scripture again and again.
I was seeing connections I hadn’t seen before.
And through that process, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, something much larger than those original individual notes began taking shape.
But the book did not come from someone who had mastered renewing his mind and decided to explain it to everyone else.
I was living much of what I was writing about.
I was still learning.
I still am.
There are times today when I reread Renewing Your Mind while preparing for a class and find myself highlighting, circling and underlining passages in a book I wrote.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking:
“That’s really good.”
“Did I really write that?”
And there is something almost amusing about that to me.
Because I know me.
I know the guy with ADHD and dyslexia who failed Grade 12 English.
I know how this book actually came together.
I know how much I still have to learn.
And I know I didn’t begin because I thought I had all the answers.
I began because God told me to write—and eventually, I obeyed.
The biblical truth that gives the book its value was His long before I ever put words on a page.
Then Something Happened That I Will Never Forget
One day I was walking down the street and caught myself smiling.
There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable happening.
I was just smiling.
And that was unusual enough that I noticed it.
I actually stopped and thought about what had just happened.
“Why am I smiling?”
Something had changed.
And what struck me was that my circumstances had not changed.
The difficulties I had been dealing with hadn’t suddenly disappeared.
Life had not somehow become easy.
But something in me was different.
For years, I had read about the love, joy and peace Scripture describes as fruit of the Spirit.
I believed those things were real.
But for a long time, they had seemed painfully absent from my own life.
Now I was beginning to discover them for myself.
The foundational passage that would become central to Renewing Your Mind says:
“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”
Romans 12:2 NKJV
I was beginning to understand what transformation from the inside out could actually look like.
My circumstances had not changed. But God was changing me.
Today, I Can Say Something I Once Could Not
There was a period in my life when I hated my life and longed for heaven.
Today:
I love my life.
That doesn’t mean my life is perfect.
It doesn’t mean every struggle has disappeared.
And it doesn’t mean I have somehow completed the process I now teach.
I still have unresolved struggles.
God still shows me things that need my attention.
I still find places where what I know and the way I live don’t line up as consistently as I would like.
That’s part of sanctification.
Paul said it this way:
“I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on…”
Philippians 3:12 NLT
We are becoming more like Christ.
That process continues throughout this life.
But I now know my place in Christ in a way I once didn’t.
I am grateful for the life God has given me.
I love my family.
I have purpose.
And I am happy to be here doing what I believe Christ has called me to do.
The man who once wondered whether God’s truth somehow applied to everyone else has begun discovering for himself the love, joy and peace Scripture had been describing all along.
And I want to help others discover the same.
This Ministry Was Born Out of My Experience. But It Isn’t About Me.
I don’t teach this because I studied a problem other Christians have.
I teach it because I lived it.
I know what it is like to believe what Scripture says and still wonder why its promises seem so distant from your own life.
I know what it is like to compare yourself with other Christians.
I know what it is like to feel like an outsider.
I know what it is like to have your feelings tell you something very different from what you know Scripture says is true.
I know how far that road can go.
But I also know what it is like for God to meet you there.
I know what it is like for biblical truth you have read many times to suddenly become intensely personal.
I know what it is like to discover peace while circumstances remain difficult.
And I know what it is like to realize one ordinary day that something inside you has changed.
My story is not unique.
There are Christians sitting in churches every Sunday who genuinely love God and believe His Word but wonder why the love, joy, peace and freedom Scripture describes can sometimes seem so far from the life they are actually living.
Some may simply recognize areas where they want to grow.
Others may have begun wondering whether something is wrong with them.
And some may have travelled much further down that road.
I want them to know there is hope.
Not because I have discovered some secret that Scripture forgot to tell us.
Quite the opposite.
The truth was there all along.
My experience isn’t the authority. God’s Word is.
The principles behind Renewing Your Mind did not originate with me. God had already given them to us in Scripture. My role has been to study, organize, write and teach, and to walk alongside others as they engage what God has already provided in His Word.
God is the One who transforms. And becoming more like Christ remains the goal.
My desire is to help believers discover for themselves what God has already provided in His Word and learn to increasingly live from it in everyday life.
Because I know what it is like to wonder whether the truths you read in Scripture really apply to you.
And I know what it is like to discover that they do.
The Book Wasn’t the End of the Assignment
Finishing Renewing Your Mind did not end what I believed God was asking me to do.
Before moving on to anything else, I became convinced there was another resource I was supposed to create.
The teaching needed to be integrated with guided application in a form that could reach people who may not have access to the kinds of discipleship environments many of us take for granted.
That became the Special Edition of Renewing Your Mind.
If I am being candid, it wasn’t where I naturally wanted to go.
The environments it was intended to reach were outside my comfort zone.
My financial circumstances at the time made taking on another project difficult as well.
But I had already learned something about delayed obedience.
This time, I obeyed.
And something happened through that obedience that I could not have anticipated when I began.
The integrated teaching and application developed through that work eventually became the foundation from which the DeepDive materials were developed, followed later by Milestones for churches and small groups.
What began as something I was uncomfortable doing became part of the foundation for much of what this ministry offers today.
Its purpose is as important now as when I created it: to carry biblical teaching and guided application into places where access to ongoing discipleship may be limited.
And it gives the rest of us a way to take part, sometimes simply by helping put a biblical resource into the hands of someone we will probably never meet.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.