It’s a good thing my butt already has a crack in it – as it is, I almost gave myself a second one. Luckily, nothing sensitive got injured, and all I ended up with was a three foot square hole in my ceiling and a baseball sized contusion on the right side of my butt (which was helpfully treated by my sitting on an ice pack for 20 of the most awkward and least attractive minutes of my life).

For someone who just quit his job and has a limited income right now, this was not a welcome experience. Doubly so since I also have the handy man skills of a six month old.

So now I’m sitting here, staring at the massive hole in my ceiling, and all I can think of is Michael Caine. Specifically, this clip:

I love that clip for a thousand different reasons, not the least of which is Michael Caine’s accent. The man just sounds cool. But I also love it for the truth it contains: we fall down so we can learn to rise. Life has its way of asking us to go backward in order to go forward; we’re not fond of that fact, but it’s true all the same.

I had coffee with a friend tonight (well, now that I think about it, I had coffee; he never drank a thing) and we talked about life and the changes that it holds. For me, the changes with my job and career track; for him, the adjustments to fatherhood and how his writing/creative life has been put on hold for the moment. As we often do, we reminisced about life in high school and college, and we each were able to identify a specific point, or a specific thing, that – if we could do it all again – was the one thing we’d do differently. We talked about that for a second, and then my friend said something like this:

“But you know, by not taking that path, we’ve become the men we are today. So in some ways, not making those choices taught us to make them when they counted.”

We fall down, so we can learn to pick ourselves back up.

I know plenty of people who’ve fallen down lately (and for some, it’s more accurate to say they’ve been shoved down cruelly or kicked to the ground). There are people who are simply looking for enough hope to make it through the end of the week, or the day, or their particular shift at work. They wonder if things will ever be in their favor; if they’ll ever reach that point where life feels like it’s moving forward more often than it feels like it’s going back. The dream is still out there, but they’re tired of it being beyond reach.

All I can say is that falling down isn’t the worst thing in the world. Going backward isn’t always bad. It’s staying there that’s the issue.

If we fall down, we must get up.

That’s the path of reward – that’s the life worth living. Even gaping ceiling holes can be patched and made good as new. But sometimes, we have to live through those moments to believe that.

To all of you who have supported or helped me in the ministry over the past fifteen years, please know that I am grateful for each of you. Your contributions, far more than my own, were the reason that God was able to transform so many students. Thank you for being such a blessed part of my service as a pastor.

*****

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” – Romans 8:29

There’s a book that’s been sitting on my nightstand now for almost a month. It’s less than a hundred pages thick, and the stark white cover almost mocks me every time I walk by.

“Risk is Right” it tells me. John Piper says so.

I’m not a very risky person. Never have been. When I was a kid, my idea of taking a risk was dunking an Oreo into milk after I’d taken a bite, thus allowing for the potential of tiny black cookie crumbs to contaminate the pure white milk. It was my brother who jumped off the house with only a shopping bag for a parachute. It was my friends who snuck out of the house at night to sit on their front porches and feel the rush of the cool night air combined with the knowledge that they’d broken a rule. It was the heroes in my comic books that dared to do things that common sense and insurance agents said was, to put it bluntly, stupid.

But not me. I was the good kid. The (semi) obedient one. I set the example. I toed the mark. Always have.

Sure, there were times when I did things that were risky. Once, when I was about 15, my friends convinced me that it would be fun to camp out in my neighbor’s yard as a cover for sneaking down to a store that was rumored to sell cigarettes to under-age kids. I didn’t smoke, had no interest in smoking, but I was the straight-arrow, so they figured I could just walk in, be my normal polite self and procure a couple of packs of smokes for the heathens. The plan, they said, was flawless.

Except for the fact that I froze up. I couldn’t go inside the store. I had visions of the police being called, of my arrest and incarceration, of my parents sobbing as the judge threw the book at me and derailed my chance for college, which would derail my chance for a good job, which meant that I was inevitably headed towards a future of riding the rails like the hobos in Hardy Boy novels, destined to either help Frank and Joe solve a mystery or be a shadowy figure who foretold their doom.

So my friends took my learner’s permit and went inside to try and by smokes anyway. The clerk kicked them out, laughing. I was relieved until, as we crossed the street, I got hit in the knee by a car that didn’t have its lights on. I was knocked head over heels into a drainage ditch, convinced that my leg had been severed as punishment for being so stupid. I just knew I was going to die in that ditch, becoming a cautionary tale to other kids and a source of embarrassment to my family.

“Poor Jason,” my grandparents would say as they sat on the carport shelling peas. “He seemed like such a good boy.”

Obviously, my leg was fine. My knee did swell to the size of a mini-basketball, but I hid it from my parents by wearing baggy pants for two weeks and pretending my limp was just some new kind of strut. It is entirely possible that I was responsible for starting the gangsta lean. I should’ve thought to trademark it.

But that’s just not who I was.

I could tell you more stories, stories about how I didn’t take the right kind of risks, stories about how the risks I did take were either coldly calculated to the point that there was no risk at all, or wildly impulsive, resulting in a day-after sense of shame and regret that made me burrow deeper into myself. Bottom line is that I’ve never taken the right kind of risks. Never figured out that there are healthy and productive ones to be taken.

Which is why I picked up that book, “Risk is Right”, in the first place. I needed to know how to do what God was telling me to do.

I needed to know how to leave this church, step out in faith, and see where God would take me.

It’s funny that this is all coming together on Graduation Sunday. A lot of people are here to celebrate and acknowledge the preschoolers and high schoolers and college folks who’ve put in their time, completed a major season of their lives, and are moving on to other things. New things. Scary things. I look at Austin and Madison and Cody and Brandon and Jon and Haley and Victoria and I remember what it felt like to walk in their shoes. After high school, the choice was simple: college. After college, the choice wasn’t so simple, especially for me.

There’s not a lot of people banging down the door to hire English majors. Though there are a lot of English majors banging down doors to deliver you a fresh, tasty pizza in 30 minutes or less.

It’s funny that this annual ritual comes around and we stand in front of these kids and extol the virtues of risk, of stepping out, of change. We tell them to chase dreams and find their passions, and we slip them a couple bucks and we wait for the inevitable: for them to do what so many of us did, and settle down, find a job, start a family, and leave risk behind.

Change, for some of us, is best left to the younger. Or to the marketers behind clever political ads.

And yet change is at the very heart of what it means to be human. From conception onward, we are constantly in flux. Life is steady progression from one stage to the next, only we stop acknowledging it at some point when we feel safe. Maybe it comes when we make “enough money”. Maybe it comes when we get that dream house. Maybe it comes when we find a church we like that has people like us and we feel at home. I can’t say what it is for you, but for some of us out there, you know what I’m talking about.

You find that comfortable spot and you set up camp and you say, “This is where I’m supposed to be. I ain’t moving.”

Which would be great if life worked that way. But it doesn’t. We’re not meant to become static. We’re meant to be ever-changing. Just look at what Paul is saying in Romans 8:29 – we are meant to be conformed into the image of Christ.

Conformed. It’s a verb. It means continually shaped. Molded. Remolded. Occasionally taken back to the drawing board and started over again. It’s the truth about our lives and character: we are constantly being remade by the One who made us, the One who doesn’t have to be remade.

Have you ever thought about that? That God doesn’t have to be remade? I grew up hearing that “God doesn’t change” and while that’s true, it’s misleading. It makes God sound stale. It makes God sound like the old man who lived in my former neighborhood and threatened us with a shotgun for walking on the neighbor’s side of the property line.

“You’re almost on my grass! Do it again and I’ll shoot! Whippersnappers!”

The reason that God doesn’t change isn’t because He’s crusty, it’s because He is infinite. He is all things in all times to all people. That’s why He’s just as accessible to people today as He was in the time of Moses. That’s why His word still has wisdom and power in our modern world just as it did when the majority of people thought that sailing too far would make you fall off the edge of the planet. Because God is infinite, which means that He is always sufficient, it means that He never has to grow or change or learn. He simply is and that’s always enough.

So when we, who must change, decide that we’re not going to anymore, we establish ourselves as equal with God. The Bible says that’s blasphemy.

Our comfortable, familiar lives are blasphemous.

Now that’s a powerful thought. It’s no wonder we resonate so strongly whenever we hear speeches that implore us to strive for more. We are built for that kind of thing, and when we become too entrenched in a blasphemous lifestyle of complacency or apathy or fear, we sense deep within our hearts that God not only means for us to do more than just sit there, He is grieved by our self-satisfaction because it means we no longer listen to Him.

I was in that spot. I didn’t want to risk being obedient to God, which sounds pretty dumb for a pastor to say. But obedience to God meant walking away from a sure thing; it meant leaving behind friends and family and security and hope for a future. It meant stepping away from students that I’ve come to love very, very much. It meant defying conventional wisdom that life is better when we mitigate risk, settle in for something comfortable and dependable, and only consider stepping outside that zone if we’re sure that there’s something better waiting on the other side.

In fifteen years of preaching about having faith in God and obeying Him no matter what, this is the first time I’ve followed His leading without knowing where I’m going to land. It’s the first time I’ve truly put my life and the life of my family into the hands that formed the universe and said, “Okay. Show me what you’ve got.” It’s scary. There are days when I wonder what the heck I’ve done. There are days when I want to say, “No! I take it back!”

It’s like falling in love with the person you’re meant to be with for the rest of your life: there is no safe. It’s all risk – but you never feel more alive than when you take that chance. And you never feel more certain that you blew it than when you let it pass by.

Jesus knew all this stuff, of course. He knew when to push, when to withdraw, when to challenge and when to comfort. As it says in John 13:3, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” Jesus knew who he was, whose he was, and what he was supposed to do. This is the image that we’re being conformed into: it’s not one of weakness or timidity, it’s of power and love and sound judgment; it’s not one that is easily defeated, but it’s more than a conqueror; we are not conformed to the things of this world, the ideas and beliefs that tell us to settle and hold tight, but we are conformed to the image of the One who didn’t think equality with God was something to hold onto, who instead submitted Himself to death on a cross so that His Spirit might echo in our hearts, telling us the will of the Father is for us to “Go.”

So I’m going. It’s Graduation Sunday, after all.

What if you chose likewise? What if you didn’t accept the premise that safe is best? What if you put your hand into the hand of God and said, “Show me what you’ve got?” What would change? What would be different?

Because here’s the thing, and it’s unavoidable: the world is changing. Grayson is changing. The things that people hold as right and dear and true are changing, and we are called to be witnesses to them. But how can we tell them with a straight face, much less convicting power, that the greatest Truth in the world is that God loves them and wants to change them into the likeness of His Son, if we ourselves are content to sit tight and not change a thing?

Risk is Right, Piper says. So says the Lord. What will you do with that truth today?

From Nietzsche -

“The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.”

Been thinking a lot about endings recently. With graduation upon us and my own transition out of my role as a youth pastor, there are an awful lot of things coming to a tidy conclusion in my life.

Maybe you’re the same way. Maybe a big part of your journey is drawing to a close. Maybe a horrible time in your life is coming to an end. Maybe both are the same. Wherever you find yourself, this much I know:

Endings are necessary. They are good. They aren’t always happy. They aren’t always tidy. But they must happen for us to move forward, because that’s what it means to be human. To move forward. To grow. To change. To chance. Too often we forget that; too often we strive to be unchanging, sedentary, immovable and thus end up rebelling against our own selves. We aren’t static creatures because we lack the resources for it.

We are finite. And finitude means adaptation, and adaptation means changing things about ourselves, our circumstances and our lives as often as necessary.

So part of becoming who we are meant to be is letting go of one version of ourselves, or one time in our lives, and moving towards the next. We don’t live for the end, and I don’t really believe we stop at the end; I think each ending is for the moment, not for the one found within it.

Many thoughts. These are just a few.

Graduation.

That magical time when young people turn the page on a specific portion of their lives and look eagerly toward whatever the next chapter may be. For high schoolers, it might be college. For collegians, it might be a job. For parents, it might be a nervous breakdown.

Huge life moments have that effect, you know.

Because I’ve lived through my fair share of such transitional moments (high school, college, first job change, marriage, moving, birth, more job changes, most recent job change – just off the top of my head) I thought I would offer some prosaic words of not-quite-wisdom but not-quite-humor. Let’s just call them musings.

* There will be more times in your life when you feel exactly as you do now: a mixture of nerves and satisfaction. This is the normal way a healthy, growing person should feel. Learn to be okay with it, instead of fearing it the way so many before you did.

* If you don’t know this by now, then remember: if you don’t decide who and what you want to be, someone else will come a long and assign you a role. Don’t let them.

* The first big lie of American adulthood is that more money makes you happy. The second big lie is that money doesn’t matter. Strive for the middle ground, where money is a tool you learn to use with wisdom and discretion.

* There will always be someone around to tell you that you can’t do something. Take some time to hear the voices who tell you that you can. (Unless what you’re wanting to do is patently stupid; in that case, listen to the can’t chorus.)

* A job is a job. A career is what you do with the jobs you have to make the world a better place.

* All things in moderation, including risk, caution and cologne.

* If the phone rings, answer it. If you don’t, respond to the voice mail. If you don’t, pretend you were in the hospital for an extended period of time.

* Every organization, no matter what its purpose, is an institution. And institutions are where they put crazy people. Including you. 

* Surprisingly, there are very few well-paid poets. Same is true of nuclear engineers.

* When it comes to getting a job, it’s not the degree, it’s the person who wields it. And whom the person who wields it knows.

* Those who can, do. Those who can do and explain how, teach. Those who can do neither, blog. And there are 10,690,000,000 Google search results for the word “blog”.

* At some point in your life, you might fall in love. Depending on whom you fall in love with, rest assured your family will have a lot of opinions on the matter. And so might the rest of the world. You decide which ones to listen to.

* It’s been said you can either be happy or right. That’s a false dichotomy. You can be both, if you’ll shut up when you need to, speak when you should, and say things with grace in the moment.

* And finally, this is a truth that few people heed: life is a series of endings, followed by beginnings. Don’t be afraid when an ending comes around. It means a beginning is just around the corner.

To the class of 2013 – all the best. Godspeed, good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Sure, we were meeting in a church, but I was doing something new. And I knew I would either nail it or fail miserably.

I decided that nailing it was the preferable option. So I pushed my anxiety aside, kept my Whatchamacallit candy bar in my stomach where it belonged, and I started telling a simple story about a boy, his kinship with a pencil, and the journey of discovery they made together. (If you’re interested, here’s the PDF: Project LIFT – The Boy)

If you’ve ever spoken to teenagers before, you know they can be a tough sell. They’re smart, they’re savvy, and if they think for a second that you’re flim-flamming them, they’ll shut you out and move on. The students I spoke to yesterday were no exception. But as I went along with the story, trying my best to weave in humor and add in improvisational moments based on their responses to me, the most amazing thing happened.

They stayed with me.

Now, here’s where years of youth work comes in handy. To the average person, a teenager who is “staying with me” might seem a lot like a distracted, disinterested person. They rarely keep eye contact, they tend to shift in their seats, and every so often they’ll look up or down or around the room to see if maybe a magic fairy has flown in to grant wishes. It can take some getting used to. In fact, you really have to simultaneously speak to them and look for the cues that they’re with you: a smile, a subtle nod of agreement, leaning forward in their chair at a crucial point, tapping their neighbor on the shoulder and gesturing for them to pay closer attention. All of those signs were present yesterday afternoon, even as my talk soared past the fifteen minute mark.

I wrapped it up after 25 minutes, and the best thing in the world happened.

They wanted to ask me questions. Which means they had listened and heard something that piqued their interest. I even got asked two of my favorite questions: Have you ever thought about being a teacher? and Have you ever thought about doing stand up comedy?

(In case you’re wondering: yes to the first and no to the second.)

Afterwards, the folks who invited me to speak (without ever hearing me, might I add – brave folks) told me that it was the first time they could remember that the kids had ever sat through a presentation without having to be redirected.

“That never happens,” one worker said. “They actually listened to you.”

Yesterday, I took step beyond the familiar boundaries I’ve always known, and the ground beneath my feet was just as firm. I’ve always been told – and believed – that I was a good preacher; yesterday was the first time I’ve been told I was a good speaker. There may not seem to be much difference, but for me, there is. And since you might be asking yourself, “Self, what is the difference?”, I’ll tell you:

A preacher comes with a built in audience. A speaker has to earn one. God has always been gracious to me because He’s always provided me with a platform to speak from and people to speak to. I’ve never taken it for granted, but it’s always been built in for me because of my involvement with a church. Yesterday He showed me that he could open doors beyond a church (never mind that I was physically inside a church) and that I could earn the right to be heard. He showed me that He could do more with me than I’d imagined.

The best part of the day, however, the part that just made me fresh-from-the-oven-chocolate-chip cookie gooey inside, was when I got into the care with Rachel to leave. She silently grabbed my hand and said, “Good job.” I kissed her hand and said thanks. But then she added this, and I knew things were going to be okay:

“I loved hearing you speak like that. You really seemed to be in your element. It was awesome, and the kids really enjoyed it.”

One journey ending, another beginning. Into the deep blue we go.

Today’s the day.

And I’m scared. I’ve struggled with what to say. How do I start? Should I be funny? Is what I’m thinking of actually funny, or just a lame middle-aged man’s idea of what he thinks students find funny? What can I say that would be meaningful? What can I say that isn’t saturated with religious overtones (this is an after-school, non-religious program)? What do I wear? Do my sneakers smell? And why does Wile E. Coyote keep chasing after the Road Runner? Can’t he just go vegetarian and save himself some hassle?

Like I said – it’s been a struggle.

But another friend of mine gave me some advice recently. He referenced the TED Talks and said that the average TED presenter is told they have 18 minutes with which to change the world. So, my friend suggested, if you had just a few minutes to say something to change the world, what would you say?

I extrapolated that to my afternoon session: I’ve got 30 minutes to maybe change a life. What do I say?

Well, off the top of my head, I can tell you what I don’t want to say. I don’t want to talk about negative things. I mean seriously: if you only have 30 minutes to change the world, do you really want to burn 10-12 of them enumerating things that suck? Not that I’d cold open with a laundry list of things that are horrible about the world, but sometimes, when trying to motivate people, we drift into the negative because that’s kind of our default. We tend to see the hardships in life much more clearly (or at least it dominates more of our view) than the blessings.

People know the world sucks. What they need to know is how to fix it. So, in 30 minutes or less, how do you teach someone to fix the world?

I can’t even get my kids to sit still and eat dinner for thirty minutes.

But, if we eliminate the negative and stick with the positive – that is, if we focus on things that move us towards a better world – what are the essential things? Well, naturally, I’d say a relationship with Jesus Christ. I think the only hope we really have of ever changing the world begins and ends with Christ changing us. Until we have His heart, His Spirit, and His power, our best efforts will be dust in the wind. But, if we speak and write and act according to His will we can see the world tilt on its axis. The past 2000 years have shown us at least that much.

Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can be that overt. But if I can’t proselytize, I can certainly use Christ as an example. So what about the life of Jesus can I point to that suggests how we can change the world?

Well, there’s sacrifice. That’s always a good one. There’s leadership – He certainly knew how to train the absolutely worst candidates for the job to become the best in their field. There’s compassion. Honesty. Integrity. Courage. Solitude. Wisdom. Guts. Gentleness. Appropriate anger*. Friendship. Vision. Mission. Hope. Determination. Obedience. Intelligence. Critical thinking. Storytelling. Understanding. Creativity. The list could go on.

*My favorite thing I’ve seen recently was a t-shirt that read, “When asked, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, always remember: flipping over tables and taking a whip to people is a viable option.

But what was the key thing? Something that can be reproduced in every human being, regardless of religious affiliation?

My friend John Njoroge, of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, shared it with me a while back when telling me about a message he had to deliver. It’s found in John 13:

Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.

Put simply, Jesus knew who he was and what he was meant to do.

Maybe this resonates with me because it’s my reality right now. I’m discovering at 37 that knowing who you are (your talents, passions, likes, dislikes) and what you’re meant to do (the things that you feel you must do in order to truly live) is the core of being able to effect change. Too many of us waste away, not knowing ourselves, not knowing what we are supposed to be doing with our lives, not even daring to ask ourselves the questions. We succumb to the idea that a life of domesticity – that is, a life where we simply work, pay bills, do a few fun things, then die – is the life we’re meant to live.

But even a life like that begs to be lived fully. Sure, you may never quit your job and move to Nepal to serve as a sherpa, but that doesn’t mean your life should be devoid of growth and change. That doesn’t mean you should see yourself as a person who doesn’t matter.

And this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, we-are-all-precious-little-snowflakes garbage either; I’m not encouraging the pursuit of some stupid fantasy life. I’m encouraging the living of life to the fullest. To do that, though, you have to know yourself. You have to know what you can do, want to do, and where to find the meaning in between. You also have to know if you’re willing to live with the risks that come from embracing that future.

So that’s where I’m going to go this afternoon. I would rather teach a group of kids that pursuing their dreams of being whatever they think they can be matters, rather than stand up there and encourage them to be good little boys and girls. It’s like C.S. Lewis said: “Aim for heaven and you’ll get earth thrown in; aim for earth and you’ll get neither.” By knowing who we are and what we’re meant to do, we can avoid getting caught up in the expectations and demands others would place on us. We can choose wisely where to invest our lives in order to make the most impact.

Thirty minutes. Not a lot of time. But knowing who I am and what I’m supposed to do, it’s time enough.

If anyone would understand the power and wisdom in that statement, it would be Dawn; diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant, she not only survived the surgeries, treatment and pregnancy, she came away with a fantastic son and a heck of story. The words, obviously, stuck in my head.

And now I’m living them.

After much prayer and consideration, I resigned from my position as the Youth Pastor of Chestnut Grove Baptist Church on May 2. It was hard. I was graciously offered a three-month severance to help my family through my time of transition because I’m leaving with nowhere to go. No job offers. Nothing immediate on the horizon. Just the overwhelming sense that God wanted me to stop and listen for His direction.

I know it will involve writing. That much has become clear over the last three years. It’s a passion I’ve had forever, one that I almost followed but turned away from because I wasn’t ready. I am, I think, ready now. What that will look like, what that will mean, I don’t know. But I can only do what I know God has directed me to do, and that is put my life completely in His hands and wait on His timing.

And that’s hard.

Not because He’s unfaithful. Not because He won’t deliver. It’s because I’m so used to having things lined up – so used to “helping” Him move me from place to place that being completely out of the loop on this round is a bit unnerving.

It’s also hard because of the people it affects. I spent a bit of time on the phone this evening with a wonderful, sweet woman who was just in tears over my resignation. It’s hard – or it should be – to break good people’s hearts. It should never be easy; at least, not to my mind.

And so I come back to Dawn’s words: “God is good. Life is hard. Don’t get the two confused.”

I haven’t.

I’m hoping I can still say the same tomorrow.

If you try to make people happy all the time, then you’re not a leader – you’re a clown. – John Maxwell

I had the privilege of being part of the live event Chick-fil-A Leadercast 2013 today. Not only did I get to hear some amazing speakers (Andy Stanely, Dr. Henry Cloud, John Maxwell, Mike Krzyzewski, and more) I was inspired about my future. I came away feeling much better about what God has for me, and what I can do with the talents and gifts He’s given me.

On a personal note, the quote from Maxwell really speaks to some of the things that I’ve been learning about myself; I have always been someone who tried to take responsibility for the feelings of others. I wouldn’t say I was a people pleaser, but for the people I most love and care for, I usually go out of my way to help them as best I can. It sounds admirable until you realize that you are living your life at the mercy of other people’s emotions.

And that’s no way to live.

So I’m learning to let go of things that aren’t mine to begin with. I’m learning that people being disappointed that I didn’t fix their problem(s) doesn’t make me a bad person. I’m discovering that when I live for God and His will above all else, I am happier, healthier and above all else, free.

Maybe you’ve felt the same way in your life. If so, please know that there is freedom.

You don’t have to be the clown.

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She gave it to me. Straight, no chaser.

“You don’t need to change fields,” she said. “You need to do what you’re good at, which is write about and talk about God in a way that young people, and people who maybe aren’t so into God, feel like they have a friend.”

Well dang, then.

What does this mean moving forward? I don’t know. I have suddenly surged upwards with the number of folks subscribed to this blog (I’m almost to 400, 225 of which have come within the last month or so) and my freelance career is coming along nicely. Not enough to make a boatload of cash, but enough to give me hope that more work is out there if I’m willing to hustle for it (and I am). And I know that people have been interested lately in having me out to speak to their church’s youth group or weekend retreat (and I would love to do even more of those).

I don’t want to make any kind of declarations, but I’m satisfied that God is showing things to me, if only I’ll have eyes to see. And it’s all new territory. New sights. New sounds. New smells.

It’s scary stuff. But as someone wise once said, “The trick is to figure out what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about, and get someone to pay you for doing both.”

Do what you do, bruh. Do what you do, and trust Him to do what He does.

Amen?