Well, to be frank, I am firstmost a writer. I know I play games on Twitch and have dabbled in digital art (like stuck my toe into the water but I’m trying). Yet I ultimately care more about the words I say, write, read than the games I play or the masterpieces I see in a museum or on a stream. If all of us are cameras, replicating the world around us from our viewpoints, mine comes out as 1000 words or more, usually more.

Then, let’s think about how crazy the last year has been. On top of a global pandemic and racial unrest, I had back surgery in January, became a father in February, and then spent six months in quarantine. Come August, I went back into the classroom, teaching a subject that is becoming more and more a matter of opinion rather than a search for objective facts. I feel like a lot of what I was raised to think and hold onto has slowly eroded over the last decade, and I doubt I am alone. 

So this brings me to the blog. 

In my journey to process the wake of this crazy storm of a year, I realized that I didn’t really have much to hang my hat on creatively. So, in the interests of my own mental and emotional health, I decided to do something about it. 

My therapist would be so proud, and I would care more about his opinion if he wasn’t kind of the worst. [Definitely will unpack that in a later post, probably… depends on how vulnerable I feel like getting.]

You see, I am in my early thirties—right around the age Jesus is thought to have been crucified, the age when He changed the world.

Even if you don’t believe “in Jesus” in the Christian sense, the historical reality is that a man named Jesus, whom people called the Christ, was crucified outside Jerusalem in the early first century CE. His death sparked radical change around the Mediterranean and even further around the world. 

Still, for me and others like me who believe Jesus died and rose again, this world-changing event has changed my life personally as well as shaped my worldview. Everything hangs on this moment, which Christ completed in his early thirties, right around the age I’m at now. 

So, like any good millennial, I keep asking myself why I haven’t changed the world yet. I mean, my teachers all said that I could change the world. I just had to go to college, get good grades, get a good job, and make a difference. While I’ve done all that, I don’t think the world has changed or is changing because of my 30+ years as a contributing member of society. And as I pondered this fact the other day, it hit me that Jesus’ faithfulness to God’s will is what changed the world. After all, it was “Not my will but yours be done” in Gethsemane, so I figured I’d follow suit (Luke 22:42).

And so that is what I seek to do with this blog. 

I may not start a worldwide movement with followers in nearly every people group around the globe; in fact, I most definitely won’t. I can, however, be faithful to the words God places on my heart to write or to say, for better or for worse. It’s hard. It’s terrifying. It keeps me from getting a good night’s rest most nights. But it’s right and worthwhile. 

So, what should you expect from this blog? I promise that you will get me, my voice, my perspective, and I promise that I will write what I feel God putting on my heart. Sometimes, that will be about Twitch. Other times, I will talk theology, books, ministry, education, etc. It really just depends. I am a man of many interests these days. I hope you’ll stick around and read what I have to say.