“Those bastards!” he exclaimed cheerfully, putting the paper down and looking at me from across a desk cluttered with loose-leaf pages and pushed up against the far wall of the mobile home.

“Right,” I agreed.

It felt like something to which you should agree.

He leaned back (eliciting a sharp squeak from his swivel chair), and put his hands behind his head with a smile. Forgetting that I was in a straight-backed folding chair, I tried to recline, too, and came dangerously close to falling over.

I settled with a crash and returned his smile. He nodded. A comfortable camaraderie rose between us.

I didn’t want to ruin the moment, but I felt that to confirm his strict judgment without fully understanding his rationale would be a small betrayal of our new friendship. So, after a moment’s hesitation, I ventured the question:

“But really, what’s wrong with USAA?” I said. “I thought their insurance was pretty good.”

“Oh, everything,” he replied, waving his hand to signify that he used the word in its literal sense. “They’re cheapskates, for one. They don’t stand for any supplemental stuff. Or if they do, you have to go through hell to get it approved. And they’re slower than tar.”

“That does sound rough,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

“This estimate they gave you,” he continued, “is probably $1,000 short of what it’ll take to get the work done. At least! See, they have one hour for blending the paint, and I know for a fact it’ll take at least two hours. And that’s just the beginning.” He gazed into the middle distance and shook his head, clearly envisioning disaster.

My heart sank. Despite the now-proven bastardy of USAA, I’d been hoping that this man would be up for repairing the deep scratch on the driver’s side of my 2004 Corolla.

He glanced back at me and registered my concern, and his face softened with compassion. “But let’s go take a look at it, huh?” he said, slamming his hands on the desk to flutter the top layer of papers to the floor. Then he breezed past me through the screen door and bounded down the uneven wooden steps.

I followed.

Outside the office, it was getting colder, and a flat gray sky promised snow. He bobbed forward energetically in an oil-stained t-shirt, arms bare, navigating the row of junkyard cars until he came to mine. I followed, huddled into my huge green military jacket, wondering how much I looked like a retracting turtle.

“Hm,” he said, putting his hand to his chin and peering at the door. I came to stand beside him and followed his gaze.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. Somebody had sliced through the side of the car while I was parked at Chuze Fitness. They’d left a deep dent, bare metal that jutted through flaking paint to shine like bone, and (regrettably) no note.

“That would happen at Chuze Fitness,” said Alli when I told her.

“What do you mean?” I asked. But it wasn’t a fair question, because I did know what she meant.

Snow began to fall. Standing in front of the car, the repairman pursed his lips and clicked his tongue, thinking. He came to a conclusion. “Let me ask you something,” he said.

I let him.

“How much do you care about the way your car looks?” he inquired, placing a clear, profound emphasis on the last word so I’d be sure to take his meaning.

“What do you think?” I replied. “I’m driving a 2004 Corolla.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” he said, patting my shoulder. “I like the way you think.”

Internally, I glowed.

“Now, I’ll tell you what I’d do,” he said conspiratorially, looking around and lowering his voice. “You already filed the claim, right? So they’re going to send you a check for $1,500. Thing is, though, they don’t care how it happens from here.”

He paused and spoke in a whisper I had to lean forward to hear. “I’d take the money and run.”

I blinked.

“That’s right,” he said, immediately back to normal volume and a contagious level of cheer. “That’s right! Take the money and run!” He chuckled.

“But will it be okay to drive around with it like that?” I managed in confusion, gesturing toward the gash and wondering whether, if I did take the money, I’d really have to run.

“Oh, you’re worried about the car?” he asked. “Well, let’s see. Does the door open okay?”

Abruptly he opened the car door and slammed it shut.

“That’s fine, then. Now look. You go to Lowe’s, get a bottle of primer, and spray it over the metal.” He motioned toward the heart of the hole. “Duct tape around the edges to keep the water out, and that’ll last three years, at least. After that you could always find a door at a junkyard and slap it on.”

Unfamiliar with slapping doors onto cars, I considered the idea.

“Primer and duct tape will last three years?” I asked.

“Three years,” he confirmed. “At least. Although you might need to replace the duct tape.”

“Huh,” I said.

And that’s how, without doing an iota of repair work, Highlands Auto Body earned its 87th five-star review.

Update on Music Stuff

Here’s the situation: Last year, I worked on music once per week. But it turns out recording music once every week is tougher than I’d expected.

It’s hard to get in a groove; you set things up, start recording, and then come to the end of the day with a bit of a song done. Then, the next week, you get back into things and find you want to clear out whole sections and start again. It’s exhausting.

So, after reflection over the holidays, I’ve decided that I’ll be changing things up. My plan for this year is to take a week off at a time and record music every few months. I think this will let me make more music more efficiently – but it’ll also mean more time between recording sessions, and more time until I put out more music.

I have a week cleared out in early February. I should have new music ready shortly after.

That’s the situation. Thanks for tracking with me in the meantime. I appreciate you.

We are in constant danger of attaching ourselves to what we do.

Our danger is this: In hooking ourselves to our efforts, we carry ourselves up and off. But inevitably what we do breaks down and disappears, and then we’re left falling. The farther you’ve carried yourself, the longer your fall, and there’s always a fall. You can’t do anything forever.

You’re a student and then you graduate. You’re a mother and then your children grow up. You’re in charge and then you get old. Each role you play is a number slapped on your chest for a sprinting race in some direction, but there is always a finish.

That’s doing. We’re in frantic flux and we sometimes get lost.

Who we are though is something deeper. It’s not a sprint but more rooted motion, like stacking stones one on the last or digging a hole deeper until well-water bubbles up. It happens in long arcs like growing trees.

That’s being. We’re always becoming more of what we are.

I think the danger of getting carried away with doing is especially great when what we do is something other people admire.

One of my friends here in Denver is a pastor, and he told me that his identity has become tangled with his office so it’s hard to tease out what’s what. People think of him as a pastor, and in our crowd this is a very good thing, so he puts it on and polishes it and wears it like a medal that’s part of him.

If he ever stops performing the role of pastor, he’ll have to put the medal away. Then what will people think of him? Then how will he know who he is? It will be a long fall.

Someday I have a fall coming, too. I’ve run my own business for a year. People’s ears perk up when I tell them. If I do something else or the business fails, will I be less interesting? Will I be less myself?

Of course, there’s no straight line between what we do and who we are, not really. The words are just windows to look through. Our doing becomes our being; what we do is a small stone stacked to make who we are. So each day I work on my business and my friend works at church, I guess we dig our wells a little deeper and also hitch ourselves a little higher up and farther off.

Movement is unavoidable, even good. But we need a mooring line to remember ourselves, and we have to be careful not to hook the line to the wrong thing or we’ll end up tumbling through space like an astronaut into emptiness.

Let me hook into God who is the fullness of being. Let me do what gives me life. And let those two be the same.

I have this thing that I do whenever I accept a new friend request on Facebook: I pull up my own profile and study it, trying to imagine what the new person will think of me as they view my online image for the first time.

• What will they think of my family?
  (I like my family. I’d like my new friends to know my family.)

• What will they think of our wedding photos?
  (Our wedding was awesome. It might be better if nobody takes a photo of me dancing ever again, though.)

• Will they read that long, personal post I wrote four months ago?
  (Ah I hope they don’t. It’s kind of discomforting when people you only kind of know read something like that. Maybe I should take it down.)

• Will they get far enough back to consider whether or not I was cool in high school?
  (Probably not. I mean, they’d have to click back through a lot of photos to get this far. On the other hand, I just clicked through to 2009, so I guess there’s a chance. Shoot, junior year homecoming was rough.)

• Was I cool in high school?
  (I guess not. I remember feeling good about those sunglasses, but in retrospect they made me look like an adolescent praying mantis.)

Yeah, I literally just did this, for no good reason I can think of.

I mean, I don’t post on Facebook anymore. I don’t really use Facebook anymore. My profile is static, stamped with a smiling profile picture of Alli and I at the beach and a mountainside cover photo so people know I live in a cool place. I haven’t posted anything in four months.

There’s really no point in looking at my profile ever again. Right?

Right.

But still. Every time I get an email notification that somebody’s added me, I jump into action like it’s the bat signal. And every time I accept a new friend, I lean up to my digital mirror with a pageant judge’s eye, obsessing over how my reflection will come off.

Again and again.

I’m not entirely sure why. But I think part of it is that in trying to understand how other people might perceive me, I’m trying to understand who I actually am.

I want to know what role I’m playing in the world. I want to know what my story is.

And I want who I am to matter.

Last night, our small group read through the The Magnificat – that song-prayer that spills from Mary in the Gospel of Luke, right after the angel Gabriel bursts in to deliver the axis-shifting news about Jesus.

It’s a beautiful prayer. As she offers it, Mary seems keenly aware of her own insignificance. She knows the role she’s played; she’s not impressive. She’s a servant of lowly estate. She’s a nobody. That’s how the world sees her. That, it appears, is how she sees herself.

Then, without warning, she’s chosen. She’s exalted. She’s pulled in, caught up, eclipsed.

In all this, Mary’s place in society only gets smaller. She’ll be shunned for becoming pregnant before being married. But her story is swallowed up in a bigger one, and it reaches to the ancient past to make true God’s promises to Abraham, and it stretches to eternity to save us.

So the power of God overshadows her, and her soul magnifies the Lord.

This, I think, is one of the gifts that Jesus brings.

When he comes, we understand the smallness of our stories. We are eclipsed, and so our stories cease to be dead ends.

Thank God.

Because God knows there is probably no end more dead than looking at your own Facebook profile, nothing smaller-minded than scrolling through pictures of yourself and trying to figure out what other people might think of you for the third time this week.

I am so desperate to be impressive. I am an awkward dancer and a praying mantis when I wear sunglasses. I am so self-conscious and so small.

I am eclipsed. What a gift.

Updates

Alli and I are traveling back to Maryland for Christmas, and I’m planning to take the week off from writing / doing almost everything. I’ll be back in 2023 (hopefully with music to follow soon).

Here’s wishing you Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Getting older is like taking a trip across the country in a car.

From one perspective – from the inside – nothing moves. The cupholder is stationary. The coffee stain on the bottom of the beige seat is eternal. You might sit in a moving car for eight hours and feel still. It’s only when you look out the window and see the world rushing around you that you know you’ve left your first place very far behind.

Getting older is like admitting to yourself that you won’t be a professional baseball player. You’d harbored the hope since you wrapped rubber bands around your first glove to break in the leather. But now you’re 14, and after a game in which you make an error and strike out twice, you fight away the tears and reconcile yourself to reality. You let go. This is probably a good thing – it’s certainly inevitable – but you’d hoped to hold on for a little bit longer.

Getting older is like visiting your old elementary school just after you’ve turned 25. The hallways are much narrower than you remember, although you know it’s not the hallways that have changed. But they did repaint some of the walls, and when you ask, they don’t remember the name of your third-grade teacher.

Getting older is like walking outside at sunset after spending the long hours of the day locked into the white screen of a computer. The colors stop your breath. You’re struck by the freshness and the bigness of the world. There’s a sense that everything on which you’d poured your focus has turned out to be small and dim. But it wasn’t really about you, anyway.

Getting older is like going to a concert and hearing a song for the first time. Everyone else seems to know it. After a verse or two, you begin to pick out the pattern to the melody, almost well enough to sing along. So you start to sing with the crowd, and then you realize that this time through the chorus, the words are different.

Updates

Hey, I turned 30 the other week and I’m still wrapping my mind around it. I’ll try to keep future posts from being this melodramatic, but no promises now that I’m old.

Music stuff: I was ambitious to think I’d finish a song in the midst of the holiday season. No new music this month, but I hope to have something out soon after the calendar turns over.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

-Jon

It’s weird putting music into the world.

Not in the sense that it’s abnormal or rare or something. The opposite, actually. In 2022, making music is common, and song releases are so frequent that we may drown in them.

No, I mean that the experience of releasing music is strange. It makes you act and think in ways you otherwise wouldn’t.

When you make music, you develop a closeness with the song that’s like the familiarity you feel with family. You live with the song. You see it change. You know all of the little decisions that have shaped it, and so you’re uniquely situated to compare it against everything that it could have been (and find the real thing disappointing). You are, unavoidably, face to face with its flaws.

But you’re pridefully protective of it, too.

When you release a song, you’re anxious, like you’re anxious when you send a kid to school. Because while you reserve the right to critique your kid’s attitude or the fact that they pick their nose (after all, you know exactly what’s wrong with them), if anyone else says something, it’ll cut your heart.

When it comes to songs (and probably kids, but I have less experience with those), it’s very hard not to be a helicopter parent. You release them into the world – good luck out there, little guy! – but three minutes later it’s clear the cord wasn’t cut cleanly. You feel the pull back in, the urge to check and make sure they’re doing well.

I try very hard not to be on social media or tied to my phone, but on the day I released a song, I checked Instagram 53 times and refreshed Spotify for Artists when I blinked.

Releasing a song is mostly vanity.

It’s the human desire to shout your own name and to put your worth in your performance, or, more accurately, in what other people think about your performance.

But it’s beautiful, too, and sometimes necessary.

My friend wrote a song called “Through” after he watched the movie Boyhood. The film’s premise is crazily ambitious: It follows the same kid from the age of six all the way through adolescence, until he leaves for college. The script is fictionalized, but the actor really does grow up. They filmed him year after year for a decade.

My friend told me that, at the end of the movie, when the kid finally leaves his family and goes to school, he felt this ache:

“You’ve seen him go through hell since he was a kid, and now you see him go to college and start making friends, and you’re thinking, ‘These college friends that he’s making, they have no idea what mess he survived.’”

“They don’t know what he’s been through.”

I think that’s kind of what it’s like when you put a song into the world: It’s the nervous acknowledgement that your story is vital to you, but that other people don’t know it.

And it is an ache. It’s the discomfort of disconnection. It’s the reality that your closest friends can’t hear what you tell yourself in your head. It’s weird.

You feel that acutely when you release music.

That’s why you release music.

Updates!

Not 100% on this, but I’m probably going to take a break on writing / music next week for Thanksgiving and my birthday. We’ll see.

After that, I’m hoping to have another song out in December. Again, we’ll see.

Thanks for listening to “Signs” and, as always, thanks for reading! Enjoy the holiday week, and here’s hoping you find things to be grateful for.

-Jon

Here are all the links to it:

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Apple

• Amazon

Big thanks to Dan Busche for his good work to make it sound good (bass, drums, mixing, moral support).

I’ve written enough about it this week, so I’ll leave things there today.

As always… thanks for listening.

A few years ago, I was in the car with a friend on the way to get coffee.

The shop we were headed toward sat in the middle of a busy downtown street, the sort of place where open parking spots feel like gifts. As we got close, we started scanning for free spaces, but the day was busy and we looked halfheartedly, both of us mostly content with the likely reality of parking a few blocks away.

We came into view of the shop, one car in a line of cars, no open spots in sight.

Then, just a bit ahead of us, a car pulled out of the perfect parking space – the spot immediately in front of the shop. Caught by surprise, we both pointed toward it, and when the driver in front of us passed it by, my friend actually whooped with joy. We peeled right in, my friend twisted the keys to turn off the engine, and we sat in a moment of grateful silence.

And then my friend turned to me and said:

“God really said ‘I’ve got you!’ to us right there, huh?”

I thought that was a bizarre thing to say.

I haven’t been able to forget it.

I’m 29 years old and I’ve never heard the audible voice of God.

But I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise. Because I’ve believed in God since I was old enough to speak, and for just as long I’ve wanted to hear him speaking to me. When I was a kid, I did everything I could to give him the right opportunities.

You probably know the things: Breathing deeply, sitting quietly, and trying to listen for as long as I could manage without being distracted. (So about seven minutes.)

Flipping the Bible open, putting my finger down on a random verse, and eagerly reading it with the expectation that God would speak to my immediate decision. (And being confused when he said, “You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.”)

Spinning through radio stations to see if any of the songs said exactly the words I wanted to hear. (And trying to figure out if Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” applied to my high school relationship.)

Do these kinds of things for long enough, and you’ll either convince yourself that everything is a sign or grow blind to the possibility that anything could be. I fell toward the latter. As an adult, I’ve adopted skepticism as my standard, and it’s felt a lot like wisdom.

But sometimes I think it might be the opposite.

Last year I was sitting in traffic on the way to the store, drumming impatiently on my steering wheel and idling behind a gray Toyota Prius, when my eyes drifted to the sticker plastered on the car’s rear bumper.

“JESUS SAVES!” said the sticker.

It was a ham-fisted shout – red letters, bold font, all caps. It felt obnoxious and it actually made me kind of angry. I thought to myself, “Does this person really think that sticker will convince anyone that Jesus saves?”

The light didn’t change. I kept drumming on the steering wheel. And then I read it again.

“JESUS SAVES!”

And I started to cry.

I am far from being an expert in theology. I don’t know how God speaks.

But I think that if Jesus really can save – if he actually is the Word who spoke creation into being and if he really has been raised from the dead to be Lord of the world – then God must know about every time I’ve sat listening in silence, every time I’ve flipped open my Bible to put my finger on a random verse, every time I’ve spun through radio stations hoping to hear his voice.

If it’s true, then he must have known that I would be stuck in traffic behind a gray Toyota Prius with a bumper sticker shouting that Jesus saves.

Maybe everything is a sign.

I’m not saying that every random verse is an edict on your immediate circumstances or that if Lady Gaga comes on the radio it’s proof you and your girlfriend should break up. Mostly, that kind of stuff feels too much like arrogance, like assuming you know everything that someone else is thinking, like putting your own words into God’s mouth. God is a person, after all, and that’s not how relationships work.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable claiming every open parking space as a spoken word from God – but I do want to get better at listening.

That’s what my song “Signs” is about. It comes out this Friday; here’s the pre-save link if you want to mark it on Spotify. I’m excited for you to hear it (and if you want a sneak peek / pretty rough acoustic version, here’s a video I recorded of me playing it in my living room last week).

As always, thanks for reading.

I was driving to King Soopers for groceries this afternoon when I noticed it:

The geese are back.

I didn’t know this when I moved here, but apparently Littleton, Colorado is a go-to destination for wintering geese. Crowds of the waterfowl arrive when the weather gets cold – so many that they take over virtually every open space with sheer numbers that are impressive and disturbing.

They leave in the spring, and for the past six months or so, I hadn’t really thought about them. But today, the birds had returned, lined up like arrogant infantrymen alongside the golf course pond, making the grass as crowded as the sand in the summer at Rehoboth Beach.

So, I apologize in advance; this week’s post is going to be a rant, because I don’t like geese.

Let’s start with the obvious: Geese poop a lot.

There’s no better way to say that. I tried three different sentences and they all came back to the same thing.

Consequently, geese are a nightmare for sidewalks and shoes. That’s very important to note, but it’s not the only reason I don’t like them.

No, here’s the real reason I don’t like geese: I’m inclined to anthropomorphize animals, and based on the qualities I attribute (with total fairness) to geese, I’m certain they would make bad people.

Watch a goose and you’ll see.

They’re arrogant. They’re mean. They have two moods: They’re either utterly apathetic or in a froth-beaked, self-righteous hubbub about something. There’s no in between.

I admit that there’s a certain nobility to geese, but it’s the haughty nobility of the rich kid who only wears name-brand clothing and throws a fit when their teacher gives them a B-minus or their mom doesn’t let them drive the family Tesla.

Shoot, if geese drove cars, they’d be the person who crawls 40 miles per hour on the highway, trying to use voice-to-text to send their friend an emoji while oblivious to the traffic around them. But they’d also be the person who uses the horn every time they merge and rolls down the window at stoplights to yell at the old woman they think cut them off.

Fortunately, geese don’t drive cars.

But they do walk with infuriating slowness across the road in front of mine, especially when I’m six minutes late. Sometimes I make eye contact with them to communicate my displeasure, and even though they don’t have lips, I swear they smile.

I’m not the only one who knows that geese must be dealt with.

Alli and I have noticed a van parked on a side street in Littleton. It’s painted plain white, and on the side of it, marked in a black font that I think is Comic Sans, are two words: “Geese Control.”

I’ve always loved the marketing concept, but I used to wonder what was inside the van. A scarecrow? Air horns? A flamethrower?

Then, one day while we were walking by, the door of the adjacent house opened and three large dogs sprang out. They bounded to the vehicle, tongues lolling, and an old man ambled after them, sliding open the side door of the van so they could jump in.

Before he swung it closed, I saw the dogs frolicking on the empty floor, yipping with the joyful energy of creatures going to fulfill a great purpose.

I regret to tell you that I haven’t seen that crew in action.

But I’m glad to tell you this:

I have seen a retriever let off its leash at Baker Park at 6:30 in the morning, when the mist rising from the damp ground hid a sleeping flock of geese from the gaze of the dog’s owner.

And I remember the moment when that dog, after a few moments of snuffling through the grass, raised it’s head and sighted the birds.

There was a millisecond of stillness.

Then, pandemonium.

The dog rushed headlong into the heart of the flock. Its owner, taken by surprise, scrambled belatedly after it, shouting futile commands and making furious, unseen gestures for a halt in the direction of the dog’s hindquarters.

Whether from the noise of the human or from some animal-kingdom ability to sense danger, the geese were roused in time, and they scattered in shock, chattering indignantly.

None were caught.

I watched as the dog’s owner stooped in relief, hands on knees, huffing. The dog bounded back and forth across the empty grass, panting with the elation of the chase.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen more joy on a creature’s face.

It was beautiful.

I feel a tiny modicum of that dog’s joy when the geese leave Littleton each spring. For now, though, I’ll put up with them.

After all, geese are creatures, too. I know that, in spite of their apparent arrogance, they’re just animals, and that for all of their noise and poop, they’re not doing anything awful.

They’re just being geese. It’s what they do.

But I won’t lie to you.

I still hope that this winter, I’ll get to see “Geese Control” fulfill its high calling.

-Jon

Update on Music Stuff

Little news: I’ve switched this email (and my blog) over to Substack. I’ve been wanting to try the platform out for a while, and this week I decided to go for it. Hopefully there’s not a big difference, but lmk if anything looks weird.

Big news: I’ve scheduled a song for release on November 11th.

It was an adrenaline rush pushing the “Submit” button.

I told you the song was going to be called “Prius”, but I last-minute changed the name to “Signs”, mostly because I didn’t want the cover art to be a picture of a Prius (that would’ve been weird, right?).

Next week, as prep for the release, I’ll probably write a serious post about the story behind the song, and I probably won’t even say the word “geese” once.

Talk soon. As always, thanks for reading.

I've always hated fall.

On the surface, sure, it's a great season. The weather, at least in Denver and Maryland, is perfect: Most days are cool, crisp, sunny. The trees light up like fireworks. Even the commercial components of the season are above-average; you've got Halloween candy and sweater-weather stuff and pumpkin-spice-whatever, which I actually kind of like even though I pretend not to. And I haven't even mentioned that fall means football, which I love (although, for Pittsburgh fans this year, that feature has been more of a drawback).

But, in spite of all that's good about fall, I hate the season because it scares me.

I've always had this fatalistic thing where, as I'm in the middle of enjoying something, I start to dread its end.

When I was in elementary school, I used to work myself up in knots during summer break, obsessing over the fact that within a month I'd be back in school. When Alli and I find a TV show that we like, I immediately count out how many episodes we have left until the experience is over. When the weather cools and the leaves turn, all I can see is winter.

I know it's cliché to say this, but the tragedy of time is that every good thing ends. I think the ache of that is part of what it means to have eternity in the human heart, and I think fall is the essence of that feeling.

Alli and I went hiking last weekend at Roxborough State Park.

Roxborough State Park is a little reserve right over the first ridge of the foothills, and for Colorado, it's a kind of an understated place. It's small. It's nowhere near as breathtaking as the peaks a few miles farther into the mountains.

But on October 15, 2022 in the late afternoon, that park was a glimpse into some other world. The sun was just starting to set across an egg-blue sky, and against the slopes of the hills and the red of the rocks, the dying yellow leaves of the cottonwood trees were catching the light, glittering a fragile, glowing gold. We walked a slow three miles through the brush, watching the wind weave through wild grass, listening to the last birds of the year, marveling that the moment existed. It felt like looking at eternity.

In a couple weeks, the park will be brown and gray, and the birds will be gone, and there won't be any leaves left.

I don't think I'll ever like fall. It's too much like death.

But I think I probably need it, anyway.

I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but I'm about a fourth of the way through Book Nine of Robert Jordan's marathon of a fantasy series, The Wheel of Time.

I'm ashamed to admit it because I don't want to admit to myself (or to you) that I'm a nerd.

But, let's be real: I've read eight books that have titles like A Crown of Swords and The Dragon Reborn and The Path of Daggers and feature covers like this:

And, to make matters even worse, I'm planning on reading five more of these guys to finish out the 14-book saga.

The data is pretty clear: If I'm not a nerd, I'm doing a very good impression of one.

Which is totally fine, I guess, except that it doesn't quite fit with my self-image of "moderately athletic and mostly cool." That disconnect leads to cognitive dissonance, which leads to my mild shame.

But enough about my issues; I gave enough space to those last week. Treat all that's above as an aside, and bear with me as I get to my main point today:

The Wheel of Time is fascinating.

I'm not necessarily talking about the story itself; I'd rate the story as "decent," which I guess is kind of sad considering the amount of time I've put into reading it.

No, what I think is more fascinating is how The Wheel of Time fits into this very narrow cultural space after Tolkien and before almost everyone else.

Tolkien, for those of you who have avoided Jeff Bezos' omnipresent ads and every work of fiction since 1950, is the guy who wrote The Lord of the Rings. Pretty much everyone loves The Lord of the Rings. There are many, many reasons for that, but I think one of them is the series' powerful portrayal of good and evil.

There's no ambiguity to the morality of Middle Earth. Good is really good. The books' friendships (especially the bond between Frodo and Sam) are heartwarming. The hobbits' Shire is idyllic. The story's heroes are noble.

And evil is really evil. Mordor, the home of the villain, is a smoking, ash-shrouded wasteland. The Ring literally turns Gollum into a monster.

Our world isn't so black and white, of course. Most of our moral choices are muddied to a dull, blended gray. But in Tolkien's world, the muddy glass of water has settled and the dirt is distinct. Reality has been distilled so that goodness literally glows and evil is visibly monstrous. It's compelling. It's beautiful.

It's also a wonderful setup for subversion.

George R.R. Martin's incredible Game of Thrones series is the most popular example of this; Martin takes the idea of Middle Earth and flips it on its head. There aren't good guys and bad guys in his world, at least in any meaningful sense. The only character who might purely be a hero (Ned Stark) is killed off before the first book gets close to its climax, and in what became the most famous television scene of the past 20 years, the character closest in line to that claim (Robb Stark) dies in horrific fashion not long after.

Martin's world of Westeros is great.

But it's great largely because it plays over and against the expectations that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings created. Lacking The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones would be a top-class punchline without the setup – probably still brilliant, but fewer people would get it.

And that brings me back to The Wheel of Time.

Here's why I've found it fascinating: Like Martin, Robert Jordan draws heavily on themes established (or, more accurately, re-popularized) by Tolkien. But, unlike Martin (or later writers like Brandon Sanderson), Robert Jordan isn't flipping those scripts or subverting them. Instead, he's trying to expand them.

I mean that first in a literal sense. Tolkien's series is three books (five, if you're generous and count The Hobbit and The Silmarillion). Jordan's is an utterly overwhelming 14, even before you throw in the extra stuff. At least in terms of word count, it's massive.

But I also mean it in the sense that Jordan doesn't shy away from Tolkien's thematic templates. He's early enough that he actually leans further into them. There are plenty of illustrations, but a few of the most notable are that the hero is from a small town conspicuously similar to The Shire, the evil creatures hunting him are reminiscent of Ring wraiths and orcs, and the good guys are fighting for "The Light" while the bad guys are fighting for "The Dark One".

It's all derivative of typical fantasy tropes. It's generally entertaining enough that I don't mind (too much, at least). And here's why I think it works:

The first Wheel of Time book was published in 1990.

So, after Tolkien, but before Game of Thrones, Assassin's Apprentice, and Harry Potter.

It was a bestseller.

I think, if someone published something similar today, it'd be relegated to the third page of Amazon search results. Because, at this point, too much ground has been tread, and the tropes are tired out. TV shows like Andor (which challenges classic Star Wars expectations) and She Hulk (which remakes the stakes of typical Marvel fare) are indicative of this same phenomenon: We've seen enough heroes' journeys to weary of being put through the same old steps.

Which is why it's been so interesting going back to them.

A Wendell Berry sentiment captures the feeling: "I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There’s no distinction between the tree and its history."

Berry is talking about the through-lines in his own writing, but his point is applicable to any art (and, probably, to anything at all): Everything is a reaction, an outcome from an input, a response to something else.

Without the "something else," there's nothing, and no chance of understanding it, either.

I've been frustrated with The Wheel of Time for its distorted depictions of female characters, for its questionable plot points, and for Jordan's ham-fisted repetition of the same motifs over thousands (and thousands, and thousands) of words.

But I've loved The Wheel of Time for its place in fantasy's through-line.

It's inextricable from what came after it, just as it owes everything to what came before it. McDonald leads to Tolkien, who leads to Jordan, who gives way to Hobb, to Martin, to Rowling, to Sanderson, to Bardugo, to whoever else, forever.

Art is beautiful.

I'm a nerd.

I'll see you next week.

We had Parents' Night at youth group this past week.

A bunch of church parents showed up to see what the heck it is that happens on Sunday nights. This meant that the two hours I normally spend suppressing my competitive urge so I can peacefully coexist in group games with sixth graders were twice as awkward as usual.

Not only did I have to keep up my charade of having energy and liking memes to impress the kids, I also had to add layers of wisdom, competency, and responsibility to offer their parents peace of mind. In total, the role of Small Group Leader on Parents' Night required a nuanced, multi-faceted performance that I think would've been better delivered by a more experienced actor. (Joel Stafford comes to mind.)

I did the best I could.

I've got issues.

For real, I have issues. Driving home from Parents' Night, I was reflecting on how badly I want everyone to like me, and also on how it's literally impossible to have everyone like you all of the time. It's a sad fact of existence: Sometimes, especially on the days you get out of bed, the exact thing that will make one person like you will make another person dislike you. Kick a basketball at the gym ceiling with a sixth grader and you're impressive; kick a basketball at the gym ceiling while their parent is watching and you're a hazard to church property.

It's exhausting.

I'm hoping to grow out of this whole thing soon. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that I know I'm not alone in it. If I've learned two things being a youth group leader, they are 1) that kids are remarkably insecure, and 2) that encouragement is remarkably easy.

To encourage a kid doesn't require any sort of special skill or cleverness. It doesn't require you to be cool, or to like memes, or even to be particularly competent. It just requires that you engage with a thing the kid cares about and point out ways the kid is good.

At our youth group's winter retreat last year, I watched a leader tell an underclassman with direct, cheerful seriousness that they were likable, regardless of what anyone at school said. Six months later, during a small group session, I was taken aback to hear the student echo the conversation: "Sometimes I try really hard to be liked, but I know that I don't need to, because Kyle told me I'm likable." Criticism certainly sticks with us, but so does affirmation, especially from people we trust.

We're all kids at heart. The antidote for our insecurity is love.

This is the great news of the Gospel, of course, and it's the antidote for the whole human condition: that we are loved, and liked, too. In spite of the self-doubt we chew on in our minds, the roles we work so hard to play, and our real and serious shortcomings, we've already made it. God looks at us and sees good.

He likes us.

I know this is probably not a good reason to start dominating sixth graders in dodgeball, but I think it's the perfect reason to stop caring so much about what other people think.

I'm trying. Even on Parents' Night.

Two weeks ago, I promised to give you an update on my music.

You may have noticed that, last week, I failed to keep that promise.

You also may not have noticed (and, let's be real, that second option is by far the more likely one). Either way, I'm sitting down to write this week's post with the knowledge that I didn't write one last week. I'm only slightly sorry. Last week, I was in Nashville with my brothers, and I was too busy losing 18 straight games of pickle ball to think about much else.

Here's what it looked like.

Well, that's what it looked like when Tim and Tom played. When I played, it looked like one of my brothers hitting the second shot of the rally past me with metronomic consistency. (I'm not being hyperbolically self-deprecating when I say I lost 18 straight games.)

(Yeah I'm slightly bitter.)

Anyway, this week, I'm going to try and belatedly keep my promise by telling you where things stand with with my music.

The only problem is that I'm not quite sure where things stand.

I guess I'll start at the beginning.

Here's the very first voice note version of the song I've worked on for the past month. It's called "Haze".

Like most of the songs I write, "Haze" is based on everyday experiences that I've worked overly hard to wring metaphor from. I wrote it in the early months of 2021, pretty shortly after moving to Denver, and I sang the version embedded here around that time, sitting in our bedroom on a winter night with my phone propped against a book so that the speaker was facing in the right direction.

That season, those first months after our move from Frederick to Denver, was probably the hardest one that Alli and I have experienced in our five years of marriage.

To a degree, we both felt overwhelmed – Alli from trying to adapt to grad school, me from trying to meet relational needs within the new normal of being my company's only remote employee. I also had a keen sense that time was passing. I felt distant from my family, more so when my uncle was diagnosed with cancer. Under everything, I felt a discomfiting certainty that, despite the fresh start we'd gained in moving, things in the world and in our lives were just gradually getting worse.

Probably the simplest way to say it is that we felt lonely.

I wrote the song to help myself believe what I think is a true hope: That things really are bad, but that somehow, they really will be better – and that it's not only in spite of, but through the downhill decay of death that God redeems all things.

Here are the lyrics:

The ash was falling from the sky into your hair
And there was diesel smoke from 18-wheelers hanging in the air
So we couldn't see the mountains
Through the haze out to the west
Spending our days just south of Denver
Looking for ways to catch some breath

Do you ever feel like you're going downhill?
Do you?
I've been hoping at the bottom of the valley there's a river
Running through
Going downhill, too

I called my brother on the East Coast after dark
He said "Knowing that you're dying's gotta be the hardest part"
I hope these endings all
Are someday gonna end
And when the fire finally burns out
There will still be something left

Do you ever feel like you're going downhill?
Do you?
I've been hoping at the bottom of the valley there's a river
Running through
Going downhill, too

I hope someday that all this haze will disappear
And we will finally see the mountains
After all the smoke has cleared
And we will drink from holy water
And the world will be made new
But until then
We're going downhill, too

Do you ever feel like you're going downhill?
Do you?
I've been hoping at the bottom of the valley there's a river
Running through
Going downhill, too

I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I've never loved this song.

I wrote it quickly one night after talking to my brother Tim on the phone – we spoke about getting older and about our Uncle Larry, who was dying. My immediate impression was that the song was an honest expression of my feelings, but also a lesser version of a song I'd written before. Still, I sent the voice memo up there to Tom, and when he told me he liked it, it made me like it a little more.

So, this summer, when I committed to creating art again, it felt like a reasonable first song to record: I liked it enough that I could get excited about working on it, but not so much that I'd be too disappointed if my first attempt at making music in three years produced a mediocre recording. I was giving myself room for error; I worked on "Haze" with the thought that I wasn't firing my favorite shot first.

And that brings me to this kind of sad, kind of funny place. I just don't like the version of "Haze" that I've made.

I'm not going to show it to you. I spent like 40 hours recording it, and all of the time shows in an unflattering way. My friend Dan Busche did a nice job of mixing my efforts, but still – the track is overproduced without quite capturing the core of the song.

And so, instead of pushing it out to sink, I'm going to try to salvage it. I'm not sure if I'll ever get it to a place that I love, but I'm reasonably confident I can get it to a place where I don't cringe listening to it.

All of this is to say: You're going to have to wait a little longer to hear new music from me. I'm sorry.

I'll end with two encouraging thoughts.

First, the good news is that I've finished tracking a second song, and I think it's better. It's called "Prius" and it's much simpler production-wise; I tried to do less with the track, and the result is that I like it a lot more.

Second, "Haze" is, at its heart, a song about holding to future hope in the face of a failing world.

So it's kinda fitting to hold to hope in the face of a failing song, right?

Yeah, I know. It's a stretch. I told you I have a tendency to work overly hard at wringing out metaphors.

Thanks for bearing with me.

There’s a scene in The Dark Knight Rises that pretty accurately portrays what it’s like to be a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It’s right after Batman’s first confrontation with the movie’s villain, Bane – the fight during which Bruce Wayne gets tossed around like a ragdoll before Bane finally, with sickeningly casual ease, snaps his back like a branch across his knee. In the aftermath, Bruce is dragged off to be dumped into a prison somewhere past the ends of the earth; Bane follows him there to say a few words.

Ostensibly, Bane wants to gloat. Also, I’m pretty sure Christopher Nolan wanted to articulate the point of Batman’s punishment as concretely as possible, so that nobody would miss the metaphor.

It’s a very simple metaphor: The prison is, almost literally, a pit of despair. But it’s an open pit of despair.

At the top of the pit, the sunlight twinkles like the light at the end of a tunnel, and inmates are told that, if they can climb the walls, they can leave. Their freedom is visible – but of course, the cruel caveat is that the prisoners aren’t really free. The promise of freedom is just a mockery of the truth: Anyone can envision it, but nobody can make the climb.

(Well, almost nobody, but you get the point.)

And that’s where the scene takes place. Bane leans over Bruce’s broken body, and, with a smug disregard for the subtlety of metaphor, tells him exactly why he’s in the prison.

“Where am I?” Bruce asks, holding to the edge of consciousness and directing his question up at the looming Bane.

“Home,” Bane replies, “where I learned the truth about despair, as will you. There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth.”

He pauses, and if he’s capable of facial expressions beneath that old-time-radiator mask, he probably smiles. Then he delivers the punchline:

“Hope.”

Hope.

For most of my life, the Pittsburgh Pirates have been bad.

And to call them bad is to be generous.

I was born the son of a Pirates fan in November of 1992. I took my first breath about a month after the Braves’ Sid Bream beat home a mediocre throw from our then-left-fielder Barry Bonds, snapping the Pirates season short of the World Series by a margin of milliseconds. In the aftermath, Bonds left Pittsburgh to sign with San Francisco; he’d go on to develop a head the size of a beach ball and hit a billion home runs. The Pirates would go on to cut up their roster for a rebuild and make my dad really upset.

They had entered the pit of despair.

They lost 87 games the next year. They kept losing for a long time.

In fact, the Pirates would go on to have 20 consecutive losing seasons. It’s a simultaneously disturbing and impressive stretch of futility that happens to be a record for major sports franchises in the United States. It spanned the first 21 years of my life, and I hope, for the sake of unborn generations, that it’s never broken.

But baseball is intrinsically hopeful. It starts in the spring, and there’s always next year. You can forever see the light at the top of the pit.

So, despite the fact that I spent the first two decades of my life watching the Pirates lose with the regularity of the Earth’s rotation, I found myself sucked into my father’s fandom. I tracked box scores; I collected baseball cards; I found favorite players before they were traded away or lost to free agency. By the time I was 20 years old, I knew that the sun always rises and sets, the seasons always change, and the Pirates always lose more than 81 games.

And then, in 2013, things changed.

I was in college at the time, and I remember starting the fall semester with a feeling of uneasy optimism. For the few preceding summers, the Pirates had shown promise, carrying winning records into the second half of seasons before crumbling, inevitably, into losing streaks and irrelevance. We fans knew how things went. Winning was always within reach, but we were always poised for the hammer to fall.

But we were also burdened with hope, because that year, things felt different. For the first time in my lifetime, the Pirates had a true superstar in Andrew McCutchen. He batted .312, hit 21 home runs, and stole 27 bases. He had a cool nickname. He had awesome hair. He wasn’t just good for a Pirate; he was good. In 2013, he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award, and the Pirates followed his lead. Finally, on September 3rd, the team beat the Brewers for their 81st victory, guaranteeing that they’d have their first non-losing season in two decades. 

It felt like the earth had stopped turning.

Of course, it kept turning. The Pirates didn’t win their division (the Cardinals did – some things really never change), but they did win the Wild Card game. Then they went to St. Louis, where they took an improbable 2-1 lead in the best-of-five National League Divisional Series. My dad and I dropped everything to make it to Game 4 in Pittsburgh, where the Pirates had a chance to clinch the series. Instead, they ended up falling quietly, smothered with emotionless efficiency by Cardinal’s right-hander Michael Wacha over the course of a boring game that never really gave us anything to cheer about.

They ended up losing Game 5, too, snapping any fairy tale hopes. And that was about it. While they were a better team in 2014 and 2015, they haven’t won another playoff game since. In 2016, they lost 83 games. In 2018, they traded McCutchen.

Which brings us to today.

A couple of years ago, at the unfortunate nadir of the most recent losing-season streak, Bob Nutting, the Pirates’ tight-fisted owner, fired his entire front office – the GM, the manager, the ball boys, everyone. It was about the only thing he’s done that earned the fanbase’s approval, and it led to the hiring of Ben Cherington (who played a hand in building Boston’s championship teams) and a spark of public optimism that maybe, just maybe, more winning was possible.

The new management team brought in a seemingly-sensible plan. They traded veterans for prospects. They drafted at the top of the board. They stocked the farm system with high-ceiling guys. And this was supposed to be the year things started to turn for the better.

But the earth’s still spinning. Things have gotten worse.

Instead of showing improvement, this year’s team clinched a losing season with embarrassing promptness at the start of September. They’ve been so bad that opposing teams’ announcers have mocked them for rolling out a lineup that’s a “hodgepodge of nothingness”. They’ve made blooper-reel errors that casual baseball fans didn’t even know were logistically possible.

It’s bad. The Pittsburgh sports news outlet I follow is keeping track of how the team needs to finish to avoid the shame of 100 losses. As of this writing, they need to go 8-10 down the stretch – and based on their current winning percentage, it’ll be close. I think they’ll probably hit the mark.

But still.

Even though the Pirates haven’t won a playoff series in my lifetime, I can envision what it might look like if they did. They have a pitcher, Mitch Keller, who’s really putting it together this year. They have a few rookies who seem really good, including a 6-foot-7 unicorn-shortstop named Oneil Cruz who just hit the hardest ball ever recorded at 122.4 MPH. Sure, he has 109 strikeouts and he’s batting .220, but he’s hit 15 home runs, too.

I still read the game stories. I can always see the sun just above the pit.

After 29 years, I don’t really know if that’s a noble form of perseverance or a useless waste of my time.

But I do know that, in The Dark Knight rises, Bane was wrong. Ultimately, that light at the top of the pit really was the way out. Because, while hope can be a poison – while it can torture you, mock you, rip the ground out from under you and leave you grasping at air – it’s also the only thing that can save you.

I’m being overdramatic, of course. I know baseball’s not that important.

But man. I sure hope the Pirates win next year.

I wrote my first song in fourth grade while playing with Legos.

Here's how it happened, as best as I remember it: I put about five Lego heads on top of each other and snapped three pairs of Lego pants together, then marched the mutant thing around my little Lego town singing six words.

"He's just a guy, just a guy, just an ordinary guy
Just a guy, just a guy, just a guy."

As a 10-year-old, I thought that was hilarious, and I thought the melody was pretty freaking catchy, too. (Still do, to be honest. I'm literally humming it as I write this, and to my 29-year-old ears it's still a bop.)

It's harder for me to write songs, now. I think there are a few reasons for that – some intrinsic to me, some part of the world I'm living in.

For example, have you ever noticed how guardedly ironic the internet is?

Last week, my friend sent me The New Yorker's piece on Ted Williams' last home game.

You should read it. It's like digging up a time capsule. It's lyrical. It's a little bit funny, but it comes across as self-assured, almost pretentious, as if John Updike, the author, unashamedly believed that what he was writing and witnessing mattered. It was published in 1960, when journalism was still, for the most part, a one-way media format.

I think the piece would've been written differently today. In the era of endless comment sections and echoing Twitter threads, I think Updike probably would've struck a more ironic tone. He definitely would've used fewer big words.

I don't know for sure, but I imagine being a sports journalist in 1960 was similar to Bob Ross' work painting in a TV studio; the work was always for the public, but the public was safely removed to the other side of the screen. People had fewer direct lines of feedback, and so had less direct impact on the work. Creators felt a little more isolated, maybe.

Today, we're all crowded into the studio with the painter: "Oh, you put that happy little cloud in the wrong place. It'd look better higher up. And it should've been pink."

In modern media, making the public a part of the process is a part of the product.

There's good and bad to this, but I think one repercussion is that many of us feel the need to add caveats to what we create. Because we know that we're never alone – that anything we make can be held up and examined from every angle – we cloak ourselves in self-awareness and sarcasm. We preempt criticism by making it clear we were never totally serious in the first place.

I'm not talking about politics or "cancel culture" or anything like that, really. I'm just talking about sincerity. Sincerity is vulnerable. Vulnerability requires intimacy. The internet is unprecedentedly public, and that's one reason it's remarkably insincere.

And that's part of why it's harder for me to write songs, now, I think.

But it's probably mostly an excuse.

We've only had the internet for a couple of decades, but it's always been human nature to care too much about what other people think. More to the point, it's always been my nature; I care too much about what other people think.

I wish I didn't. I want to write like I did when I was a kid. I interviewed Jon Foreman last year, and he said something that stuck with me – as a writer, you should always have the voice of a critic and a child in your head. Here's how he put it:

"The critic is always nitpicking and saying, “Oh, that sounds like the Beatles. That sucks. That’s a horrible topic for a song. And the child is full of this wide-eyed wonder that thinks, 'Let’s write a song about surfboards. Oh my gosh! Peanut butter and jelly is awesome. Let’s write a song about it!'

"And I think that you have to be able to present yourself to both of them as you’re writing the song. That conversation is where good songs come from."

That idea seems true to me, and I wish I could listen to the child more often. Don't get me wrong: I don't want to write the same songs I did when I was 10. That'd be super weird.

But I do want to write with something of the same spirit. I want to create stuff with the world-wise taste of the critic, yeah, but also with the wide-eyed innocence of the kid playing with Legos. It's a hard balance, but it's worth trying to walk it.

Two years and a month ago, Alli and I moved from Maryland to Colorado.

We moved so that Alli could go to grad school (she's entering her third year of Denver Seminary's Clinical Mental Health Counseling program) and we also moved because we couldn't really help it. We'd talked about moving to Denver for the first three years of our marriage, and while we'd always struggled to commit to anything definite, the idea gathered gravity in our heads until the outcome became inevitable. There was a momentum to our leaving home that, eventually, carried us away.

Put another way: There is a kind of person who decisively jumps from the high dive. Alli and I are not that kind of person. But we will hesitantly climb the steps to the water slide and bring ourselves to go down, getting elbow burns from bracing against the edges only to end up in the same place.

As you might guess, we have a hard time choosing restaurants.

But in July of 2020, we packed up and gave in. I think that, subconsciously, I viewed the move to Denver as an opportunity to get unstuck. If you'd asked me then, I wouldn't have told you that I was stuck, exactly – I'd been working at a marketing company I really liked with people that I loved – but I might've admitted to a vague feeling that I needed to do something else.

In Colorado, that vague feeling became a sharp bite.

Work got harder. Most of the things I had loved about the job (time with my friends in the office) were taken away, while the things I didn't love about it (writing technical white papers for data replication companies) became the bulk of my days. I was the only remote employee; I'd log onto a Zoom call every morning at 7am Mountain Time, get my face projected onto a screen in the office for everyone else to observe, and try my best to hear what the seven people in the room were saying. I could never really hear what they were saying.

It was nobody's fault. It was my fault, maybe, for moving. It made me anxious.

To cope, during our first few months in Denver, I'd regularly go on runs after work. Behind the seminary campus, there's a pretty little path that follows the Platte river back through cottonwood trees and dry fields of yellow grass. Three(ish) times a week, I'd run three(ish) miles on it – not very fast, but fast enough to leave behind a small bit of the workday tension, and more than fast enough to leave my lungs feeling like crumpled grocery bags trying to suck in the thin mountain air.

There was a particularly hard day at work. Afterward, I went for a run on that path. I went slower. The sun was starting to fall to the west, blurring the sharpness of the mountains until they became vague, purple, towering silhouettes, skewing red and gold light and stretching my own shadow to cartoonish proportions ahead of me. I felt something in chest loosen. I felt a strange closeness to God.

I asked him a question.

"God, what do you want me to do?"

"I want you to write and make music," he said.

At least, I think he said that.

In the moment, it felt true and certain. It rang in my heart with a serious sort of resonance that made me want to cry. But then I finished my run, climbed up the concrete stairs, and shut the apartment door on the shimmering remains of the sunset, and immediately I was afraid that I'd answered my own question with the words I'd wanted to hear.

A year later, I quit my job.

Again, it felt like the inevitable outcome of a series of indecisive thoughts and actions, like squeaking painfully down a water side into the deep end. And yeah, that metaphor is accurate; this stage has been the deep end. Since quitting, I've been running my own music marketing business, and there have been periods where it's felt like drowning. This spring, I thought I might need to look for another job to make rent. But things are getting better.

I undersold that. Actually, as I write this, things are very good – against odds, we're pretty financially secure, and things have only been trending upward. Things are so good that I now have free time and have lost the excuse of busyness.

I have no illusions that this will last forever. This moment in time feels like an outrageous gift. It also feels like a push.

"I want you to write and make music."

Right before I quit my job, I had a conversation with a friend, asking him to talk through my decision with me and weigh the factors I was facing. I won't rehash everything, but a lot of it came down to this: I was worried that, in quitting, I'd be caving to my selfishness. I'd be pursuing my own thing, and in doing so, I'd be abandoning my friends at my company and putting my wife's security at risk.

My friend said something like this: "You know, I'm sure you're right. I'm sure that there is some selfishness in your desire to quit. But I don't think that's the core of it. I think that God gives us good desires, too."

"Don't be afraid to follow them."

This summer, I decided to write and make music.

Here's the plan:

I'm going to try to write one post like this each week. I don't know if that schedule will be realistic, and I don't know what these posts will turn into (note to self: probably try and make the next one shorter) – but I do know I'm going to write. (And hey, if you want to read, you can sign up using the form below.)

I'm also going to create and release one song each month. I've finished the first one – I should have it out sometime in September – and I've just started the second one. Honestly, I don't have high hopes for the quality of the instrumentation or production. But I can't stop writing songs. And the only way to get better at making music is to make music, so I'm going to do that.

Really, I've been meaning to do this stuff for the last two years.

Life is funny. There's a momentum to it, a feeling of inevitability, a sense that as we eke up the ladder step by step, we can buy enough time to see things coming. But still, we never get used to the cold plunge into deep water. For all of our desire for control, we're never safe.

Thank God for the push, right?