About Chris

Chris DeLeenheer writes from a desk in Waco, Texas, where he lives with his wife Libby and their four daughters. He has spent the last twenty years in business, the last decade running hard things on purpose, and his whole life — whether he knew it or not — trying to follow Jesus honestly.

He grew up the son of a Bible Study Fellowship teaching leader and a father who came home from work every day, changed clothes, and walked straight to the backyard to throw baseball with his son. Every morning before school, Chris would find his mother in the same chair, on her knees, a blanket across her legs and her Bible open at her feet. He didn’t understand it then. Later, when he became a follower of Jesus himself, he realized the posture was already in him — the idea that you seek God daily, and on your knees, before the day starts.

That same daily-discipline instinct ended up on a baseball field. The paint bucket his dad sat on to catch him. The soft toss after dinner. The broken fence panels from errant throws. A state championship his junior year he can’t quite remember the details of anymore. A walk-on season at Kentucky where gear didn’t come in his size and the locker-room staff didn’t have room for him, so he walked across the quad every day carrying his own equipment. Then Baylor, a transfer, Big 12 tight end, and the number he wore — 85 — which years later would quietly become the identifier for his family.

He met Libby in college. Both of them were leading college ministry; both of them had decided their dating lives needed a different frame. At his mother’s suggestion, Chris read Proverbs 31 for months. It changed what he was looking for. One year, during a three-day fast in Chicago while Libby was on a family trip to Hawaii, he sensed God tell him plainly: this is your wife. They have been married for over twenty years. She has helped him become almost everyone he is now.

After college he went into business. He has spent the last twenty years building and investing in operating companies — small and mid-sized, mostly in construction, home services, and medical. He has been on both sides of the table. He has built teams from nothing. He has sold companies he loved. He has written checks and sat in boardrooms on three continents. None of the line items matter as much as what they taught him: success does not fix a man, and wearing yourself into the ground to prove something does not buy what you think it will buy.

Somewhere around his late thirties, he realized he had drifted. Four monitors in a home office running cameras of a business he wasn’t really leading anymore. Three hundred pounds on a frame that used to run. A marriage he loved, kept at arm’s length by a work pace he kept telling himself was temporary. Scripture he believed, not really practiced. The outside of his life looked like a win. The inside was quietly collapsing. He describes it the way most men describe it: I didn’t lose it all at once. I lost it a half-inch at a time.

Coming back took longer than drifting away. A friend named Jimmy, a 2 AM conversation on a back porch: Come home. Let God put you back together. A therapist named Linda, put in front of him by a man named Michael Hall who could see what Chris couldn’t. A retreat in the woods where he knelt alone in the rain and planted a sword in the ground in front of God. A coach named Jon, and the first long run Chris had done in years. A lot of small decisions repeated a lot of days. No dramatic testimony. A slow, ordinary return to the man he was supposed to be.

Today, the center of his life is not a business or a book. It is one marriage that is still being repaired and built and enjoyed, and four daughters who are watching him more carefully than he would like. He sees his family as the most meaningful investment he will ever make — and, most days, the one that exposes him the fastest. He is learning, often imperfectly, how to be present, how to lead with consistency, and how to build a legacy lived day by day instead of declared from a stage.

He still runs — half marathons and marathons, including Chicago and London in the coming year, as part of a seven-race, three-year commitment to raise $1M for World Vision. He still builds — quietly, with teams he loves, in work that has stopped owning him. And he still seeks God — not as someone who has arrived, but as someone who has been away and is trying never to be away in that way again.

Quiet Drift is the book from that journey. If any of this sounds like your life — if you have been quietly winning on the outside and quietly disappearing on the inside — you are the person he wrote it for.