Olio: Seeking a Trajectory

Artwork: Pascal Blanché https://www.artstation.com/artwork/NGrRRg

It’s been two years since I decided to discover myself. That’s a story I will save for another time, but is also the story of why you are here.

Before 2020 I was headed in one direction. I thought I knew what that was. But I was wrong. I’d already found moderate success (three published books, youtube modicum of success, still a pastor.) But there was more lurking under the carpet than mediocre pay for thankless work and dislike clicks from anonymous trolls. Lockdown land revealed not only a whiplash red-pill wake up from Captain Americana’s meme propagation of the American Casino, but the soul hard truth of a lifelong battle with CPTSD. In the depths of the living hell which was discovering the abuses of my childhood both at the hands of my family and the TV programming to which they abandoned me, thank God, I also experienced a vivid revival of the hunger which once brought me to Christianity in the first place.

The new direction I began to chart was not (and still is not) entirely clear to me, but it began with these words: “The Wisdom of the Man of Peace, Son of David, King in Jerusalem.”

Quickly I discovered that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. As the summer of two-weeks-to-slow-the-spread dragged into fall and Christmas, the spiderweb of “things I thought I knew but now know I don’t know” grew like an ever incompleting jigsaw puzzle of 6x4 notecards across my desktop (that’s right, I simultaneously embarked on a decision to embrace the fulcrum proposition of Sonke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes and cast myself heedlessly into a world built of as much analog information work as possible. Stay tuned for that as well.)

For someone who once upon a time “knew” that I wanted to be a writer and “knew” which books I was going to write, this became something of an existential crisis. On the one hand, I discovered that I was more interested in what I did not know than in repackaging what I already knew. On the other hand I also found that on many levels I did not what to write what I’d planned to write at all. In set a struggle of conscience that delved well below the service of my integrity as a public producer and scraped at the roots of my identity as a private person.

The result has been two years plus of wandering, tinkering with this, exploring that, and not really certain even what I was searching for, only certain that I was searching for something, and that desperately important to me, if not to everyone else.

In the meantime, astounding success chased me in other quarters. Mad Christian Mondays grew from being a “we need a newsletter to launch a comic book kickstarter” to a small but avid subscriber list devoted to not wallowing in the muck of these gray and dystopian days. A Brief History of Power (with Rev. Dr. Adam Koontz) exploded my potpourri podcast channel from 1500 to over 4000 downloads a week. Bringing my beloved and insightful bride Meridith onto the once-Saturday-Morning-Chill now Stop the White Noise youtube livecast opened us up to a whole new audience hungry to navigate the screen-addicted brainwashing world of family and childrearing. The Sons of Solomon prayer discipline likewise found a niche in men’s groups and quiet moments across the world (and is now into its third printing!)

Who would be disappointed with this track record?

But all the while I have felt like a hollow man. Walking away from screen entertainments, leaving digital gaming for the zombies, adopting carnivore nutrition, stepping onto the jiu jitsu mat and founding a gap-year bible school for men in Rockford still left me feeling like something was missing.

What was it? Not more time on a screen, that is for sure. Not another broadcast. Not another project. Not another half finished great book idea hovering over me like an albatross of my own mediocrity.

Writing. Just, plain writing. Today. Enough. No more.

So here we are. I think I am on to something, at least for the moment. I have a batch load of back content sitting on hand screaming, “Do something with me!” I have book beginnings and tidbit punches and unsolved riddles and study notes galore. I don’t know where I’m going to start, and I don’t know where I’m going to finish. But I do know that I need to do this. I need to share. I need to speak. I need to stop thinking that I am alone with these thoughts.

So buckle in if you’re up for the ride. There will be rhyme and there will be reason, and there will be order, though it may not be apparent to the casual observer. But if there is one thing that the smart noting chaos of my overflowing desktop has taught me, it is that there is always a design, if only you can view it from the high enough angle.

“To know the difference between wisdom and discipline, to distinguish the words of distinction.” (Prov 1:2)

Descarte got it backwards: I am, and I think. That means there is a great deal more going on than meets the eye.