We scrapped and saved enough for a meager down payment during those first two years of marriage, and we were ready to buy a house and settle down somewhere. We just weren’t exactly sure where.

By the time the new year rolled around, in early 2016, we had two options: 1) I could accept a new role with expanded responsibilities at Lifeway, or 2) we could begin looking for ministry opportunities closer to home, somewhere around the Midwest (our original plan).

After some consideration, we decided to take the new opportunity at Lifeway and stay put in Middle Tennessee for at least a little while longer. We decided we would buy a home and put real roots down. Our two-year stint in the South would be extended…for at least a little bit.

The question we had to answer once we decided to stick around was pretty simple: where can we afford a house that won’t require an extensive remodel?

The Smiths

At the time, we were living in an apartment in Hermitage, an area of Nashville just east of downtown—close to the airport and the Opry Mills Mall area. It wasn’t a bad area, but we didn’t particularly love it either. We also just didn’t have great community. A lot of our best friends that we had made through work or otherwise weren’t within a 20-minute drive of where we were living. As a newlywed couple in a completely new place, we were watching a lot of Netflix and not getting together with friends very much.

Earlier in 2015—I don’t remember exactly when—Susie and I went to coffee with Brandon and Christa Smith in Nashville. They were considering a move to Nashville so Brandon could help lead the launch of the Christian Standard Bible, but they were unsure about moving to a place they had never lived and so far away from family. Brandon and I had become friends through bantering on Twitter—as you do—and so when they were in town for one of Brandon’s interviews, we got together with them to talk about our experience as transplants in Nashville far away from home.

The Smiths eventually moved to Nashville in 2015. They had us over for dinner in the fall of 2015, just a few days before our terrible wreck on I-65, and were singing the praises of this college town they settled in called Murfreesboro, about 30 miles southeast of downtown Nashville. I was aware of the city, but it wasn’t really on my radar when we were talking about places to settle down until we were talking to the Smiths about it.

So, when we began seriously looking at houses in the spring of 2016, we considered Murfreesboro. I had to convince Susie to consider the suburb, mostly because it would significantly increase our commute time to the city—which was a worthy concern, to be sure. We had been driving about 15-20 minutes each way from our apartment to our offices in downtown Nashville, and this move would triple that commute time (on a good day).

Eventually, based on our new friends the Smiths living in Murfreesboro1 and the fact that Murfreesboro more and better houses available in our budget range, I was able to convince Susie that we should zero in on Murfreesboro.

The Hunt

I recognize that “the housing market” has been “kinda crazy” in a lot of places for a long time for a lot of reasons. But the housing market in the Nashville area in the spring of 2016 was unlike anything I knew could actually happen in a housing market. Houses were not hitting listing websites before they were being snatched up by all manner of aspiring renovators, Airbnb entrepreneurs, and transplants from around the country.

Buyers were paying all closing costs. Houses were being bid up beyond their listing prices by tens of thousands of dollars. It was bananas. We could barely go look at houses before they would be sold and unavailable. And even if we could go see a house that was actually still on the market, we wondered if we would be able to compete in any sort of bidding war that would almost certainly ensue.

The Nashville area was hot.

Eventually in March, we made the drive down to Murfreesboro after work one day and looked at something like three or four houses. After not loving any of the ones we saw initially—”Great bedrooms, tiny shared space”; “Lovely house, no yard”; etc.—our realtor suggested we look at just one more house. I remember being pretty fed up and ready to go home for the night. It was Friday and we had some West Wing to binge back at our apartment. But we went the last house.

We walked through the house. We loved it. We thought it was the perfect starter home. But it was a solid 10% more than the top of our “budget range.”2 We had no clue if we could make it work financially, let alone if it would still be available by the time we got back to our apartment to formally make an offer.

Given the nature of the market, we knew we had to make a decision fast.

The house went on the market on Friday morning, March 4, 2016 at 8am. We toured the house around 4pm. We put an offer in by 8pm.3 The offer was accepted by 8am Saturday morning.

We were moving to Murfreesboro.

The Move

We moved to Murfreesboro on Saturday, April 23, 2026. Some family and a handful of friends from the Hermitage area were kind enough to help us load the truck at our apartment. We knew we had some friends waiting for us to help us unload in Murfreesboro, but we didn’t really know.

It took just a touch less than an hour to get from our apartment to our new home—which we had spent painting much of the weekend before our move.4

Not long after we arrived with the moving truck and our cars full of everything we owned, still plagued by the smoke smell of our next-door neighbors in the apartment, we were greeted by the handful of friends we knew would be meeting us at the house—the Smiths, Trevin, Aaron, and a couple others.

What we didn’t realize is that the Smiths had invited about a dozen other people from their church to help us move into the house. Susie and I were floored. We had never met these people in our lives, and they were taking orders from Susie and me about where to put all manner of furniture and boxes. Susie often says when we talk about the move, “All I know is that I never lifted a box.”

They had us all moved into the house in under two hours, as I recall, aside from a couple of pieces of furniture we were letting air out in the front yard to keep from bringing the stale smell of secondhand cigarette smoke into our perfect, beautiful new home—a gift we inherited from our apartment neigbors.

We figured we were going to check out the Smiths’ church among others, once we moved to town. But after the church provided a small army to help us move in and get the house all set up, we weren’t sure we’d ever even check out another church.5

The Last Decade

As of last Thursday, we’ve been in our house for 10 years. The “perfect starter home” has become the home we may not ever leave, and not just because we have a primo mortgage rate.

We never planned to settle down in Middle Tennessee. Susie and I are simple midwestern folks through-and-through. Pass the ranch. Yes, for the pizza.

But we love the city of Murfreesboro and the people with whom we get to share it.

Of course there is our church community. We have walked through all kinds of life experiences with the people of our church. In our church family here we see the kindness of God made manifest in so many different ways. We are grateful for a community of brothers and sisters who are tender when they need to be tender and tough when they need to be tough.

The people of our church make me want to be more like Jesus because they point me to him in their words and in their deeds. They steward the gifts and talents God has given them for his glory and others’ good—and my family has been the recipient of that faithful stewardship so many times. We are so grateful for the ways we have been cared for and loved by the people of our church family, and we hope that we have mirrored that care in all the ways we know how.

Beyond our church family, we have been so grateful for the teachers and staff of Maggie’s school, now that she has entered kindergarten. As I’ve written about before, Maggie attends a pretty rigorous public school in our area, and this first year of school has not been without its challenges for both student and parents alike. But the teachers and administrators at Maggie’s school have been so helpful and kind. We have all grown this year, and while we are eagerly looking forward to a break from all the homework, I am excited to see how she continues to be stretched next year in first grade.

On top of all of this, we enjoy so many other blessings.

Maggie and Daisy have been learning music theory and piano from a local teacher since they were just beginning to walk.

The girls have gymnastics teachers they adore.

We walk to a massive city park next to our house multiple times a week where we have informally adopted a pet turtle named Helga (Maggie took her American Girl doll to meet Helga last week).

We are blessed with lovely neighbors, one of whom is named Miss Bonnie. She works at the park and is fighting cancer. Pray for Miss Bonnie if you would. We love mis Bonnie.

We get all manner of birds feeding at our feeders in the backyard, and we’ve become friends with our local Wild Birds Unlimited owners, who are amazing and love seeing our girls cause a ruckus in their store.

We enjoy some incredible Thai food and Middle Eastern food from local, family-owned restaurants on a regular basis.6

We’ve been able to watch teenagers we led in youth group grow up into full-fledged adults. And we have seen those adults to be some of our girls’ favorite people in the world. It’s so sweet.

God has been so good to us and provided us so much more than we could have asked for or imagined.

We are so glad to be home in this place and at this time. We would have never thought to be in Middle Tennessee for this long. And now we can’t think we would ever leave. But we don’t get to plan such things. So for now, we will just be glad to be home, here.

3

I included a heartfelt note to the homeowners about how Susie and I were excited to raise a family in the home. I think it helped.

I won’t post the whole psalm here—you can go read it if you want to read the whole thing—but here are the first 15 verses (with a few of my favorites bolded):

Of David.

Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
be not envious of wrongdoers!
For they will soon fade like the grass
and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the LORD, and do good;
dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the LORD,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Commit your way to the LORD;
trust in him, and he will act.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,
and your justice as the noonday.

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,
over the man who carries out evil devices!

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!
Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
For the evildoers shall be cut off,
but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land.

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more;
though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.
But the meek shall inherit the land
and delight themselves in abundant peace.

The wicked plots against the righteous
and gnashes his teeth at him,
but the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he sees that his day is coming.

The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows
to bring down the poor and needy,
to slay those whose way is upright;
their sword shall enter their own heart,
and their bows shall be broken.

Psalm 37 hit with new force this time around, and I think it took me a minute to figure out why. But honestly, I think it just comes down to two factors:

1. We have no shortage of evils about which to be angry today.

2. We have no shortage of people telling us to be angry at the evil all around us today.

What are you angry about today?

Are you angry about something the President of the United States posted on social media?

Are you angry at some kind of unjust practice you’ve observed in the human resources department in your company?

Are you angry at the lengths to which people will go to deny the sanctity of unborn life?

Are you angry at some arbitrary rule an administrator in your child’s school has decided to enforce out of the blue?

Are you angry at the perpetuation of war in the Middle East?

What are you angry about?

Are you angry about real injustices being committed at a global scale to the detriment of countless people?

Are you angry about the perpetuation of pet peeves that pile up and derail the contentment you’ve found throughout the day?

What is it? Does it feel small and personal? Does it feel big and global? Does it feel within your grasp to affect or totally and frustratingly out of your control?

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t really matter what it is.

The bigger question is this:

Do you have faith that God can handle the object of your anger?

Do you have the faith to suppress your rage, no matter how righteous it may be?

Do you have courage to trust that the God of your salvation is also a God of justice?

To suppress rage is not to be ignoring or uncaring. To suppress rage is to have faith that God is just and good and sovereign.

It isn’t (always) wrong to be angry—“righteous anger” is real. But, sometimes we are angry and wrong at the same time. Sometimes we can be in the wrong even if we are angry about the right things.

But something I gleaned from David in Psalm 37 this time around is that it is never wrong to set aside our rage in favor of faith. It takes immense courage and humility to take whatever rage we have against evildoers—of the local or cosmic variety—and entrust their fates to the God of the universe.

What are you angry about today?

Let go of it and entrust it to the God of perfect justice.

Have the courage to turn your fists into open hands that are ready to receive the goodness of God.

Some think AI is a wonderful technological advancement that will lead to unmatched productivity and economic growth, leading us into some sort of new industrial age of wealth, prosperity, and freedom.

Others think AI is a scourge on society, a threat to jobs that will drive further disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and that it has the ability to demolish much of what it means to live a fulfilling live as a finite being on an amazing planet in an infinite universe.

Most, it seems, find themselves someplace in the middle of these two poles, perhaps seeing some value of AI’s ability to automate parts of jobs that no one seems to enjoy while also feeling a bit squeamish about how artificial intelligence could eventually do more harm than good in ways we may not yet even be able to fathom.

I haven’t written much about AI, and I still don’t plan to make any attempts to be an “AI though leader” of any kind, but as I wrote a bit in this newsletter last summer, maybe my greatest concern about the relentless adoration of AI right now is how it seems to have catapulted “productivity” to the top of many priority lists.

Before we go any further I want to make clear that I am impressed with how I have seen AI augment productivity. I just started a new job last month, and I have been using Claude a good bit to help me brush up on some skills that I haven’t used in a while. Without a doubt I have seen the benefit of AI in some aspects of my work, even as I take great care to not become overly reliant on it in any part of my job.

What I mean to say is that I see the appeal—the performative boost and administrative support provided by artificial intelligence is not just smoke and mirrors, even if some of the marketing seems a bit blustery. AI has real utility that I have seen and experienced myself.

At the same time, one of the best cautions I’ve read about AI is some version of, “Don’t use AI to augment any skill you hope to improve,” and I think we would be wise to heed cautions like these, too.

The most common case I see others make for the proliferation of AI—in Christian circles and otherwise—is how integrating artificial intelligence into our lives and work will “lead to levels of productivity and utility that mankind has never seen in its history.”

And I just don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.

Utility Is Not Paramount

While I am not one to deny that AI has great utility, I think what concerns me is the degree to which it seems we have started to prioritize utility above all, perhaps because AI is so useful.1

Like with so many technological advancements, so it is with AI: perhaps our concern ought not to be with the product of the technology but with what using the technology does to us.

In his keynote speech last fall at the Dragonsteel Nexus conference, sci-fi/fantasy author Brandon Sanderson shared a quote from Oscar Wilde’s prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Sanderson goes on to say that one of his greatest concerns about AI is that it “seems to be too focused on the product and not the process,” which is another caution and concern we ought to heed.

Something is lost when we prioritize yield over the toil and experience it took to produce the yield—certainly in the case of art, but also in the case of other kinds of work!

Like Sanderson, one of my greatest concerns regarding the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence its inherent appeal to eliminate friction. This concern may not be as strong in the area of accounting as it is in the world of art.

Art Is Meant to Be Born Through Struggle

The best art is more than what it is.

The best art finds at least some of its beauty in the scars it took to become its finished self.

The best art is born out of friction and struggle, not in spite of it.

When we use artificial intelligence to shortcut the creative process, we produce less art and more content—these two things are not the same.

Content is meant to be consumed, art is meant to be felt.

We live in a time in which it has become widely acceptable to consume everything all of the time.

Like vacuums we suck up all the content we can, filter out what we don’t like, and never process anything that may be too difficult for us to handle.

All the impressive AI models we see today can create content more content for us than we could ever hope to consume, but they cannot create the kind of art that can make us feel. Such art requires us to connect with the struggle and the friction that had to be endured by the artist to create the art we engage. And the frictionless experience of plugging in a prompt leaves no scars to adorn the beauty of the finished product.

Even more, as Sanderson highlights, creating art does something to the artist. In a sense, he says, “You are the art,” and without the creative process, the artist is not transformed by the work.

Art is fruit that sprouts along the twisting vines of expression and vulnerability born in sweat and tears and struggle.

Art is not efficient, nor is it often useful.

And that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

Maggie is a puzzle pro, and because of my pretty severe colorblindness, I am definitively not a puzzle pro, so Maggie patiently lets me help her work puzzles. Usually I’m tasked with getting all of the edge pieces together to make the frame, but this puzzle has no such pieces given that it is in the shape of a literal rooster. Because of this, I felt particularly helpless on this puzzle.

We sat and talked and puzzled at the kitchen table for a while as the snow began to fall, and by the time we had finished probably two-thirds of the giant rooster, Daisy called from the uppy-stairs:

“Maggie! Come uppy-stairs and pay wif me!?”

Maggie called back something like,

“No, Sissy. I’m doing a puzzle with daddy right now!”

Then Maggie turned to me, and said,

“I’m having fun with you, and that’s all I care about right now.”

Maggie can struggle to stay on task at school sometimes, especially if reading a story brings to mind a story of her own she wants to share. But when she spends quality time with people she loves, she is relentlessly present. She gets this from her mother more than anyone else.

May I learn from her even as I do what I can to help her learn.

—

Many days, when it’s nice outside, our family will spend the afternoon hours after Maggie gets home from school and before dinner playing out in our front yard or on our driveway. Often we’re riding bikes, scooters, or maneuvering the other toy vehicles that take up one bay of our two-car garage. Sometimes we’re playing kickball or hitting a tennis ball back-and-forth.

A few weeks ago, some flowers and trees had just begun to bloom and violets were poking up through the barely-alive grass and other assorted weeds. Our family pickup kickball game was abruptly paused when Maggie began picking the violets out of the grass and collecting them in a bug net—Daisy, as always, followed closely behind.

At one point, Maggie shouted toward Susie and me, as we were sitting in the garage watching them pluck, and said:

“Mama, we’re so lucky to live in a place where flowers grow!”

Most of us live in places where flowers grow. And I suspect that, unless we are passionate gardeners, most of us aren’t stopping to smell or otherwise enjoy the flowers around us very much. Certainly most of us mow over the violets that crop up in the middle of our grass along with whatever other kinds of weeds invade.

What I love most, I think, about Magnolia is her unmatched ability to fully and completely enjoy everything about the world around her. She is often unconcerned with where she needs to be going. She is rarely in any sort of rush. She is constantly taking in her surroundings, curiously examining every sight, sound, and smell, and either enjoying what she loves or asking questions about what she doesn’t understand.

Now, does this make her difficult to teach sometimes? Yes, we hear that it does. Does it also make her difficult to parent sometimes? Absolutely. And we are doing all we can to give Maggie a bit more urgency and discipline without suffocating her curiosity and appreciation of every last bit of her world.

I think it’s fair to say that all of us have some remarkable qualities that inevitably come with some costs we wish we could eliminate but that are inseparable from whatever it is that makes us remarkable. Growing in discipline requires us to embrace the beautiful parts of who God has made us to be while also recognizing we live in a world with other people we are called to consider more important than ourselves.

That said, I’ll take being late from time-to-time if it means I can move about my world with a heart that is grateful to live in a place where flowers grow. And as a restless, tired, father of two little girls who just happened to both be named after flowers, I would do well to stop and be a bit more appreciative to live in a place where flowers grow.

Happy golden birthday, Maggie. I am so grateful you are one of the flowers I get to watch grow.

I know that sounds weird—because it kind of is—but it’s true, and I figure I should be honest with you about it.

I’m at that weird age and stage of life (35-years-old with two young children) in which I vacillate between feeling invincible and inescapably fragile in a matter of hours.

One day I may feel invincible, totally forgetting that death will one day come for me. And then the next, I may be physically and mentally aching, totally and painfully aware that one day my kids will bury me—hopefully well after they are adults themselves.

Death fascinates me for a whole host of reasons we won’t dive into today, but death becomes a front-burner topic in my mind around Holy Week each year for obvious reasons: the Savior of the world died and then de-clawed death by rising from the grave.

Obviously I don’t want to die anytime soon mostly for personal, selfish reasons like wanting to see my girls grow up or enjoy a long life with my wonderful wife. But I never fear death less than I do when I am reminded of Christ’s conquering of it, and how temporary it really is.

Death and resurrection are baked into the fabric of the cosmos, and our greatest hope in life is the life that awaits us on the other side of death.

Death and Resurrection: Threads in the Fabric of the Cosmos

In his book The Hope of the Resurrection, Patrick Schreiner has an entire chapter dedicated to how the realities of death and resurrection are woven into the fabric of the whole cosmos. He writes specifically about how we can see the resurrection in our backyards (bolding mine):

For example, the life cycle of an oak tree is one of death to life. An oak tree doesn’t reach its peak acorn production until it is about fifty to eighty years old. Its acorns contain seeds protected by hard wood shells. When an acorn falls to the ground, it is alive. But once it is disconnected from the tree, the outer shell slowly dies so that the life in the seed can sprout through the shell. An acorn’s potential is never realized until part of it dies. After an corn sheds its outer shell, new life bursts through.

The Scriptures say that this reproduction cycle points to a resurrection reality. When asked about the resurrection, the apostle Paul turns to seeds to explain it (1 Cor. 15:35-38). People in the first century were just as shocked by the idea of the resurrection, so he uses nature as an analogy for it. He says we are foolish if we don’t recognize what you sow into the ground does not come to life unless it dies (1 Cor. 15:36). Paul asserts that our earthy bodies are like seeds planted in the ground. You are to your future resurrection body as an acorn is to an oak tree. Today you are an acorn, but the acorn must die. In the resurrection you will be an oak tree.

Schreiner also shares a great Martin Luther quote that reads, “Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.”

The movement from life to death to life-to-the-full is true of us, the pinnacle of God’s creation, and echoes of this truth are woven throughout the fabric of all of creation. How awesome is that? Even the acorns cry out to testify of God’s work in creation to bring about new creation.

I have sometimes been a part of Holy Week services in different church communities that are somber in tone—like Good Friday services—and I’ve just always had a hard time play-acting grief when in such a service—for two reasons, I think.

First, it’s hard for me to pretend that Christ has died and not yet resurrected. It’s hard for me to get into that mode, I guess. I live in a post-Easter-Sunday world, and it’s hard for me to mentally transport myself to the night of Good Friday or the silence of that Saturday.

Second, I guess I find myself asking the question, “Would I have rather Christ not died?” How could I genuinely grieve one of the most important elements of the greatest news the world has ever received? While Christ’s death was unjust and awful, I find it hard to make myself grieve it—without it, we don’t have resurrection! The two feel so inextricably connected to me that it’s hard for me to deeply grieve Christ’s death without immediately being comforted and overjoyed by his resurrection.

The only reason death doesn’t scare me—even as much as I would like it to hold off for as long as possible—is because Jesus conquered it and showed us that real life awaits us on the other side of death. In going up on the tree, he fell from the tree like the acorn, bringing forth new life that could only come from death. This is what awaits us. This is our ultimate hope.

What Is the Ultimate Hope for the Christian?

In their tremendous work The Gospel Way Catechism, Trevin Wax and Thomas West answer the question “What Is the Ultimate Hope for the Christian?” in this way, in part:

Answer: Our hope is in Jesus Christ. We believe he will come again to reign over and restore the world, delighting to dwell with us and grant life everlasting, forever filling us with wonder, love, and praise.

“A man who believes is a man who hopes,” claimed Nicholas Sarkozy, former president of France. “Secular morality always risks exhausting itself because it is not backed up by a hope that fulfills man’s aspirations for the infinite.”

Our world wants to hope but doesn’t know how.

….

We were created to live for God and to hope in God.

….

The ultimate hope for the Christian is embodied in Jesus Christ. He is not just the fulfillment of God’s promises; he is our hope. Christians look back at the fulfilled promises of God and look ahead to the eventual return of Jesus Christ…The new heavens and earth will one day be our eternal home. We will be free from suffering and sorrow. All that will remain is the presence of God filling us evermore with wonder, love, and unending praise.

The ultimate hope for Christians is in the finished work and future return of Jesus Christ.

Death is, in the eyes of most, the worst thing that can happen to humans—it is the cessation of life itself. But, because of Christ, death is not the destination for the Christian. Death is but a brief layover on a connecting flight that shortly arrives at eternal, joyful life in the presence of the God who created, saved, and loves us.

No one wants to die before they’ve lived whatever it is fulfills their version of what it means to “live a full life,” and this is understandable. It’s good for us to want to experience the variety of beautiful experiences and wonderful graces that God provides for us throughout our decades of heartbeats and deep breaths.

At the same time, we can see death not as a cessation of life so much as a changing of mode.

Death doesn’t press stop on life, it just moves us to the next final, beautiful, unending song.

Whether we’re rooting our hope in the eventual return of Christ in glory or the eventual reality that we will join Christ in glory, the ultimate hope for the Christian is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is because he defeated death that we don’t have to fear it.

The Impenetrable Armor of Resurrection Life

A prayer titled “Retrospect and Prospect” in the Puritan prayer book The Valley of Vision says:

I am not afraid to look the king of terrors in the face,
for I know I shall be drawn, not driven,
out of the world.

Until then let me continually glow and burn out for thee,
and when the last great change shall come
let me awake in thy likeness,
leaving behind me an example that will glorify thee
while my spirit rejoices in heaven,
and my memory is blessed upon earth

Whatever sort of terror it is we face—whether some sort of spiritual oppression, a cancer diagnosis, a relational catastrophe, or something else—we can face it without fear. We can “glow and burn out” for the Savior who gives us hope. Perhaps if the terror overcomes us and we find ourselves joined to Christ in glory earlier than we would have preferred, we could leave behind an example of Christlikeness and gospel-rooted hope that it glorifies God.

Finally, to zoom in a bit more closely on the idea that our hope is untouchable, that no earthly terror and even death itself cannot take away the hope we have in the finished work of Christ, let’s look again at something Patrick Schreiner writes in The Hope of the Resurrection:

…the resurrection is satisfying because it confirms that nothing can finally harm those who are in Christ. The resurrection affirms that the Christian cannot be destroyed in the ultimate sense.

….

Even if people maim a body, they can’t reverse the resurrection. What a comfort this is. Satan is incapable of destroying us. We’ve been given impenetrable armor.

….

If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then there is always the chance that someone can take everything away from you, including your life. However if Jesus did rise from the dead, then everyone in Christ has a satisfying end to his or her story.

No one can take everything away from us because everything we have been given are gifts of God that are not ours to hold for our own sake, but are ours to steward faithfully for the glory of God and the good of other people.

Our only hope in life is death and the untouchable, unending, and unmatched life that comes after. But even as we look ahead through the dim glass of death to the life that is to come, let’s enjoy this one, too.

The Qoheleth writes in Ecclesiastes 9:7-10:

Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Amen. Christ is risen! Christ will come again.

Genesis 2:5-17 says:

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

In his commentary on Genesis 2, Warren Wiersbe writes:

God planted His garden “eastward in Eden” (Gen. 2:8). “Eden” means either “delight” or “place of much water” and suggests that this garden was a paradise from the hand of God. Bible history begins with a beautiful garden in which man sinned, but the story ends with a glorious “garden city” (Rev. 21-22) in which there will be no sin. What brought about the change? A third garden, Gethsemane, where Jesus surrendered to the Father’s will and then went forth to die on a cross for the sins of the world.

We are people of the garden. We find our beginning in a garden paradise infected by an idolatrous parasite. We find hope in a future garden city consumed by the presence of God and the glorious goodness that overflows from his presence and into our hearts. And that hope was purchased for us because of Christ’s bloody, tearful submission to the will of our Father in a garden of twisted olive trees.

But there is yet another garden, one that grows between the garden of Christ’s prayer and the the garden-city of God’s presence.

Yet Another Garden and Its Gardener

Following the death of Jesus, Mary and Mary made their way to his tomb to tend to his body.

Of course when they arrive they are astonished to see the stone already rolled away. John writes about Mary Magdelene in John 20:1-16:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

The exact burial site of Jesus Christ is debated, with the two most likely places either being the famed “Garden Tomb” site or the location upon which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built.1

Regardless, that Mary Magdelene mistook the risen Christ for a gardener tells us that the burial site was in the midst of a garden. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make much sense for her to mistake the voice of a man in her midst as the gardener.

Here we have a fourth garden—the garden into which Christ was buried and from which he rose. And was Mary Magdelene, in fact, mistaken, to think the man was the gardener? I suppose so, as she didn’t think it was Jesus. But in a sense she was not mistaken.

Mitchell Chase writes in Resurrection Hope and the Death of Death:

She thought the voice was the gardener’s. She did not realize Jesus had spoken to her. And yet Jesus was, in a more important sense, a gardener indeed (see Gen. 2:15). He was the last Adam, not returning to dust but risen and tending to matters of new creation.

Mary Magdelene was mistaken to think that the man who spoke to her was merely a gardener, and we would be mistaken to overlook that Christ is, in fact, a gardener.

The One by whom God created everything out of nothing is renewing everything for himself as the gardener who rose from the grave.

People Want Oblivion

Toward the end of the last Daniel Craig James Bond movie, No Time to Die, Bond confronts the villain Lyutsifer Safin1 (Rami Malek). In the confrontation, Bond is attempting to talk Safin out of his grand plan to infect the world with his biological warfare weapon. Bond talks with Safin about how neither of them really had a chance to live before their families were taken from them, and that the millions of people Safin intends to kill shouldn’t be subjected to such evil.

Safin responds to Bond like this:

The thing that no one wants to admit is that most people want things to happen to them.

We tell each other lies about the fight for free will and independence when we don’t really want that.

We want to be told how to live, and then die when we are not looking.

People want oblivion, and a few of us are born to build it for them.

Here we have a fictional villain delivering some nonfictional truth.

We live in a time in which So Much Happens that we cannot help but be subject to things happening to us. Even the most offline person has a hard time avoiding oblivion.

No matter how much we try to avoid being “current events” men or women, it feels increasingly hard not to be smacked in the face with some kind of Horror of the Day.

Brokenness is everywhere, and it happens to all of us in one way or another. The sad reality is that many of us just let it happen. We see the train coming down the tracks and we don’t let ourselves get out of the way. We, as Safin says, “tell each other lies” about our desire for independence and free will without actually acting like we want those things.

We talk about the desire to scroll feeds less and go outside more, and yet our screen time reports continue to testify against us.

We talk about working for change and resisting injustices—signaling our virtues or carrying around a hollow husk of optimism—only fall in line with the status quo and not have the courage to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

As much as we say otherwise, our lives often reflect those of people who want to coast along in comfort, hoping to avoid the injustices or issues we detest instead of doing something about them.

Safin hits the nail on the head when he concludes, “People want oblivion, and a few of us are born to build it for them.”

Here I see oblivion as clearly analogous to our current cultural posture of scrolling ourselves to death—a posture we simultaneously eviscerate and embrace.

Oblivion drops the world and all of its problems into our pockets and only provides us with the illusion of doing something about it. Oblivion makes us grand spectators, deciding to consume the lives of others instead of cultivating lives of our own.

Silicon Valley executives recognize that the people want oblivion, and they believe they are the ones who have been born to build it for them.

The Trough of Oblivion

Over the last couple of decades, a group of brilliant psychologists and computer scientists dedicated their lives to setting up carefully curated troughs of oblivion to be consumed such that we feel infinitely informed, endlessly entertained, and unwittingly enslaved. Our attention is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per quarter.

Invading the core of the human heart and swapping beauty with oblivion is a profitable venture.

When we passively consume content on our feeds, we perfectly embody this spirit of people who want things to happen to them, as Safin describes. We verify our identities (even as we forget who we are), open our phones, approach the blue-light trough, and keep our noses down, consuming until time runs out or we begin to feel ill.

Eventually, we fattened livestock have consumed so much from the trough of oblivion that we can be harvested. But the beautiful profitability of it all, is that when our attention and data are butchered from our selves, we continue living, unlike other butchered livestock. By giving ourselves over to troughs of oblivion, we endure a kind of death, even as we yet live.

Feeding from the trough of oblivion isn’t free, even if it never hits our wallets.

Somehow when we finally find the courage to lift our heads from the trough and see the beauty of the night sky or the promise of open fields, we squint with skepticism. What might be out there that we cannot control?

We continue to consume out of fear of being consumed. The trouble is we run headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We want oblivion. We want to be told how to live and how to think and how to spend and how to believe…and then die when we least expect it. We clamor for free will and independence bound to feeds by chains we purchased ourselves, only able to be freed by keys we’ve willfully misplaced.

Life is meant to be lived, not consumed. And so, by consuming, we ourselves are consumed. Safin is right: we do want oblivion, and we’ve no shortage of people who believe they were born to build it for us.

We are not promised plenty, but we are promised to be blessed in our need.

We are not promised health, but we can discover the grace of God amid our illness.

We are not promised power, but are pointed toward the centrality of humility.

Following Jesus is not easy, but that’s okay once you realize that ease was never the point. The problem is that Comfort is an appealing god that we often attempt to furnish with a second throne. Threats to Comfort lurk around every corner, and the rampant evil that plagues all of creation has arguably never been as visible and apparent as it is right now. These realities yield predictable fruit.

Scarcity in Abundance

I try to live under a rock a little bit more these days than I have in the past, not ignorant of the brokenness of the world, but also not captivated by it as I have been before. Every once in a while when I stick my head out from under my rock1 I encounter two dominant realities: fear and scarcity—the first of which usually follows in the wake of the second. Let’s start with the second.

More than any other modern phenomenon, the coronavirus pandemic brought our scarcity mindset to the fore, almost exactly six years ago (!!!) when toilet paper and other household items were disappearing from store shelves despite no real indication that any shortages were afoot. The panic buying of these items ultimately acted as self-fulfilling prophecies—the unfounded fear of a future scarcity led to panic buying and stockpiling, which then actualized the scarcity everyone feared.

Since then, this scarcity mindset hasn’t really gone away, even if it isn’t at the forefront of our minds as it was back in the throes of the pandemic.

For years, homes have been hard to come by, as Boomers live longer and longer, holding onto their homes, young families like my own sit tight in “starter homes due to advantageous mortgage rates, and new home builds can’t keep up with first-time homebuyers trying to find an affordable house. Oil (and gas) prices are spiking as we wage yet another war(?) in the Middle East.

A housing crisis and conflict-fueled energy price spikes? Even pop punk music has been resurrected—I’m seeing Yellowcard on tour this summer, for goodness’ sake! The early-2000s nostalgia is in full-swing, for good and for ill!

Used cars were scarce for a while, and may still be, which has caused the used car market to be pretty overpriced in recent years. Even simple things like Pokémon cards are next to impossible to find unless you want to pay nearly double the retail price at small card shops or with aftermarket dealers.2

On top of those abundant scarcities, it’s getting harder and harder to find a job as the job market looks weaker in basically every sector except for healthcare, and the comparison between annual average salary versus home price in the United States is…concerning:

Then, of course, how can you have any conversation about anything in 2026 without asking, “How might AI play into this?” And for that I have to share a recent graphic from the Financial Times relaying research done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, depicting how AI could: 1) create a tech singularity that ends scarcity as we know it, or 2) create a tech singularity that leads to human extinction, or 3) set us on a modest AI-boosted GDP growth path of roughly 2.1%, in line with how the GDP has grown for over a hundred years:

I’m sure that if I took the time, I could probably come up with a handful of other examples of how scarcity manifests in other areas of life right now, beyond the ones I’ve listed.

These real, varied scarcities, join up with other factors to yield real, widespread fear.

Fear Itself

We do not lack opportunities to be fearful.

All the scarcities I’ve listed above are worthy causes of concern, depending upon how acutely any particular person or family feels the squeeze.

We bear witness to regional wars3 and endure rumors of world wars.

Some here in America understandably fear an increasingly authoritarian state marked by violence and mass surveillance on a scale we perhaps have not yet seen.4

And, thanks to social media and the smartphone, we have a front seat to all of it. I scrolled past a half-dozen videos of missiles and drones falling across the Middle East this past weekend while checking Twitter over breakfast.

I shared this screenshot of a tweet recently, and I’ve seen some version of this on social media a handful of times in the last month or so:

This tweet is obviously a bit cheeky, but it is an accurate representation of how too many of us are probably trying to handle the feelings of scarcity and fear that we carry. Some of us are just trying to scroll through it, but what’s actually happening is that we are scrolling ourselves deeper into the fear and/or rage we may be trying to escape. (I plan to write more about this next week.)

We fear our neighbors. Depending on our persuasion, we either wonder if they’re illegal immigrants who intend to harm us, or we wonder if they’re the kind of people who want to deport anyone who looks like they may not be from around here.

We fear our bosses or our workplaces, wondering if there is ever anything we can do to provide an untouchable sense of economic security so that we can remain employed and ward off any threats of scarcity that may arise.

We fear artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and what effects these new frontiers may have on everything from our ability to work to the mental health of our loved ones who develop unhealthy relationships with chatbots.

This all leads us to feeling like cornered rats, afraid of everything, ready to lash out at everyone. So often what leads us into that corner are moldy, poisoned bits of cheese that we pick up as we tap and flick our screens in hopes of finding something that nourishes us and give us the hope we so desperately long to deliver us from our fear.

Fear and scarcity hold our hearts in a vice, and we tighten it by our own hand.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t.

People of Joy and Generosity

I recently accepted a job offer to work for a ministry dedicated to publishing resources that help people connect with others in their local churches and grow to become more like Jesus.5 When I was interviewing with this ministry, they asked me to review their core values and share about which one resounded with me the most.

One of the core values they have is, “Joy and generosity transform.” As I reviewed the values I knew immediately that this is the one I wanted to highlight in my conversation with the team.

This value stood out to me because of everything I’ve written about fear and scarcity above. One of the best ways to loosen the vice grip that fear and scarcity have on our hearts is to live a life marked by joy and generosity rooted in the overflowing goodness and grace of God we see in Christ.

Philippians 4:4-7 is the most instructive passage that comes to mind when I consider the centrality of joy and generosity in the life of the Christian. Paul writes:

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

In a time when it is easy grapple with scarcity and be driven to fear, Christians will be set apart by how they engage their neighbors in joy and generosity.

Our graciousness, our generosity, is to be known to everyone—this is not easy (or possible?) when we are gripped by feelings of scarcity. Who wants to overflow to bless others when they fear they already lack so much?

We can find comfort in the nearness of the Lord, Paul reminds us—we don’t have to worry. If we find ourselves in need, we present our requests to God. We can choose to cry out to God instead of lashing out in fear.

If we can manage this, Paul says, if we can overflow with grace, remember that Christ is near, and take our needs to God, then we may find the peace we long for—the peace that surpasses all understanding, the peace that fulfills the scarcity, the peace that drive out the darkness of fear.

In a conversation in my community group recently, some were grappling with these feelings of scarcity and fear, and it allowed us to have a good conversation about how we might live right now in light of Everything Going On and the tenuous feelings we may have about so much of it.

Eventually the conversation led to the question, “So, like, as Christians, what happens if authoritarianism and fascism takeover in our lifetime here in America? What happens then?”

I said something like (I don’t remember the exact words), “We die. Or rather, we image Christ until we die.”

We don’t need to be afraid. We really don’t. Paul writes just a few chapters before the passage above in Philippians 1:21, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He is not being cute or trite, but mortally serious.

Joy and generosity transform. They transform us, to be sure, but they also transform others and point them to the source of our transformation—the Spirit of the living God in us. When others are being shaped by their fear and scarcity, driven to lash out at others or spiral into despair, we can take hold of otherworldly hope by way of joy and generosity rooted in the finished work of Christ.

In response to an expert in the law who asks Jesus which of the commands is most important, Jesus replies:

He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

One of the best, most practical ways we can obey this second command to love our neighbors is to overflow with joy and generosity when scarcity is in abundance and fear itself is most terrifying. In doing so, we may see ourselves and our communities transformed.

The book was one of my favorite reads all last year, and I found it to be well organized and full of helpful guidance on how to handle the gospel in our current cultural moment. Unlike other multi-contributor books I’ve read in the past, the chapters flowed together well and complemented one another nicely, without repeating the same information over and over in different ways.

I’ve been holding onto a number of article ideas from the book for months now. So, as I have time, I want to share bits of the book with you along with a smattering of thoughts I have here and there. I would definitely recommend you pick up the book if you’re able. It is a fantastic primer for how to share the gospel in our time.

In his chapter on “the goal” of cultural apologetics, reflecting a bit on Romans 1, N. Gray Sutanto writes:

First, apologetics is not about moving non-Christians from ignorance to the knowledge of God but about unmasking the fact that non-Christians already know God. The problem is suppression, not ignorance. This means apologetics is a moral enterprise as much as it is intellectual; it is as much pastoral as it is philosophical.

Second, unbelief isn’t primarily an intellectual problem but an affective one. Failure to acknowledge God isn’t due to the lack of arguments, evidence, or awareness of the knowledge of God but due to the corruption of our hearts. We don’t want God to exist, for acknowledging his existence and glory means simultaneously acknowledging our maximal vulnerability before him (Rom 1:32)….intellectual objections we raise against Christian faith, while real, are motived by the heart’s resistance to God.

Earlier in the chapter, Sutanto shares a quote from Johan Bavinck’s exegesis of Romans 1. Bavinck writes:

We need to keep a sharp eye on the fact that there is something distorted in the human condition. People have have been resisting, suppressing. They have done so unconsciously. But they do so all the time, moment by moment always unaware that they are doing so.

Bavinck shares a related thought in a different quote Sutanto cites later:

Man has repressed the truth of the everlasting power and the divinity of God. It has been exiled to his unconscious, to the crypts of his existence. That does not mean though that it has vanished forever. Still active, it reveals itself again and again. But it cannot become openly conscious; it appears in disguise, and it is exchanged for something different.

The core flaw of the human condition is the desire to worship the self, and this makes the reality of one, true God feel more like a threat than a hope.

My pastor often talks about how our default posture with regard to the truths about God and his lordship over everything is that of someone attempting to hold a beach ball underwater in the pool.

It takes constant, even if unconscious, effort to hold back the truth that is continually breaking through about creation and its Creator. Try as we might to keep the beach ball underwater, it will always find a way to fly up and hit us in the face.

This attempted suppression is not only a futile effort of the unbeliever, let’s be clear. Even those of us who believe what Scripture says about God and trust Christ to save us from ourselves can engage in this foolish effort to suppress what we know. Sutanto writes toward the end of his chapter:

…apologetics is necessary not just for those who don’t yet believe but also for those who believe. The human heart holds deceptive secrets, and believers must continue to be vigilant from the ways they too continue to nurture the self-defensiveness, fear, and pride that cause us to resist the exposing and sanctifying witness of the gospel. Indwelling sin continues to trouble the believer. And if apologetics unmasks the discrepancy between what one professes and what one knows deep within, then Christians need to be exposed just as much as those who don’t yet believe.

…

God refuses to leave himself without a witness in the heart of every person. It is exhausting to keep suppressing what we know in our heart of hearts. Jesus calls us to his rest, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30).

Amen.

May God help us have the humility to join in with the confession of the father whose son was healed of an unclean spirit, saying, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).

This situation makes the 'current-events man' a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents.

He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist.

A current-events man is that relative on Facebook constantly posting about the latest news coming out of the Oval Office. It’s the co-worker who was an expert on public health in 2020 and has insights on immigration policy and enforcement this week. It’s the pastor who can’t help but hook every sermon to a headline.

I have been a “current events man” at times, especially early in my adult life, when I first was developing a significant readership online. It is incredibly tempting to be a current-events man when doing any sort of public thinking or online content creation, in part because tying your “expertise” into the news of the day is one of the best ways accrue and monetize attention. Christian content creators—pastors, self-described “thought leaders,” “columnists” (i.e. “bloggers”), and others—are arguably as guilty as anyone else of being current-events men or women.

These days, though I pay for subscriptions to a number of national publications and am as interested in current events as I ever have been, I try not to be one who is “highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents,” in the words of Ellul. When I have been active in writing about social media and its influence on us, I do what I can to connect the transformative power of social media to examples in our everyday lives without attempting to ride the wave of headlines or topics about which I am uninformed. But the temptation persists.

For me to avoid being a current-events man does not require me to be ignorant of what all is going on in this world—to be so ignorant could probably be described as unhealthy in its own way.

To avoid being a current-events man requires me to cling to timeless truths rather than reach for real-time hope.

It is good to care about the flourishing of our world without being wholly captivated by it.

Has it ever been easier to be a current-events man than it is today, or to justify being so? With timelines and notifications galore, the atrocities appear in our pockets on-demand. And, after all, we don’t want to be ignorant—heaven forbid.

Because it has arguably never been easier or more acceptable to be a current-events man, carried along by the whitewater of who-knows-what-will-happen-next, it is ever important that we remember our role as ambassadors from a foreign land.

Second Corinthians 5:17-20, unsurprisingly, has been especially helpful for me in this regard. Paul writes there:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Also, Paul’s words here in Philippians 3:20-21 are helpful:

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

These images of ambassadorship and citizenship have been important to me for as long as I can remember, but they are especially helpful in our present environment when So Much is happening and it is easy to slip into some sort of perpetual discouragement or nihilism out of a sense of duty we feel to be Aware.

As ambassadors from and citizens of the kingdom of God sent to the foreign lands of temporal existence generally and our own geographical contexts specifically, we are tasked with caring for the good of our assigned Time and Place without being consumed by the evil that crouches at the door.

To be a current-events man is to slip into thinking I am a citizen of my Time and Place, forgetting I am an ambassador and that my citizenship lies elsewhere.

We are wise to advocate for the justice of God to prevail and for the love of God to abound without being carried along by the fears that follow in the wake of ever-present brokenness and sin. It is in this way that we resist the siren song to become current-events men and remember our role as ambassadors with an otherworldly citizenship.

Anyway, here are five of my favorite reads from 2025 and a few words about why for each.

1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Is this my favorite fiction book ever? Maybe!

A couple of years ago I bookmarked the list of Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction in my web browser, and each of the last couple of years I’ve tried to read at least a few of the award-winners. I’m so glad I read this one early this year.

Why do I love this book? I think it’s because of how it feels like Catcher in the Rye if you actually loved and wanted to hug the main character rather than punch him in the face. Demon has so many similarities with Holden—Kingsolver even alludes to this in the book!—but I just found myself pulling for this kid in a way I never did with Holden.

Kingsolver does such an amazing job of capturing the simultaneous wisdom and folly that intermingle in the mind and actions of a teenage boy.

I almost never re-read fiction, but I could go back to this book in 2026 without any hesitation.

2. Everything Is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson

No doubt my favorite nonfiction book of the year. Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible, and I’m always looking for new ways to unpack it. Bobby Jamieson proved to be one of the best guides through the winding wisdom of Qoheleth I’ve had in some time.

My friend Trevin summarized it well when he gave this book his top honor of the year:

Like its biblical counterpart Ecclesiastes, Jamieson’s book is something of an enigma, but the kind that stirs up curiosity and wonder rather than confusion. Jamieson offers us memorable pictures, well-crafted sentences, and thoughtful questions so that we see life on earth as a gift and look to our Creator for redemption and restoration.

Indeed. This book was insightful, well-written, and is one of my favorite books on Ecclesiastes. Pick it up for yourself!

3. Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

I had never read Paul Kingsnorth before picking up his latest release this fall, and I think I will need to remedy that in 2026.

Against the Machine is not as plainly an anti-technology book as its title may make it sound—but it is at least partially an anti-technology book. What Kingsnorth is after is helping us see how the life of modernity (technologically, economically, and otherwise) we’ve been sold is preying on us and ultimately not out for anything but its own malignant expansion.

Smart Christians have levied fair criticisms against this book, but I think read wisely and with a firm grip on some solutions that may be better than those suggested by the author, the questions and concerns raised in Against the Machine are worth consideration. And he’s just such a great writer.

4. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

What a lovely book.

At The Gospel Coalition annual meeting earlier this year, I had the pleasure of sitting at the same table as Allen Levi for a writers’ gathering during the conference, and I believe I told him that Theo of Golden was sitting atop my stack of books to read next.

It’s a good thing I hadn’t read Theo before meeting Allen because if I had I may have attempted to embrace him and sob in his shoulder.

If you’re looking for some feel-good fiction that will inspire you and sorta break your heart all at the same time, read this.

5. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

I bought this book back in May just a day or two after it released, I think, and it probably took me until about October to finish. Chernow is one of the best living biographers, and has been one of my favorite authors for some time.

This is maybe just the second of Chernow’s books that I have read with my eyes, as I have read most of his works via Audible in the past when I used to commute to Nashville multiple days per week. His works tend to be quite long—this one is 1200 pages—but I think his pacing is solid. There were only a couple of stretches of this work that felt a bit slow to me, and I am so happy with how much more I know about this American icon.

For most people, I’d only feel comfortable recommending this one as an Audible read for long drives or commutes, but if you’re an avid reader you would do fine with this one!

I hope you read some great books this year! If you have a top five or any recommendations at all, feel free to share them in the comments below.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I am going to refrain from sharing here about how we intend to handle Santa Claus with our kids, as it isn’t really the point of what I want to explore here.

So far this season, questions about Santa haven’t come up much, but the other day Maggie did ask me why we don’t have an elf at our house like some of her friends at school do. It took everything in me to simply say something like, “Well everyone has their own ways of celebrating Christmas,” instead of saying, “The elf of the shelf is a bastardization of all things Christmas and each one of them should be thrown in a pile and burned.” God granted me grace and patience at an opportune time for her sake and mine.

But all of this had me thinking about something I haven’t really thought about before.

How is the myth of Santa Claus still alive in 2025 for anyone over the age of like…five?

I wondered this first because of the advent of AI use in popular culture. I entered “is santa real” in a handful of the most popular generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc.), and all of their answers would spoil the imaginations of children around the world.

So then I tried plain ol’ Google. “Surely,” I thought, “Google will have some kind of cheeky, kid-friendly response at the top and then real answers tucked away someplace. Nope. It also told the truth about the jolly old fellow right at the top of the results.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, 97% of kids from ages three though 18 have some kind of internet access.

So I ask again: How is the myth of Santa Claus still alive?

I remember when I still believed in Santa Claus in the late 1990s, I spent much of Christmas Eve refreshing Netscape Navigator on the NORAD Tracks Santa webpage, surely clogging up our dial-up connection for the whole day. If Google would have existed then, you better believe I would have gone looking for the truth.

It would be nearly impossible to do some kind of study on if kids are disbelieving in Santa earlier today than they did 20 or 40 years ago. Logic would suggest that they are disbelieving earlier, because of the early age at which so many are given unfettered internet access, but it’s hard to know in an empirical way!

So I guess I want to ask you, dear reader. Among the kids you know—your own, ones in your school, etc.—is belief in Santa still alive and well? Have you seen kids disbelieve sooner than before? I’m curious!

My own ambivalence aside, as a parent who isn’t sure how far to take it, I don’t wish for the death of the myth at all. Santa is a fun feature of the holiday. I just wonder how much longer he’s got.

It was November 29, 2015. I was in my second year of seminary and struggling mightily with my Hebrew class, and I asked Susie to take over driving the rest of the way home so that I could sit in the passenger seat and study my vocabulary flash cards on my phone.

We sat in about 90 minutes of traffic around Elizabethtown due to an accident, but after that cleared, we were able to get going again. For being 7:30-or-so in the evening the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the traffic was mercifully light. According to the GPS we would be home close to 10 o’clock, which was fine with us—we didn’t have kids yet and could handle sliding into the apartment pretty late after a trip back home to Indiana.

We were listening to the newly-released Purpose album by Justin Bieber. The back seat was full with Thanksgiving leftovers like Amish peanut butter, Babee’s chicken and rice, and probably some desserts. My Playstation 4 sat on the floor of the backseat. I had taken it home because back then we still had plenty of free time when visiting home without children, and there was a new Call of Duty waiting to be played over the break.

The Accident

Around mile marker 67, just about a half-hour south of Elizabethtown near Munfordville, the rain had picked up again. “The Feeling,” by Justin Bieber (featuring Halsey) was playing in the 2009 Toyota Camry we had recently purchased from my parents.

Here’s what I wrote about what happened next, back on December 7, 2015:

Susie was behind a car and the “wake” of the rain spitting off of it was making it difficult to see. So, she moved into the left lane and sped up just a bit to get around the car so she could see more clearly. Shortly after moving into the left lane, we hit a deep puddle, spraying water up onto the windshield. Susie couldn’t see, so she attempted to slow down, which caused her to lose control of the car.

“Oh no!” she said through a terrified, cracky voice as we began to swerve. I said nothing (she tells me, I have no recollection), and held on tight: I knew what was coming. I tightened the grip of my right hand which was already on the bar above my passenger window, and clung to my iPhone in my left hand, which was doubling as a music box and a study tool.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight like a little boy does when he thinks you can’t see him because he can’t see you, and I shut my mouth like you do when you jump into a pool, only more forceful. I felt us hit the wall, but listening to the sound of the shattering glass distracted me from our flip onto the roof of the car.

I opened my eyes, and before I could process my aliveness, I looked through my blurry vision out my absent window because I’ve seen enough TV to know what happens next. When I saw headlights out my window, I closed my eyes and my mouth for what I was certain was coming: another car or three.

After what could have only been a few seconds, I opened my eyes again to hear Susie saying nothing but, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” through her tears. Feeling virtually no pain myself, I didn’t even think about the fact that one of us could be seriously hurt. I just knew we had to get out of the car no matter what. My iPhone was still in my hand (yes, it was), so I turned on the flashlight.

Being in our car on its roof reminded me of how I used to feel being in my school outside of normal school hours. It’s some sort of pseudo-reality in which something totally familiar feels totally foreign.

Anyway:

Susie unbuckled herself easily, and I claimed I couldn’t unbuckle my seatbelt. In my disorientation, I thought my buckle was on my right side, but as I was the passenger, it was on my left. I told Susie I couldn’t undo my seatbelt, so she did it for me. At this point, help began arriving at the car. A woman, Lisa, I believe, approached Susie’s side of the car, and a man, Kyle, was on my side.

They were asking how many people were in the car and if we were OK. I feel bad even now, but I feel like I remember them asking this a number of times, and eventually I responded in frustration, “It’s just the two of us, we’re fine, just get us OUT!”

“Turn off the car!” Kyle said, and that’s when I realized why. “Oh no,” I thought, “This car could explode. Maybe it’s already on fire.” Instantly, getting out of the car wasn’t the next step, it was a matter of survival. I began to panic when neither Susie nor I could turn the car off. Both of us just started looking for the easiest way out.

One way or another, my door was pinned shut. However, the window was completely blown out and gone, so I tried to slide my legs out that way. No dice—only about half of the window was not against the ground, so nothing above my knees fit through.

At this time, Susie realized what is, without a doubt, the scariest part of the ordeal for me. As she attempted to maneuver out of her door, Susie realized her hair was pinned under the car. The sunroof of our Camry also blew out in the crash, and somehow, as the car flipped and/or slid, her ponytail went through the sunroof and about half of the hair on her head was pinned between the roof of the car and the ground below it.

Susie screams, “I’m pinned by my hair,” which I relay to Kyle outside my door. People began asking around for scissors or a knife. A few seconds later, someone handed me what had to be something like a six-inch hunting knife, which I had not business handling in my current state. As I was looking at Susie’s hair to figure out the best way to safely do the deed, Susie frantically began yanking her hair. Eventually, she yanked most of it free, opened her slightly sky-facing door, and crawled out of the car. I followed just seconds behind her.

After Susie and I hug and make sure each other is OK, Lisa (a former ER nurse, by the way) is tending to Susie, asking the others who have stopped for more coats, blankets, etc., as it was rather cold and wet.

I use my iPhone flashlight to examine myself a bit, as I talk with the others there about if we hit anyone else and if my face looks OK (relatively speaking). I see only minor cuts on my hands, and my lip was swollen, as I had nearly bit through it. Susie is obviously shaken, but truthfully she was in a worse mental state than she was a physical one.

After what seemed like hours, but was only probably 15-20 mins, Kentucky State Troopers, a couple of firetrucks, and an ambulance all arrived on the scene. Without fail, each safety official who arrived on the scene went straight to Susie, who was surrounded, sitting on the ground with coats and blankets to keep warm in the standard Midwest 40º drizzle of a November night. I stood by talking to those who stopped and examining myself thinking I had to be more injured than I actually was. At one point, Susie was so mad at all of the attention she was getting and the lack of attention I was getting that she sternly said to the troopers and firefighters, pointing at me, “HE WAS IN THE CAR, TOO! PLEASE CHECK ON HIM!”

This happened once or twice with different responders. Each time, they looked at me, and I just said, “I’m fine.” Because I really was, to everyone’s surprise, it seemed.

It was the first night on the job for one of the state troopers. He told me someone wrecked because of that same puddle the night before, and that the construction company working there had been warned. Eventually, when the ambulance arrived, we climbed in, they checked our vitals, and asked if we wanted to go to the hospital. My only hesitancy was that I know it can cost a ton to ride in an ambulance, and it didn’t seem like we needed treatment. But we decided to go anyway. Better safe than sorry, we figured.

Almost all who responded. The EMTs, police officers, firefighters, and emergency room personnel seemed to be looking at us with wide eyes and confusion. A sort of, “You sure you’re really OK? Like, for real?” It was a regular reminder of how fortunate we really were.

We were briefly examined in the ER—we actually wish they would have done more than they did—and eventually a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the hospital to take us to a Super 8 for the night.

Fun fact: about two weeks later, the state of Kentucky shut down that portion of I-65 for a time because they couldn’t figure out how to get it to drain water properly amid all of the construction. I like to think the sternly-worded email I sent to the construction company helped play some role in that decision.

Reflecting on the Accident 10 Years Later

This past Saturday, November 29, 2025, we drove the same stretch of I-65 in the middle of Kentucky. This time with two little girls, a dog, and plenty of leftovers, again, in tow.

This time we drove through mile marker 67 in the early afternoon, under overcast skies. I was listening to Christmas music. Susie was napping. Maggie and Daisy were watching two different movies in their seats. The dog was panting in the third row, looking forward to stretching his legs once we got home.

I do most of the driving to and from Indiana these days, which I’m happy to do. And while Susie was a bit more spooked by the 10-year anniversary of our accident than I was, I would be lying if I said making the same drive on the same date didn’t give me a touch of the heebie-jeebies. I was tempted to put the same Bieber song on the speakers as we drove over the spot, but for Susie’s sake I refrained.

If I’m going to be honest, I don’t think about the accident as much as I would like. What I mean is that I wish I had a firmer grasp on the overwhelming sense of gratitude I had immediately following the accident. Today, the accident has faded into the realm of life of events that I know I experienced but that feel like were part of another lifetime—like playing high school football or moving into college.

It was a violent accident. We basically rode a wave of water up a temporary concrete barricade on the left side of the left lane on I-65 and rolled over onto the roof of our car, landing in the middle of the interstate, and we came out with more mental scars than physical ones. I consider that borderline miraculous.

The most terrifying part of the experience for me to remember is when I opened my eyes after the car stopped moving. I looked out my blown-out passenger window toward oncoming traffic. My glasses were on, but had slid down to the tip of my nose, so all I saw were blurry, astigmatism-ified headlights headed right for us. I still vividly remember closing my eyes and waiting for impact. I remember, too, thinking it would be the last thing I saw. My life didn’t flash before my eyes or anything, but I was aware of what I thought was about to happen.

By God’s grace, traffic wasn’t dense enough for this to happen. No other cars were involved in our accident. Somehow the traffic behind us was able to stop in the ponding water without hydroplaning. The first two people who approached the car were a retired ER nurse and a guy who lived like 10 miles from us (we were still a couple hundred miles from home). God’s hand was so evident in the small details surrounding the accident that night. Not just in our immediate protection, but in so many small graces we experienced in the immediate aftermath. Our church family and employers were gracious and so supportive. I haven’t experienced a ton of hardship in my life, and this traumatic experience still reminds me of how important it is to have community.

Life has changed so much since the accident. Yes, I do most of the Indiana driving now, and we don’t leave super late on Sundays to come home from Indiana anymore. These are small parts of life that have changed. But of course we have children now, too, and a dog, and I can’t even imagine experiencing something similar today.

Perhaps the most impactful fruit of the accident is how it affected Susie mentally. Susie has struggled with some measure of anxiety since she was little, but Susie really struggled after the accident with believing we were actually, physically unharmed. Understandable, really.

Eventually, about eight months later in the following summer, this came to a head with a bout of panic attacks and anxiety that weren’t rooted in the accident, but were triggered by it. Working through Susie’s anxiety together has been a major part of our marriage and lives for the last 10 years, and though it hasn’t been easy, I’m grateful for it—not for the anxiety, but for God’s timing in using the accident to cause it to boil over. The anxiety bubbling under the surface for Susie was bound to spring up sometime and in some way, and that the accident was the tipping point was honestly a grace, at least in my mind. Life has only gotten more chaotic and inherently stressful since then, so to be able to work through the earliest stages of that struggle in that season was a gift.

Between the accident in the fall of 2015 and Susie’s panic attacks in the summer of 2016, we moved out of our apartment east of Nashville and into our home in the suburbs. We joined a church with a robust counseling ministry and developed a relationship with a counselor in Nashville. That Susie’s long-bubbling anxiety came out in full-force in that season of life rather than, say, now, is a blessing. It gave Susie plenty of time to work on her own struggles before we had children, and it led to a fruitful career for her, as she eventually went to work for her counselor, using her gifts and helping others struggling in similar ways.

Of course, I wouldn’t wish for the accident to happen again, but it is fair to say that in the events surrounding and resulting from the accident I have seen God work in some of the most impactful ways in our lives and our marriage, and I’m certain we are better people for the experience than without it.

November 29, 2015 was the night everything could have changed, but it didn’t. But some things did change—in difficult and beautiful ways—and for that, I’m grateful.

Data is, of course, important. If someone has a job, they work for a business.

And every business from the non-profit that serves homeless people in your community to a trillion-dollar company in Silicon Valley needs to pay attention to financial data to make sure their bills can be paid.

Sports teams have to pay attention to the data collected by their statisticians and analysts to know which pitcher to put in the game to face the slugging lefty that comes up to bat with the game on the line.

Parents need data to understand how their children perform at school, so they can know if some sort of tutoring or remedial work is necessary to ensure their child doesn’t fall behind the necessary requirements for students their age.

Data has always been important, but it seems that it has maybe never been as influential in decisions as it is today. Much of the reason for that is because novel technologies have been developed that allow us to quantify—or turn into numbers—parts of life that were never able to be quantified before.

I’ve never been much of a “math” guy—I’m more of a words guy—but I have always loved statistics. I struggled in my high school geometry class, but aced the college-level statistics course I took my senior year of high school. So don’t come away from this thinking “Chris thinks data isn’t important.”

I do think data is important, and I love analyzing data to find meaning in the numbers. If collecting data is quantifying reality, I love to do the work of taking data and de-quantifying it, turning it back into meaning that can be acted upon in the real world, outside of a spreadsheet.

But I think we’ve come to care too much about data, perhaps expecting it to be able to deliver more value than it actually can.

I heard someone say recently, “The things that make life meaningful are not so easily measured.”

I am concerned that we become unhealthily interested in that which we can measure solely because we can measure it and not because it is what matters most.

This is especially true in ministry, is it not?

Of course in a for-profit business enterprise that exists to make a profit, what matters most is making a profit, and this is definitionally quantifiable.

But in a ministry or more general non-profit setting that exists for a purpose that may not be so easily quantified, the temptation to invent data that measures “success” is a strong one.

We should not attempt to quantify Christlikeness, for example.

Do you have data to demonstrate the value of your friendships? Your marriage? I hope not.

That the things which matter most cannot be quantified is not a bug—it is a feature.

The ability to quantify and track the effectiveness of various parts of our life is a gift, so long as we can resist the draw to care more about that which we can measure than that we cannot.

We should learn from what we can measure even while we invest in what we cannot measure.

I’ve had some other contract writing projects that actually pay the bills, so I’ve had to prioritize those. On top of that, it’s been a tiring season on the parenting front as our littlest, Daisy, has been getting up closer to 5am than her usual 6:30am the last few weeks, so any morning writing time has been sapped, too.

I am working on some pieces I hope to publish between now and the end of the year. But I wanted to pop in this week and share some links and other things I’ve been reading and such on a variety of topics.

So, the following is a bit of a disjointed collection of recommended things for you. Take them as you will.

Paul Kingsnorth on Ross Douthat’s Podcast

I have been listening to podcasts more in the last three months than I have in the last five years. Two stand out: Derek Thompson’s Plain English and Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. I think Ross is running one of the most compelling podcast operations around today because he interviews such a varied array of people with such compelling lines of questioning.

This interview with Paul Kingsnorth around the topics in his NYT bestselling book Against the Machine is a newer episode and very good.

The Admired Leadership Newsletter

A friend of mine recently passed along an article from a newsletter on Substack called Admired Leadership. I really appreciated the article, so I subscribed to the newsletter. I am a relatively young senior leader in an organization—I serve as a director and have something like 30-40 people who report up to me—so the leadership insights in this newsletter have been helpful for me.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent piece called “Protecting the Team by Saying ‘No’ Upstream”:

Leaders above are often the source of noise and distraction. They can direct work, create unnecessary urgency, and ask for deliverables that are a waste of time.

Team members can’t really decline their requests, but strong team leaders can.

Saying “No” can delay leaders upstream, allowing the team to maintain its focus and avoid being pulled in multiple directions.

Team members appreciate a leader who is willing to stand up for them and negate anything that is not essential or sets unnecessary new priorities.

The Monks in the Casino

I mentioned above that Derek Thompson’s podcast Plain English has been a favorite listen of mine lately. I’ve enjoyed Derek’s writing for a while, too, all the way back to Hit Makers, which he published back in 2018, but still holds up today.

Last week, Derek published this article, “The Monks in the Casino,” which may go down as my favorite article of the year. It’s super insightful. Here’s a bit of it for you:

The sociologist Max Weber proposed that Christian asceticism gave birth to capitalism. Today it is capitalism that is birthing a wretched asceticism, as the casino economy turns our young people monastic. The monks at the casino represent an inversion of that old Christian principle. Whereas the Protestants that Weber studied were socially giving and financially stingy—their financial prudence created savings that could be invested in new enterprises—today’s monks are risk-averse in the world of bodies and risk-chasing in the world of bets.

This inversion of risk doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the predictable result of how public policy and technological change have allocated risk and reward. Since the 1970s, America has over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital space. To open a daycare, build an apartment, or start a factory requires lawyers, permits, and years of compliance. To open a casino app or launch a speculative token requires a credit card and a few clicks. We made it hard to build physical-world communities and easy to build online casinos. The state that once poured concrete for public parks now licenses gambling platforms. The country that regulates a lemonade stand will let an 18-year-old day-trade options on his phone.

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.

This shift has moral as well as economic consequences. When a society pushes its citizens to take only financial risks, it hollows out the virtues that once made collective life possible: trust, curiosity, generosity, forgiveness. If you want two people who disagree to actually talk to each other, you build them a space to talk. If you want them to hate each other, you give them a phone.

The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

Our daughter Maggie is in kindergarten now. She is doing well—already beginning to read with some speed—and we are grateful for how much her teacher and her school have been pushing her even in this first semester of kindergarten. I know that her school uses laptops to some degree in their education, and I have always been a bit wary about how much we’ve integrated laptops into children’s schoolwork.

This week, Jean Twenge—author of iGen—published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education.” This article is disturbing and captures the concern that many have had about the integration of laptops into education. Here’s a snippet:

Although it once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own device, it’s clear that those policies have been a failure. It may be possible to harness the power of school devices more judiciously, with little to no device use in lower grades, and high school students given laptops strictly limited to relevant apps. We could go further, creating completely device-free schools with rare exceptions for students with special needs. It would be back to the textbooks, paper and pencil of previous eras — when the most significant classroom distraction was students passing notes.

Many adults struggle to concentrate on work when social media, shopping and movies are just a click away. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a 16-year-old, much less an 11-year-old, to focus in the same situation. Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions isn’t just bad for test scores; it is inimical to learning.

And it is fundamentally unfair to our children.

Room for Nuance with Trevin Wax

Finally, I wanted to highlight a recent podcast episode that features my good friend and mentor Trevin Wax.

I’ve been impressed by Sean DeMars’s work on the Room for Nuance podcast in the last year, and when Trevin told me back in the spring he had been interviewed on it, I was eager to watch it. Sean does a great job of getting Christian leaders to open up, and even as well as I know Trevin, I learned some new things in this interview.

If you’ve ever been blessed by Trevin’s work, I encourage to watch this interview! It’s a great peek into writing, Christian publishing, and other topics.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks for being here. I hope one or more of the above is interesting to you.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I hope to be writing more for you in the coming weeks as my schedule may open up a little bit.

-Chris

A month or two ago I read Everything Is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson. In it, Jamieson walks through a number of key themes throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. This will probably end up being one of my favorite books of the year. I read it alongside re-reading Ecclesiastes the last couple of months.

Today I want to share some of my favorite bits of the book with you and how they put words to how life has been the last year or so.

Depression Is the Fruit of Navigating Absurdity

What does it mean to “struggle with depression”? I can’t say I’ve “struggled with depression” in the way that phrase is often used—describing a sort of frequent fight with feelings of hopelessness and despair that may require some kind of pharmaceutical or therapeutic intervention. But I have certainly “struggled with depression” in the literal sense, sometimes succumbing to prolonged periods of sadness and malaise despite my best efforts to win or evade the fight entirely.

In his second chapter on the topic of hevel, highlighting the absurdity of life, Jamieson has a long section on depression and it makes up probably the strongest pages of the whole book. Below are a handful of quotes from that section (bolding mine):

Depression is the inevitable shadow side of a society in which every man and woman is his or her own sovereign. It is a consequence not of acting badly but of feeling unable to act at all.

….

Our whole existence has been rendered vulnerable, precarious, insecure. Change is a threat because it can always bring harm or failure. Depression is the price millions of people pay for the demand that you be more than human: that you create yourself, surpass yourself, act on your own marvelously malleable nature, and make yourself more than yourself. Depression is the shattering sense that you are only yourself, and yourself is not enough.

….

We are irreparably estranged from this work that, despite being our home, doesn’t feel like much of a home, and we are equally estranged from ourselves. As Christian Wiman laments, “What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?” In such a strange, estranged world, and with such strange, estranged selves, depression is not necessarily a sign that you are viewing your life wrongly. Instead, it could measure the suffocating weight of all that you rightly see is wrong with the world, and even some of what is wrong with yourself. Walker Percy says,

You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Depression is the fruit of living in an absurd world— a world broken by an unwelcome omnipresence of sin that discolors everything everywhere all of the time. When you have a deep sense that the world is not your home, depression is uncomfortably close.

I think sometimes it’s easy to look at someone who is grappling with depression and wonder, “How could you be so sad? Look at all you have!”

Rich people grapple with depression.

Proud parents struggle with it.

Accomplished artists know the fight.

How? Why?

Even those who live the most charmed lives struggle with depression because even the most charmed life falls woefully short of the world we were made for.

A handful of times in the last year, when I have come nose-to-nose with feelings of depression, I’ve wondered how I could feel so aimlessly bummed out when I have so much. And this collection of passages help me put words to what I already knew.

How, then, have I fought the feelings of hopelessness that can so easily come with middle-agedness? By seeing life, as absurd as it is, as a gift and, by seeing the simplest pleasures as sources of deep joy.

Unmatched Joy and Life as a Snow Day

Later in Everything Is Never Enough, Jamieson has chapters on “Gift” and “Enjoy” that pair well together. Recognizing that this world is not my home often leads to feelings of despair, but appreciating this world for what it is often helps me dispel those feelings.

For me, this looks like seeing my life and this world as a gift to be enjoyed for now, rather than seeing it as a hope for fulfillment forever. Everything in life is a means to an end that exists outside of life as we know it, in a place and time without end.

Jamieson finishes his chapter on seeing life as a gift with this, “To receive life as a gift is to recognize that this universe has a moral center and you aren’t it.”

In the following chapter on enjoying life as a gift, Jamieson writes about how life is best seen as a snow day:

Learning to receive everything as a gift from God’s hand turns life itself into a snow day. What can you do with a snow day? You can’t control it. You can’t schedule it. You can’t order it for delivery. You can’t will a forecast into a guarantee. You have no say over how much snow will fall or how long it will stay. All you can do is enjoy it.

….

Life itself is unfathomable and inexhaustible. If you want to enjoy it more, quiet your heart, commit your mind, and open your hands and your eyes.

How could this life, though so strictly limited, be inexhaustible? Because every gift bears a trace of its giver, and every day and breath and moment is given by the inexhaustible God.

…

Though the days of your life are restricted, the depth of the good in them is not.

So much joy is found in the simple depths of everyday life. In ways we cannot plan or orchestrate or control. This is part of what makes them beautiful, and it also makes them hard to pin down or predict.

A significant part of growing older, for me, has been realizing that some of the greatest joys and pleasures of life are most readily found tucked amid everyday rhythms and not on some far-off vacation or transformative life experience.

I wrote about this recently, reflecting on C. S. Lewis’s words in A Letter to Malcolm. He writes in that book:

Gratitude exclaims, very properly: ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says: ‘What must be the quality of Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window—one’s whole cheek becomes a sort of palate—down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time.

One of the most effective weapons in my fight against the occasional despair that comes with recognizing the world is not as it should be is the practice of grabbing hold of the glimpses of God’s glory in creation amid the brokenness and tracing those glimpses “up the sunbeam” to the Creator himself.

I’ve often joked that a lot of Christians deal with their midlife crises by becoming Wendell Berry fans, and I can tell you I’m pretty much there in spirit even if I haven’t quite hit midlife or read a Wendell Berry book.

I have something like six bird feeders in the backyard full of seed at any given time, along with a couple of bird houses that may or may not have tenants depending on the season. I try to enjoy long walks at my local park as often as I go to my local gym, even if going to the gym may yield a more robust workout. I attempt to make one or two meals a week that are new or require a bit more time and attention than a midweek crockpot or spaghetti night demands.

The more I feel life speed up, the harder I have found myself working to intentionally slow it down.

But beyond that, I’m always revisiting a couple of key questions.

Who Am I and What Am I Doing?

Back in his section on depression, Jamieson shared this quote from Walker Percy, which I shared earlier in this article:

You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

And then Jamieson asks:

Do you know who you are and what you are doing?

I’ve spent a ton of time in the last year asking these questions of myself, before I even read Jamieson ask them so pointedly in his book.

Who am I? What am I doing?

Asking questions like this resulted in significant clarity around what I would call my “North Star.” My North Star is this:

I exist to steward the gifts God has given me for the glory of God and the good of other people.

I’ve held this sort of “North Star” idea for some time, but this year has brought it into focus in new ways.

This year solidified for me that I am not a “career man,” who will do whatever it takes to climb some kind of occupational ladder to a level of amorphous success that may come with a luxurious payday and an impressive title. I don’t know if I ever really was a “career man,” such that it impinged on other parts of my life. But because I am driven, relentless, and always wanting to improve, I know that, unchecked, I could easily prioritize my work above all else.

That said, it’s somewhat easy to not be a career man when you’re in ministry because rarely does climbing any sort of ladder come with a payday that would be worth the toll that such climbing takes on yourself or your family. It may be a bit more tempting to chase career success at all costs if generational wealth were on the table by climbing the ladder. My fight is more of an internal battle to know when I’ve given enough of myself to my work in any given season.

Along the lines of not being a career man, I’ve really doubled down on how I want be a dad to my girls. Put simply: I want to be present. For instance, earlier this year I wrote about how I will never commute again. With total understanding that this will prevent me from some number of career opportunities, I just decided this year that no job is worth losing two or more hours multiple days a week with my family so I can make a little more money and Important Decisions. It just isn’t.

I am grateful to God for another year of life and for what he has taught me this year about who he is, who I am, and who I am not.

This has been a year of finding radical contentment in the simplest of things, of tracing the sunbeam up to the sun, and of piercing through dark nights and foggy days to see clearly the North Star that God has for me to follow.

C. S. Lewis writes in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer:

Gratitude exclaims, very properly: ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says: ‘What must be the quality of Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window—one’s whole cheek becomes a sort of palate—down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time.

….

One must learn to walk before one can run. So here. We—or at least I—shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest…Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

As I have gotten older, I have become much less interested in wringing my hands about global matters of supposed importance outside of my control and much more interested in seeing how God may be whispering and working in the closer things underneath the clamor and chaos of the distant things.

Often this results in my mind running “back up the sunbeam to the sun” and considering the glory of God in chittering hummingbirds or evening snuggles with my girls.

May God graciously draw our eyes to ways he gives us small pleasures, and may he help us hold loosely the concerns we have about “important things” outside of our control.

Here’s the theme: the current cultural unrest we feel is due to living in a cultural period in which a number of value systems and ways of living are at war for the cultural throne that was once held by Christendom and the perpetuation of Christian values throughout the corridors of culture—from government to family relations to entertainment—but is now, effectively, vacant.

Put another way, we live in a culture that once had a clear king (Christendom), but now has a cultural civil war as the throne sits empty.

Now that we live in a post-Christian West, culture wars persist with different groups vying for the empty throne of influence that Christianity once held. Some fight in hopes of helping Christianity regain the throne. Others fight against Christianity (or any faith) ascending the throne, hoping for a more humanistic or naturalistic ruler. Yet others fight, perhaps, for the throne to remain empty.

Being a Christian “culture warrior” has never felt right to me or for me. I don’t mean to say I think those who fight for Christianity to gain more influence in culture are wrong, I just mean to say that I’m not sure I can bring myself to engage in culture wars on behalf of Christianity. I am not a good cultural “crusader,” if you will. I want human flourishing to flood forth, and I think the way of Christ is how that is best achieved, but I’ve never felt comfortable adopting a pugilistic means toward that end.

“But then,” I sometimes wonder, “How might I best work for the flourishing of others and the glory of God if not by campaigning for various reforms or candidates or the like?”

Put another way: how do Christians faithfully breathe life into a dark and dying culture stained by the bloodshed of different people groups and ideologues vying for the throne once held by Christendom if they don’t want to join the fight themselves?

By midwifing glimpses of new creation through countless small, creative acts of faith—little fires in the dark—that God’s kingdom may come and his will may be done.

‘Only birth can conquer death’

In his classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces mythologist Joseph Campbell quotes the British historian Arnold Toynbee—I came across the quote in Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. Campbell writes (emphasis mine):

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

We live in a culture that was once ruled by Christendom and its values, but that era has died and it cannot be resurrected, no matter how many Christian politicians are elected or how many Christian TV shows are popularized.

We don’t conquer death by destroying or belittling or “owning” or ideological opponents. That is to say, the way to react to the death of Christendom is not by conquering our foes in hopes of resurrecting the old. We conquer death through new birth.

Kingsnorth writes, “At the end of a culture, the real work is not lamentation or desperate defence—both instinctive but futile reactions—but the creation of something new.”

We don’t work toward the flourishing of our neighborhoods and our nation and the nations by fighting over fiefdoms of cultural influence in hopes of one day re-seating Christian culture on the throne of the West. Even if we were successful, we would misunderstand Christendom on the cultural throne for Christ on the cultural throne—these are not the same.

We work toward the flourishing of our neighbors and our enemies by acting as midwives of new creation—or at least by trying to provide an ultrasound picture of it, if you will. We sow seeds of God’s kingdom come and his will done. We work to reveal some of the already as we wait for the not yet.

This sort of work doesn’t have to be done with some kind of postmillennial optimism that our work will bring about the Christianization of the globe. But it does require us to believe that even amid the increasing brokenness and warring of the world it is good work to help others see the beauty and wholeness of the new creation hope we have in Christ.

How do we functionally do this? How do we preview new creation in an effort to help our neighbors and our enemies flourish as everyone fights for control of the throne of culture?

Lighting Little Fires

Midwifing glimpses of new creation in the midst of our crumbling culture is difficult and thankless work. In fact, it can create more enemies than friends. If we commit ourselves to providing glimpses of the world to come amid an ongoing war for control of the present world, all those who quarrel for control will harangue us for not joining their side.

Our faithful Christian neighbors who attempt to fight for the throne on behalf of the Christendom that lost it will wonder how we can live with ourselves if we don’t join in the fight for Christian values to pervade the halls of Congress and the soundstages of Hollywood.

Others who fight for some other value system to ascend the throne, or to maintain its vacancy, will bemoan our unwillingness to fight on the right side of history and push back against the oppressive value systems that threaten to rule.

So what do we do?

Kingsnorth writes (emphasis mine):

This, in practical terms, is the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out in the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture.

Kingsnorth goes on to describe this work like lighting “particular little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best as we can.”

I love this image.

It is as though we live in a dark cave. And while others crusade to become the Ruler of Darkness on the Throne of Despair, perhaps our time is best spent grabbing some tinder and sticks to provide a bit of Light and Warmth in little nooks and crannies around the cave for people who are looking for a spell of relief.

Just a bunch of little fires here and there and everywhere. No giant blazes. No burning down of others’ buildings. No fires set in an attempt to retake any throne or gain some sort of authority.

Like freed prisoners who have seen life outside the cave, we light fires to provide some glimmers of hope that maybe the darkness isn’t all its cracked up to be, suggesting that maybe there’s a place where the Light rules and not the Darkness. A place where there is a Ruler of Light on a Throne of Grace.

We pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” But do we act in accordance with this prayer?

Will we have the courage to do the slow, boring work to light particular little fires that midwife a longing for a new creation marked by sharing warmth and light rather than for grasping for power and darkness?

We may have such courage. “But first,” Kingsnorth concludes, “we are going to have to be crucified.”

Our girls fulfill many of the birth order stereotypes you may see among young children. Maggie is relatively conscientious, steady, ordered, and the like. Daisy is…not. Daisy is more spontaneous, mercurial, and expressive. Maggie is prone to being shy when entering a room. Daisy, by contrast, often becomes the center of attention. Maggie has naturally straight hair. Daisy’s hair is a curly, wavy tangle at all times.

Since she started walking around the beginning of this year, I’ve taken to occasionally referring to Daisy as “Bamm-Bamm” after the classic Flintstones tot known for swinging his club around and causing a ruckus.

A cliché for this kind of kid would be “a bull in a china shop,” which Daisy can certainly be. But despite her relatively tough, rough-and-tumble disposition—especially in contrast with Maggie, our oldest—Daisy is undeniably sensitive and fragile.

Daisy is the porcelain bull in our little china shop.

Let me give you an example.

Take Maggie. For most of her life, when I have had to sternly tell her, “No,” or give a firm instruction to “Stop,” Maggie tends to either listen to my instruction or stubbornly disobey. This is typical, of course. These two responses are normal.

Contrast that with Daisy. Despite Daisy’s tough demeanor, she often struggles to be truly stubborn.

Sometime in the winter or early spring, something odd happened for the first time—at least it was odd to me because Maggie never did anything like it when she was little.

We had somewhat recently begun to let Daisy start feeding herself in her high chair. One morning, Daisy, Maggie, and I were sitting at the table while the girls had breakfast before Susie was out of bed. Daisy was stuffing far too many pieces of pancake into her mouth at once, and I simply said, “Daisy…no. Slow down,” not raising my voice, but perhaps using a bit of a stern tone.

Daisy stuck out her bottom lip, covered her eyes as if she had just seen a monster, and started wailing in despair—as if I had just screamed at her that she will never have another pancake for as long as she lives. To my shame, I busted out laughing, and I eventually had to get Susie as I could do nothing to comfort Daisy. I had betrayed her beyond immediate reconciliation, I suppose.

Since then, such a crumbling of Daisy’s will has become a somewhat normal occurrence, though I would say it may be waning as of late. It’s sort of adorable because it’s not a proper temper tantrum characterized by flailing and screaming and the like. Rather, it’s a sort of resigned, demoralized defeat to the decree of Dad (She only does this to me, not Susie, who is more likely to see her stubbornness, I think.).

As tough and demonstrative as Daisy seems, I have had to remind myself that she is quite fragile. A bull in a china shop, yes, but a porcelain one to be sure.

So much about Daisy is simply adorable. She’s a cute kid. Her curls are incredible. She has a deep voice for a two-year-old girl. She’s got gorgeous, big, brown eyes, and olive skin like my own. She has a sort of spunky confidence to her that I can’t wait to see develop in her as she ages. One of her favorite things to do right now is to walk up to me, get my attention, and say in her sweetest, most sugary voice, “Wook…pitchers?” as a request to look at the pictures of our family in our shared Apple Photos album on my phone—an activity she could do for hours on end if she was allowed.

We enjoyed celebrating Daisy’s birthday with friends and family this past weekend, and we’re excited to celebrate her in the year to come. She is so much fun.

I can’t wait to see how Daisy continues to grow and develop, and to see if she remains a porcelain version of that bull or if, perhaps, she develops a bit more of a tougher shell that matches her other more demonstrative qualities.

I may have shared this here before, but I have this weird thing about listening to music: I have pretty strict seasonal music tastes. Most of the music I listen to is really only appropriate for certain times of year, most often dictated by the weather rather than the date.

Some of this is because certain genres of music lend themselves to certain kinds of weather and seasonal vibes, but most of the time I associate a musical artist or their work with the time of year I first heard them.

I have occasionally shared music recommendations in this newsletter, but I’m not sure I’ve ever really written at length about different music I like and why. This week I figured I’d pick nine songs that mean a lot to me, for one reason or another.1 I’m not listing songs here because they’re “favorites,” by any means, but more just because they carry some kind of meaning for me. As you’ll see, a good number of them are meaningful because of their ability to teleport me to very specific time and places in life not unlike a photograph can.

Sharing some meaningful music feels weirdly vulnerable, I think because music interests can be so personal, but whatever. Here are 10 songs that are meaningful to me and why, listed in no particular order.2

Musician by Porter Robinson

I can place when I first heard and fell in love with Porter Robinson. I somehow stumbled across a trailer for an NHL video game and while I wasn’t at all interested in the video game, I was compelled by the song choice for a hockey video game. I saw the trailer in 2014, and you can watch it here.

There’s a lot I love about Porter Robinson, and I won’t go into all of it here. But “Musician” is a particularly meaningful song to me because of how it clearly communicates the difficulty of pursuing creative work and how that can be a complicated pursuit.

The key lyric in this song for me is:

How do you do music?
Well, it's easy
You just face your fears and
You become your heroes
I don't understand why you're freaking out

As one who would love to make his living as a creative, I’ve often heard this lyric and thought of it in writing terms. “How do you become an author? Well it’s easy. You just face your fears and become your heroes. I don’t understand why you’re freaking out.”

The prospect of making a living purely as a creative feels impossible and intimidating. Porter captures that feeling in this song, and it moves me at a deep level whenever I hear it.

The music video is cool, too. It embodies what Porter has said is a common theme in his music. He often writes music imagining it playing on the speakers in a futuristic mall-like space, almost like something on Coruscant out of Star Wars. This song does feel like that, which is cool.

Konstantine by Something Corporate

I think my single favorite genre of music is early 2000s emo/pop punk music. Not so much the super whiny stuff or the more hardcore stuff, but the ballads and the softer brand of emo/pop punk. While some of the music in this list is, as previously mentioned, seasonal in its nature for me, early 2000s pop punk like Something Corporate transcends those lines. I listen to music like this year-round.

I was put on to Something Corporate by some friends in middle school, and I think part of what attracted me to the genre was my early exposure to alternative rock in the late 1990s (more on that later). Also what attracted me to pop punk in the early 2000s is that the themes also revolved around teenage angst and emotional volatility, and I was swimming in all of that around that time.

“Konstantine” is, in my view, objectively the best Something Corporate song. It is one of the better piano pieces I’ve ever heard in modern music—but I say this simply as a music enjoyer, not a musical critic. The main reason this song means so much to me isn’t really because of any profound depth so much as I think it is a beautiful embodiment of teenage love, heartbreak, and all of its associated feelings.

We’re All We Need by Above & Beyond and Zoë Johnston

Back around 2007-2008, when I was in high school, I worked at a local pizza joint. It was a really great job. It paid well. The owners were kind. My co-workers were (mostly) cool. I was a waiter—the first male one they ever hired—but the place was small enough that everyone sorta did everything. The only part of the job I really hated was closing the shop at the end of the night. I would have rather worked a month full of Saturday double-shifts than close a single night.

Why? Because sweeping and mopping the entire dining room was a huge pain, and a couple of managers wouldn’t even let me start the process until after we had officially closed—so that no customers would roll in at 10:50pm and be put off by a high school kid cleaning, I guess?

Anyway, one of my favorite managers to close with was Adam.

Adam was awesome because he would let me start sweeping and mopping the dining room 30 minutes before close. He’s also awesome because he introduced me to trance electronic music, specifically the work of Armin van Buuren and Above & Beyond. Adam would put on a three-hour trance podcast (which was really just a radio show) from one of these artists for us to listen to as we closed the restaurant for the night, and I was hooked.

I still have not been able to see Armin in concert, which I hope to rectify at some point. However, I did get to see Above & Beyond in Nashville back in 2018, and it was incredible. “We’re All We Need” was one of their biggest songs at the time, and it was great to see it performed live.

This song isn’t particularly meaningful to me, but this genre is. It got me through closing the restaurant in high school, and it has been the soundtrack to writing both of my books and countless research papers in college and seminary.

If you’re interested, both groups still have weekly podcasts/radio shows, though they have morphed over the years. Armin streams A State of Trance on YouTube, and you can find Group Therapy With Above & Beyond wherever you listen to podcasts. Great music for working, writing, perhaps working out.

Reckoner by Radiohead

Radiohead is a band whose music is significantly governed by my seasonal music tastes—perhaps more than any other band or genre of music on this list.

I also have to thank my time at B. Antonio’s Pizza, the aforementioned pizza joint, for introducing me to Radiohead. When they released In Rainbows on October 10, 2007 on their website through a system that let fans set their own price, a lot of my co-workers were talking about it. So I popped over to their website and downloaded it for free, having never listened to them. At this point, Radiohead has probably made thousands of dollars off of letting me download In Rainbows for free in October 2007.

I love Radiohead, but I can only listen to them in one, relatively-narrow climatological period of the year—when the chill, damp days of fall set in, most often beginning sometime in October and running all the way up until it’s time for Christmas music on the night of Thanksgiving. Radiohead becomes my default music for that four-to-six week period, and it is especially important to me on those gross, gray fall days. I literally call them “Radiohead Days.”

Radiohead, and In Rainbows in particular, is meaningful to me for much the same reason as the trance music I wrote about just above. While I started listening to it in high school, my favorite experiences listening to Radiohead came a few years later. I have vivid memories of grinding out many research papers in the Zondervan Library on the campus at Taylor University on rainy fall afternoons and evenings with Radiohead in my ears. I picked “Reckoner” to share with you here because it’s one of my favorites from In Rainbows.

On the Wing by Owl City

Behind Radiohead, which has a very narrow, but important, window of seasonal music listening, Owl City is the next most seasonally-bound musical artist I enjoy. I begin listening to Owl City (and other Adam Young projects like Sky Sailing) as soon as the first warmth of springtime sprouts and then through the summer until around mid-to-late July when other genres take over (more on that later).

Obviously, most people only know Owl City almost as a sort of meme because of the popularity of the hit single “Fireflies,” which has evolved over time from hit song to cringe internet meme fodder to relative irrelevance. However it’s fair to say that Adam Young, the man behind Owl City, means more to me than just about any other musical artist.

There are a lot of reasons why Adam and his work mean so much to me, which I can’t get into in this newsletter because it would go on for far too long, but everything from his musical style to his lyrics have resounded with me for a long time. I came across his music on MySpace in 2008, right around the same time I was getting into trance and electronic music in high school, and his electropop sound combined with his whimsical and romance-adjacent lyrics were exactly what I was looking for in that stage of life. Add on top of that his Christian faith,3 and it was no surprise that Adam (in Owl City and his other projects) became my favorite artist. I have seen Adam perform live six times, I think.

I could have chosen from about a dozen Owl City songs for this, but I went with “On The Wing” because it begins the Maybe I’m Dreaming album, which is the only album Adam had released when I found him on MySpace back in the day. I keep Maybe I’m Dreaming at the top of my Owl City Spotify playlist, so “On The Wing” is always the first song I’m hearing.

Hide And Seek by Imogen Heap

Most fall Fridays in high school, I came home from football practice or school4, hung out with some friends at my house, ate pizza, went to the football game5, came home, and goofed around on the family PC until late into the night. Most often, I was either playing video games, chatting with friends on AIM, listening to music, or writing—usually some combination of those in one way or another.

I’m not totally sure how I had heard of Imogen Heap—surely at school—but I had two songs of hers in my regular rotation on my iTunes playlist: “Goodnight And Go” and “Hide And Seek.” Chances are, if you’ve ever heard a song by Imogen Heap, it’s one of those two…and probably this one.

At this stage of life, I hadn’t really gotten into electronic music yet—that would come soon—but my attraction to the harmonizer/vocoder work in this song was definitely an early indication of an interest in electronic music, to be sure.

The reason “Hide And Seek” means so much to me really has nothing to do with the lyrics, though they are a beautiful reflection on some kind of breakup.

Eating leftover pizza after Friday night football games in front of my family computer as I played video games or wrote while chatting with friends and listening to music is a bittersweet memory for me. I made a ton of memories playing games in that season of life. It was in those late, Friday night writing sessions that I began to develop a love for writing and blogging. But I was sad…for a lot of reasons.

I was still trying to figure out who I was, and I wasn’t sure, and that made me sad. But I was mostly sad because, frankly, I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to all of the after-football-game festivities that others were. The girl I really liked was the cheer captain at a high school across town, and I knew she was spending the rest of her Friday night at campfires with her friends. I knew this because I was texting her throughout.6 That made me sad. And so I listened to music like this and wrote deep into the night.

So, “Hide And Seek” is meaningful to me because it is a sort of artifact of a period of life that was bittersweet and meaningful to me. Even as I listen to that song right now, as I write this, I am teleported back to sitting on a dining room chair in front of a giant wooden computer cabinet in the sunroom of my childhood home, eating leftover pizza, and writing bad blog posts fueled by teenage angst and loneliness, texting the cheerleader across town who would eventually be my wife.

Everybody’s Got a Song by Andrew Peterson

Susie and I first saw Andrew Peterson in concert at a pre-conference event before the Desiring God 2012 conference at Bethlehem Baptist Church in the fall of that year. I had interned at Children Desiring God during the summer, and I wanted to take Susie up to meet all of the friends I had made during my time in Minneapolis, so we signed up to volunteer the event. We worked the registers at the Lifeway Christian Bookstore at the conference. I hadn’t really ever heard of Lifeway before.

We saw Andrew perform and decided that “Dancing Through The Minefields” would be our first dance song at our wedding the next June, but that song is actually not the most important of his for me.

Little did Susie and I know we would move to Nashville in less than a year and live mere miles from Andrew when I took a job at Lifeway Christian Resources during the summer of 2013. We also weren’t aware of his legendary Behold the Lamb of God Christmas tour until a Lifeway co-worker told me not long after we arrived to town in September 2013 that I needed to get tickets to see it at the historic Ryman Auditorium for later that year.

It was at that concert that we heard Andrew sing “Everybody’s Got A Song” for the first time. It’s a song about the wonders of Nashville, sites around town, and the city we have to look forward to in the end.

Susie and I never, ever planned on living in Nashville or anywhere near here. But we’ve spent our whole lives here as a couple—12 years this September. And now I spend most Friday mornings working and writing at Andrew Peterson’s North Wind Manor property with other Christian creatives. It’s hard to believe how much has changed since that concert in Minneapolis.

Every Christmas when we hear Andrew sing this song to kick off the second half of the Behold the Lamb of God show we become less sure we’ll ever leave the city where everybody’s got a song.

Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind

This is a weird song to be on this list because I don’t really like this song. As I stated at the top, I’m not including these songs on this list because they’re favorites or anything, but I have generally liked all of the songs until this one. Now it isn’t that I don’t like this song, I just don’t think I’ve intentionally sought it out to listen to it in well over a decade until writing up this piece.

The reason this song means so much to me is because, like some of the other songs on this list, it enables me to an almost exact time and place in my life, one that wasn’t perfect, but was simpler.

Most summer days when I was a kid looked like waking up, putzing around the house until it was time for lunch, eating lunch (or packing one), then going to the Blackhawk neighborhood pool a couple miles down the road from our house until it was time to come home and get ready for baseball.

The Blackhawk pool scene checked every box on the list of ingredients for summer community pool vibes. Pure Americana. One of the more iconic parts of spending summers in the late 90s and early 00s at Blackhawk pool was the soundtrack of summer it provided.

Most often blaring out of the speakers around the pool were either 97.3 WMEE or MAJIC 95.1. Both stations played what I think is best called “90s Pop Rock.” I say this because this Spotify station may as well be the tracklist for every summer of my childhood at the pool.

I could have picked probably a dozen songs off of the playlist I linked above as the song that is important to me from that time, but this was the first one to come to mind, and I suppose that means something. 7

1979 by Smashing Pumpkins

When I was a kid, most of my best friends in the neighborhood were a few years older than me, and they had even older siblings. I was the oldest in my house growing up, but having older friends in the neighborhood was like having a handful of older siblings—with all the good and bad that comes with older siblings.

One of the cool parts about having some older friends at a young age was exposure to more “mature” music earlier than I typically would have been. I don’t recall any negative side effects of this—I’m not sure there are any stories of me swearing a bunch because of the music I heard—but I guess I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

All of that is to say, I remember very clearly hearing the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album when I was probably eight or nine years old. The album was released the day before my fifth birthday, but I’m sure I wasn’t listening to it at that age. I am pretty sure I can remember being in one of my friends’ brothers’ bedrooms and coming across this album and popping the CD in the stereo. I remember it so clearly, I think, because of the striking Renaissance-looking album artwork.

Anyway, listening to this album and others at such a young age made it so that my first favorite genre of music I can remember is 90s alternative rock—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Presidents of the United States of America, and others. This song is a favorite of that time, a time that began my love for music in general. It is a song about all the emotional trappings of youth—happiness, angst, and the rest. A fitting song for a comfy suburban kid who wasn’t quite a teenager, but was hanging around some of them.

There you have it—nine songs that are all important to me for their own reasons. If you happened to actually read down this far, thanks for taking the time. Maybe you found a new song or genre you decided to try.

Feel free to share some songs that are important to you and why in the comments if you’re so inclined. I’m always looking for new ways to increase my Spotify hours. :-)