We're All Humans, Aren't We?

A Journey Always Begins With a Single Step

The human experience is rife of many wonderful, scary, intoxicating, boring, daunting and mystifying events. It’s been my experience that many things that we go through do not lend themselves to easy classification of one simple emotion.

For instance, the birth of my oldest child, Caleb, was an experience that was simultaneously exhilarating, terrifying, sublime and bewildering. It was an amazing goop of emotions that were mixed inseparably with each other. Such was my experience becoming a parent for the first time.

And such is the experience I am having right now. God and I are beginning a new journey together, and perhaps you can be part of it too.

But, let me back up and begin at the beginning.

For the past ten years or so, I worked for a local church as their director of communications, helping create their marketing, public relations and social media department from the ground up. This was a great job, one that fed my creative and analytical side, especially with writing and wordsmithing.

One of the many things I was in charge of was creating content for a weekly e-blast. In trying to come up with a hook that would entice our readership to open our emails every week, I wrote a weekly “mini-devotional” that opened the e-blast.

It worked and became a main selling point of the e-blast. Over the years, the devotionals became less “mini,” and it grew to be something that I looked forward to writing every week when I had the time. God, in my opinion, deserves all glory, and if my life experiences and my thoughts captured in written form bring Him glory and others closer to Him, then I did my work.

Each affirmation, coupled with my growing desire to write and teach, made me wonder what God is trying to tell me.

Unfortunately life marches continually on, bringing changes with it, lest we as people become stagnant. My position was eliminated due to budget considerations in May. On top of that, my wife discovered she was pregnant shortly after. Reeling from all this, we realized God was up to something, but we didn’t know what. Undeterred, we prayed that doors and windows would be opened for us. (We still haven’t stopped.)

During this period of job searching and job interviews, I started to work as a K-12 substitute teacher for several local deaf / hard-of-hearing school programs. Even though it is not steady or full-time work, I quickly realized it was a great fit for me because it fed my love for teaching and empowering others, especially others that don’t see themselves as empowered.

In the few months since I left my position, I had people, including some I never met before, approach me and tell me how much they miss receiving my thoughts each week. Each personal encounter kept affirming my desire to keep writing and teaching others to see God in their lives. Each affirmation, coupled with my growing desire to write and teach, made me wonder what God is trying to tell me.

While I continue to search for a full-time job (or possibly consider going back to school to continue to teach full-time) to help support my growing family, due to God’s persistence of sending people or affirmative emails my way and the common themes I’ve been hearing from others, I have become convicted that God has called me to trust Him at a greater – and frankly, terrifyingly – level that I’ve never trusted on Him before.

After praying and thinking about it (and seeing the small paychecks that teachers unfortunately receive), I decided to create a website out of a domain name that I sat on for years. What you see before you is the result. But I’m not stopping here.

I’m going even further because I want to see where God takes this. I feel that God is guiding me to a fuller relationship where my growing family and I are more and more reliant on Him, especially in the area of income. He wants me to listen and discover the very truths written in Psalm 40. He wants me to write for Him again, but this time in a much deeper and expanded capacity, a capacity that may include doing this full-time on top of my current part-time substitute teaching job.

I’m going even further because I want to see where God takes this.

So, in response to God’s calling, in addition to setting up this site, I’ve also set up a way that you can support me if you feel called to. You can find more information on how to by clicking the link above. The link will go into more detail on how this website will function and how often it will be updated. Please, also, if you feel called to it, share this site with anyone that you think will gain something from it.

It is my desire, above all, that people come to a deep, abiding understanding of our Creator and that will always remain the goal of this site.

So, here I am, embarking on a new journey and once again, I find myself at a loss of how to easily explain how I feel. It is with a goopy mix of trepidation, wonder, anxiety and plenty of hope that I take this first step of this journey. I have no idea where this journey will take my family and I, but I can’t wait to see where God takes this endeavor! May He be glorified always, and may others be blessed through this site and the work done here.

If you have any questions at all, please, please feel free to shoot me an email.

– Matt