Been thinking about Anthony Bourdain a lot recently. Re-watching old episodes of his shows, dreaming about what it would be like to make a living traveling the world and telling the stories of the people and places I’d see. I loved his ability to tell the stories, and in particular I loved his ability to tell the sad and heartbreaking stories as well. It was evident in his storytelling that those nasty truths affected him. Looking back now, a few years after he took his own life, and it’s evident in his shows the toll that the nastiness of life was taking on him.

I’d often lied to myself and said I could be a storyteller like Bourdain. I realize now the greatest difference between us was never upbringing, Northeast vs Dirty South background, the drinking or substance abuse. The difference being Faith. My faith is what allows me to confront the nasty truths of the world, to engage with them, and come out on the other side. Not unaffected, obviously, but unshaken in my foundation. I’m sad Tony never had that faith.

My mind these days is often burned with the harsh truths of life. We can battle against systemic racism, against the darkness of the world, etc. Yet in the light of progress made, we have thousands of years of human history that tell us hate will still be around. Injustice always returns. People will find new ways to hate other people for arbitrary reasons. Some new social media will bring out the worst in us. The cycle continues, and it’s exhausting and it weighs so heavy. I think that weight killed Tony.

But Faith! Faith tells me that the cycle only seems unending, but is broken! Hate only seems to continue because Hate is trying to rage against its own inevitable end! Racism, Anger, yes even the devil known as Facebook which all seem immortal are quite the opposite: they are already dead, they just don’t know it yet.

At the end of the day, when the sorrow of the world bears down on me, it is Faith that helps me into the bed at night and wakes me the next day with the energy to fight the seemingly neverending cycle. Sola Gratia, Grace Alone.

I feel the World’s hurt. But I feel my Savior carrying me. Sorry I’m not often more open about that.

(This post was originally published on Instagram. Turns out you can share Instagram posts on WordPress! So here it is)

It doesn’t actually feel like all that long ago that we were so heavily involved in the weird Christian Blogging Circle.

I guess when I say “we” here I don’t necessarily mean you who are reading this or, really, any one person in particular. It seems somewhat important to point that out for whatever reason. There’s no subtext here. There’s nobody in mind as I write. Other than myself. Maybe all of us? Probably not important.

In those days, things began simply enough. I sat in an office and felt like I should be doing things that weren’t related to the office. It was full of paperwork and phone calls and all kinds of things that didn’t engage a significant amount of my personality. In the most basic of terms, I needed to create something, so I did. Read More…

The air was orange tonight.

It was an ominous glow as I stepped out of the door and into the night sky. The glow that hints at a coming storm; a tornado that will disrupt everyday life. A glow that brings fear, unrest. As if the current political turmoil or other civil unrest might actually loom around the corner, waiting to tear us apart.

And the aroma rose and stank and lingered. It was bizarre and unique and terrifying in its own way, directing one’s attention even more to the strange and uncertain feeling that hovered around the neighborhood.

If one allowed themselves to get lost in the moment, then there is no telling where that road could take you. You could imagine that lurking nearby was some sort of zombie outbreak, or that the bombs might fall at any moment and looting would begin.

It was ominous, it was eerie, it was hanging thick in the atmosphere.

But at that moment, a light broke through. Specifically, it was the Little Caesar’s sign that I was standing under, which I then realized was the root of the strange orange glow.

And the woman in the car in front of me was smoking weed, so that’s why it smelled funny.

So I drove home and ate some pizza.

Later this year, I will get married on a golf course on the other side of the country.

I keep coming back to that statement because it’s a really hilarious one to me. It’s one I’m very excited about to say the least. But hilarious because golf has no significance to myself or my fiancé, it’s just a really good spot where her parents live that is pretty and we have access to. It’ll be a simple service. We’ve planned it as such. Simple and purposeful. We’ve tried to be that in our relationship. We’ve tried to take hold of the absurdity. We’ve tried to take hold of the opportunity every day to be purposeful for each other.

There was a moment in an airplane earlier this year where Atlanta seemed to stretch on forever. I really do think we were in the sky for over an hour and we were still above city lights. I’m sure what I was actually seeing at that point was somewhere in Alabama but after a day of flying from Seattle at 4:00am to Atlanta and then back west a time zone, everything was just blurring together. Read More…

People are essentially the same everywhere you go, but more so if the situations surrounding them are similar. Seems stupid to say, but I’m going somewhere with it.

If you go to a smaller city anywhere in the country and eat at a a small local favorite diner, you’ll encounter the same people. They will all wear hats and shirts supporting the local sports team, there will always be a at least one booth that’s a couple of older friends you can tell have been eating there together for years and years, and the waitress is 100% likely to call you “honey” or “sugar”. Obviously you can’t go to Chicago and expect it to be like Topeka, but you can go from somewhere like Jackson, Mississippi, to Everett, Washington and in some ways it’s the same. Sure, there are mountains right outside the window of the diner as opposed to the normal view in Jackson of a parking lot where nobody knows how to park. But it still feels a tad bit like home. Read More…