I've been meaning to write this for two years.

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?