Subscriber Update: Not Dressed Up

Acts 10, Heaviness, and Earth

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Weight

This week has been heavy, and I don’t want to dress that up.

This week we saw the Missouri Synod take another black eye as a sitting member of the Council of Presidents was arrested by the Federal Government for grave wickedness. For such a time as this… If I try not to speak, His Word is in me like a fire in my bones. I am weary of holding it in. Indeed, I cannot.

Every picture in this email is a link. ☝️

Financially, I’m in between worlds.

I’ve started a day job. It is a gift. It has high upside. My boss is a godly man whom I love as a friend.

It’s also not what I am trained to do.

The bad news is that on Friday morning around 11am I felt like my life was a total failure.

The good news is that on Friday night I felt a sudden disappointment that I couldn’t resume work until Monday.

There is signal.

You.

Not enough to live on, but increasing. Thank you. My ability to provide for my family (when they are ready for it) is not collapsed yet. But neither are we secure.

There is overwhelming tension here. I stand in utter uncertainty. That fear is real. I’m building for a future that may not even exist, and that’s not theoretical. It presses on the body every day. It aches the heart.

I wake up alone. I go to bed alone:

I’m grieving the fracture of a covenant that will either rest on submission to Jesus Christ or it will not. Our mutual failure to understand each other didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of a home that became a courtroom. That kind of confusion wears everyone down.

I’m waiting in peace, trusting that the God of miracles can restore life to the dead, and that what He joins together He can hold together. Hurt is easily weaponized, but I’m seeking the Spirit of repentance while also actively learning that I will do no one any real good by accepting lies as though they were true. That is the definition of integrity.

A godly man swears to his own hurt and does not change.

I’m angry—and anger is healthy, even though it is not wise to act on it. It is just as wrong not to be angry at those who can protect truth but choose not to, at those who elevate expediency over brotherhood, at those who bow to the spirit of the age.

I’m OK.

I don’t know how else to say it. Building for what might be while praying for what you’d rather have is enough to tear any man apart. But I find myself asking Jesus Christ simply to help me stand. I find myself standing. I find myself more clear every day that the only one with a right to judge me is ascended to heaven with mercy in His hands.

If you want to know more, the work of David Edgington is proving illuminating:

I choose mercy.

I want nothing other.

So I’m not going to hide the struggle from you who are supporting me financially. This is what it looks like to carry a cross without a script. I’m not detailing private matters, but I won’t lie about what is more than public if you know where to look. If you’re reading what I write, then you’re not here for a brand. You’re here because you recognize a man seeking the Kingdom under pressure.

I don’t have a clean direction. I have a day job and my honesty. Some call it pride. Some call it crazy. I call it gratitude, and I won’t give it up for the whole world.

Thank you for being here—not as consumers, but as witnesses.

Earth

Creative work is hard right now. Trying to re-enter story work while my life is in upheaval is another avenue that reveals that the spiritual friction is real. Writing fiction that actually belongs to you—your voice, your world, your risk—can’t be done on a productivity whip. You can produce content for someone else on command. You can execute tasks. But to make something that is yours, you need a baseline of safety.

That said, the work hasn’t stopped. In the background, we’ve cleaned up Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 is now updated for reading.

It’s a small step, but it matters, because Earth is not a side project—it is the major creative work of my next year. That means it can’t live only in the moments when I “feel like it.” It has to earn a place inside a reshaped workweek, even while everything else is being renegotiated.

There’s another layer here that’s harder to admit. Making art is not just about expression; it’s about offering something to the people you love. And when the people you’re oriented toward don’t want it, don’t affirm it, or quietly frown at it—even without overt rejection—it drains something deep. Not being liked is survivable. Being met with indifference or disapproval from those you’re doing it for is far more corrosive. That’s where self-erasure starts to creep in: the quiet thought that maybe who you are is the problem.

So this is my season of resisting erasure. Continuing to write Earth not because it’s rewarded, not because it’s easy, but because it’s true. It exists because I’m choosing not to disappear.

If you take anything away, this week it is this: neither should you.