When I was a child, my house was a source of little deliberation.
My parents provided the property and I bounced off the walls as my limbs lengthened. As I graduated from educational institutions and struck out on my own that shifted significantly.
I remember staying up the night after I signed the paperwork that made the property within the survey lines my responsibility. I remember wondering if I had made a mistake. I remember the money, planning, and time I poured into the collection of bricks, mortar, and wood to try to make sure that this investment wouldn’t leave me disappointed.
As I get older and give birth to children that bear my last name, my relationship with homes, of which I’ve owned more than one of, has shifted.
Now, instead of an investment or a set piece for social media, it’s become a workshop for the building of human beings. A backdrop for memories that bring smiles and tears to my eyes. A gentle remind of God’s provision and care for me.
It’s an interesting time to live in America. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the beginning of the end of a all time great empire, or the re-awakening of a sleeping giant and a return to the things that made it exceptional. Billionaires gobble up media empires and create mini-bubbles of narrative that swaths of the population inherit like mini-Wanda Maximoff. Families at the bottom struggle to make ends meet, the middle hangs on for dear life, and the rich shrug as they scroll in 1000 count sheets under the lazy fans of their sport themed accessory dwelling unit.
The situation seems entrenched, although the status quo is relatively recent. There also seems to be a subtle miasma that hangs over the land, hidden behind the brightly lit screens of our handheld devices. In the twitches of fingers that seem to search for the nearest available screen to scroll, children that sit on benches with phones that show increasingly dangerous, weird, or both, entertainers who try to hold the attention that seems to be harder to grasp than ever.
It’s the distraction more than anything else that robs me of hope.
I dream of a time when America was great. Great in it’s hopes and dreams. Great in its aspirations and willingness to do whatever it took to make them reality.
I was not alive see this hey day, but I read of this time. I’ve read essays from men who don’t look like me, yet mourned the maltreatment of others. I’ve heard speeches from men who were committed to not just the pursuit of another dollar but of legacy. The echoes of these ideas have reached me, stranded on the shores of the first quarter of the 21st century. The intellectually blessed and fortunate industrialists of this era, whine of maltreatment and seek to gather spoils which rot as they tossed to the winds of ego or fear or rage. The political leaders cower in the shadow of bullies or retire to their chambers and send out auto-reply letters to the concerns of those they serve.
I clack away at keyboards and stare out of windows as I dream of breathing deep into my life some deeper meaning.
I worry for my children and grow tired of their yearning and tremble at the disappointments that stalk the paths ahead of them.
Mostly I pray.
For my own weakness, for the weakness of my fellow man, and for a God that will use us in spite of these failings.
It’s been a minute since I’ve had the urge or inclination to write. At least in a digital format. One of the hardest things to come by in the latter portion of my life is free time to process, create, or think. There is so much that needs attending to – and less time then I would like available.
Which is how I find myself at the kitchen table at 2:23am after having been awoken by the children as they crept into our bedroom. I’m grateful for their existence and truthfully the opportunity to transmute a bit of insomnia into something potentially useful or meaningful. My last post was at the end of 2023 and the list of changes and developments – mostly happy, thank god, is significant. Some of the most memorable include travels to the UK to visit my sister after her graduation, a day trip to Paris during the set up for the summer Olympics, multiple family trips (Florida, Bahamas cruise with inlaws, Lisbon), and moving out of our first home in west atlanta to move to a better school district and a home that worked better for us.
Just finding the pictures that encapsulated 2024 took me back through the highlights of a whirlwind year. It’s helping me to be a bit more grateful- for a part of the year we were living out of a 824 square foot duplex that we own as we searched for our next home. The circumstances of our home and its eventual purchase were evidence of God’s hand and provision. The property was actually under contract when we found it and yet we never really doubted that it was ours. It’s serving the purpose we hoped it would and every day I’m grateful that we have the opportunity to own it during this season of our lives.
We’re currently expecting our 3rd child and I find myself needing to consistently lean on God in order to feel like I have anything close to the bandwidth to take care of family I’m charged with. As the minutes march towards daybreak, I think I’ll pause this missive with the hope to return and add more as time allows.
Why hello, its been a minute since we last spoke. I think around this time last year and here I am again – following up with another wrap up and review of the year. Its been an interesting year with some surprises that I would never have seen coming.
So let’s start with the curve ball that I did not see coming. Our second baby daughter was born at the last possible moment in 2022. She graced us with her presence and after a couple of months, my wife noticed that she seemed that there seemed to be some craniofacial abnormalities. After a couple months of observation and a couple visits to the doctors office it was confirmed that our baby girl had craniosynostosis and would need to have surgery within the first 6 months of her life.
This was quite a bit to take in, as our little 6 month old stared up at us from her crib. After consultations and many late nights researching what would be involved and what the consequence of inaction was – we pulled the trigger and in May of 2023 our little girl had dual neurology and plastic surgery with a 3 day inpatient stay in the hospital following.
Thankfully our little girl came through the surgery with flying colors.
Around this same time my wife and I decided to walk down the pathway of setting up one of our units as a airbnb. A cool $10,000 later we had a functioning Airbnb and although its performing right at expectations we are still working out the kinks. I’m hopefully we can continue to iron any wrinkles and make it even more efficient.
I won’t go quite into as much depth for some of the other events of the year but I thought the example above gave you a taste of the most impactful events of the year.
Accomplishments:
Learning
Took a Igbo Classes and learned a good bit about my own culture
Also took VBA scripting class and learned the beginnings of object oriented programming – depending on the effort I put into continuing to hone this skill there is wide applicability into automating many of the monthly tasks I accomplish every month at work
Explored Access as potential database for creating monthly reports and stumbled upon PowerQuery as a improved option.
Completed Revenue Cycle Certificate from ASHP
“Day one or one Day”
Unknown
Work/Career:
Received Novartis Payout which topped off our emergency fund and 6 month savings! ($62k)
Converted a long term rental into an Airbnb and started receiving guests
Travel:
Traveled to NC to pic up Keisha’s family then traveled to DC to visit the African American Museum at the National Mall (March)
Traveled by myself to the 340B Conference for a couple of wonderful sun-soaked days
Family joined a couple days later and we had a great time exploring San Diego, the USS Midway Museum
We also visited the Sesame Street Theme Park and then spent the last day enjoying a blustery view of the seals off the San Diego Beach (March)
Visited Destin, Fl and had a amazing stay at the Henderson Resort -which was just lovely (July)
Visited Cancun for my Birthday (August)
We visited Montego Bay Jamaica with both Keisha’s Family and Mine (July)
Visited Miramar Beach with the church family for a couples/family retreat (September)
Ended the year hanging with my family in California for 11 days and then finishing out the year in Portland.
Traveling has been by far the biggest expense for our family this year and I 100% value each and everyone of these trips.
This is by no means a complete account of the year but it does help me to look back as I try to get a handle on what 2024 might look like.
Endings are complicated. Even if they are happy endings, the feelings of loss can be tough to put your hands around.
I’m in the midst of one of those endings currently.
Over the next week I’ll be ending a job with an employer and trying to figure out what the next step is. This is the first job loss I’ve ever experienced as an adult.
Salient details include the fact that this job wasn’t due to performance issues, or anything personal. It was mostly related to market conditions and an organizational decision to restructure. The severance will allow plenty runway as I try to figure out the next steps for my family and I.
Still.
I find myself processing the feelings and cycling through emotions like relief, sadness, and a shadow feeling of loss that doesn’t match up with reality. It’s so interesting to try to look into the deep of my emotions and try to identify what is actually happening.
I’m trying to stay centered on a couple of facts as I try to figure out career-wise what to pivot into.
God is not surprised by this development
God knew and knows my responsibilities and the bills
God is still God
I’m also trying to figure out how to balance the priorities of a growing family, work, ambition, and rest.
I know that at the end of the day- my biggest challenge will be resting in the strength of the Lord as he works everything out.
Thank you for allowing me to process aloud and I’m sure I’ll be back as I work through all of these feelings.
This post is specifically for those trying to walk in the footsteps of Christ. Who find themselves having a hard time trusting God’s god and perfect will for them because of the roadblocks of what you see. Faith is perhaps the hardest part of following God. Mostly, for me, because faith requires pushing past feelings. Right now, I’m feeling beaten down, disappointed, and having a hard time mustering up hope for the future in certain areas of my life. My usual route when faced with these feelings is to give in to them, to buckle under the pain and the imagined future I’ve created that is an extension of my current feelings into a absurdly depressing future.
There a couple of things that are helping me this time to stop short of getting on the ride towards hopelessness.
Perspective – I’ve been here before. I’ve seen the consequences of hopelessness and the destination it leads me to. The final destination is nowhere near where I really want to be.
Recognizing the fact that my feelings fluctuate and will not be the same in 4 days, 4 hours , and potentially 4 minutes. Letting such ethereal, fleeting feelings (no matter how all-encompassing and deep) serve as the basis for my behavior only ends up hurting me
Understanding finally that I have a power in these moments. A power that may not make me feel better immediately, but one that will help me to know how to move forward in spite of my feelings.
This power is the power to choose differently. The power to decide to trust God even when everything that I see and the voice in my head is telling me that I should trust my own understanding and seek my own happiness vs. trusting the position that God has anointed me for.
While thinking today, I was brought to the passage in Ezekiel about a certain valley. It reminds me that no matter how lost a cause may seem, there is still hope with our God.
The Lord took hold of me, and I was carried away by the Spirit of the Lord to a valley filled with bones. He led me all around among the bones that covered the valley floor. They were scattered everywhere across the ground and were completely dried out. Then he asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones become living people again?’ ‘O Sovereign Lord,’ I replied, ‘You alone know the answer to that.’ Then he said to me, ‘Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, listen to the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Look! I am going to put breath into you and make you live again! I will put flesh and muscles on you and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” So I spoke this message, just as he told me. Suddenly as I spoke, there was a rattling noise all across the valley. The bones of each body came together and attached themselves as complete skeletons. Then as I watched, muscles and flesh formed over the bones..but they still had no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Speak a prophetic message to the winds, son of man..”Come, O Breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so they may live again. So I spoke the message as he commanded me, and breath came into their bodies. They all came to life and stood up on their feet – a great army”
Ezekiel 37:1-10
Understanding the power and love of our God is what I’m leaning on as I look at the dry bones in the valley of certain areas of my life.
I’m going to have to rest on God’s grace and ability to fix even the most dessicated situation.
Outright lies aren’t the most dangerous species of falsehood. In fact, they’re probably the equivalent of poisonous frogs: bright, deadly, but they don’t kill you unless you touch them.
There is another species of lie, that is much more pervasive and hard to see, the equivalent of a mosquito.
These lies are the sort that parade around in broad daylight as the truth and seem so compelling that they fool, not just the slow or dim-witted but the brightest among us. We’ll call these “alternative facts”. Why are they so dangerous and what are examples of this species of un-reality?
These types of lies are dangerous for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest is that these lies point to a time in the present or the past and promise something that you can’t really verify until you’ve arrived. This means that you have to invest your most valuable resources – time and energy in order to discover the foundation of these lies is actually not true.
They also are held by so many people that they seep into the common cultural glue of a society and because they are seemingly so obvious they are never really questioned at a society level.
An easy example, that I struggle with is the lie that “Financial Freedom will equal happiness”.
Why is this lie more dangerous than the lie “if you jump off a bridge you’ll fly”?
To prove that financial freedom you’d have to INVEST quite a bit of time figuring out how to become financially free, perhaps giving up 4-5 decades in the pursuit, and because this is a difficult thing to accomplish, you’ll most certainly have to sacrifice things along the way. Perhaps passions, friends, time with family, having a family, investing in your children’s emotional lives, etc. This may not be the case for everyone, but at some level, sacrifice will have to happen at the altera of this lie.
The other part that is hard to unravel is that there is some percentage of truth (perhaps 60-70%) found in this lie. Some gradation of financial margin unquestionably leads to a happier life. Struggling to find food to eat or a place to live usually does not give birth to deep happiness when it’s not chosen voluntarily. This slow improvement on the small scale makes it hard for us to stop seeking it at a source of happiness when we’ve perhaps, unknowingly, reached the end of the happiness that this is able to give us.
We can confuse our lifestyle for our life.
We start to work harder, sacrificing more, and resting less, in order to achieve some dreamed of level of luxury that like our first paycheck will allow us to feel some higher level of satisfaction. At some point this is not only impossible but harmful.
We leave families, don’t enter community, avoid rest in pursuit of a lifestyle that hustle culture says will lead to the promised land of luxury for something that will ultimately disappointed if achieved alone.
Deadliest animal = Mosquito
It may be worth it for all of us to dig deep into the things we believe in to make sure that we’re not following seductive lies that point us to nowhere.
The light of experience is a interesting phenomenon. It doesn’t necessarily shine in front of you, although it can sometimes give you the shape of things you may have seen before.
Considered experience actually does the opposite and shines brightly on the past. It helps you to see more clearly the past and the ways that you, in the moment, either correctly perceived or misperceived the events of the day. More often than not, one of the ways that you see clearer in hindsight is the removal of the fog of emotions that so often hinder our vision. Without the pressing emotions of fear, lust, anger, or ambition attached to a specific course of action we can more clearly see what should have happened and why or why not we chose a particular route.
Often we may notice that fear so often achieves the goal of dissuading us from a brave course of action by minimizing who we think we are and consequently what we think we deserve.
This is fear’s favorite game.
Distracting us from our identity and helping us to choose a sub-optimal course of action based on our fears about what we are capable of and what is possible for someone like us.
Our identity plays such a huge role in determining the light that we see ourselves and is subject to so many variables – the culture we were raised in, the words our parents used on us, the relationships we entered into before we knew how to create boundaries around our identity. Our identities can so often be damaged, inaccurate, or downright fiction, as we’ve so often seen on singing competitions.
Because of the fickle nature of the identities that we’ve defined by our own thoughts and perceptions over the course of our lives, the importance of finding an identity that isn’t subject to the winds of human machinations is beyond important.
Ask the many people who have built an identity and found out later that this identity isn’t robust enough to carry them through a full life.
What do rich men who become poor do?
How do beautiful women who become old or ugly feel?
How do overachievers who become sick or infirm think of themselves?
What happens when the coolest among us, become the creepy old person in the singles bar?
Or the toughest guy in the neighborhood finds himself in a prison full of the toughest men in the city, state, country?
When the identity we’ve invested in for years no longer seems to be viable in the world we inhabit, this can open the door to being lost, to midlife crises, and to destroying everything we’ve built in order to figure out who are we actually.
Our identities should be built on something more solid than the vagaries of the cultural moment or the words of the flawed people who raised us.
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Problem: Adulthood is a bit of a blur. If your not careful, and most times even if you are, responsibilities start to pile up. The hours grow slippery and seem to slip through your fingers. This gets even more clear once you have children. Children can become all-consuming and leave you with not a lot of energy for anything other than sleep and recovery.
We’ve all met people who seem to move through life with the enthusiasm of a sloth. Seemingly bound on all sides by responsibility and the prison of debt – whether financial, emotional, or spiritual. They may have the trappings of a successful life but their spirit seems heavy.
How do we remain afloat as the waters of responsibility rise around us?
There is a poem from Kahllil Gibran that I think of when I consider the how we should structure our life – mentally and spiritually as we acquire responsibilities.
This poem reminds me of a couple things – that the dream of freedom can itself become a prison and that freedom is not the absence of responsibility but the enjoyment of life and pursuit of purpose despite the responsibilities.
That’s one reason I think it’s very important that we make time to pursue the things that feed you at least one hour a day. Make this pursuit a habit and prioritize your enjoyment even as the responsibilities of life multiply.
I know this is hard to do, but I also know its worth it.
I can’t remember the last time that I used a compass. Perhaps when I was a cub scout, searching for ways to accumulate badges as if each were worth its weight in gold. Somewhere in my outdoor adventures, there was a time where I held some version of the small round device that magically, no matter where I was in the world, would point me North.
The compass needle wasn’t influenced by the obstacles that may have lain in the pathway north or how easy the path southward is.
A compass has one job, and that is to point you in the direction that it is aligned with.
Life was much simpler as a cub scout. As you grow, black and white is replaced with a whirlpool of gray and possibilities of what to pursue multiply, which is both liberating and paralyzing. If I can become anything I want to be, how do I know what I SHOULD be?
Do I follow my passion, my reason, my religion?
How do I know where all of the possibilities intersect with the gifts that lie within me?
How do I prepare for the future while respecting and appreciating the present?
Balancing and navigating these questions is the work of adulthood.
If you’ve read this far, your probably wondering, ok, well, what do you propose be a guiding principal for the decisions we’re making as we’re navigating life?
Now, I think its important that we define what kind of fear I’m referring to.
The fear I’m referring to isn’t the bone-chilling fear of being in a dark alley with a shadowy figure approaching. I’m not advocating pursuing life-threatening situations as a means to find meaning. For most of the people reading this, your fear isn’t related to survival or making sure that you evade predators, but probably more along the lines of being exposed as being inadequate, or failing at something hard, or losing someone important to you.
Also I’m not sure if I’m advocating for using fear as a guiding principle as much as a compass that points towards something true. Just because the compass points north doesn’t mean that you should be heading north. However, knowing what direction is North is helpful no matter which direction your heading in.
So, why fear? What information does fear give us? When should we listen? How do we know when to ignore it and move forward?
In my life, fear is a marker of the edge of my belief. Fear gives me a definite boundary for exactly where my faith stops. Understanding this boundary is important because often times, when we feel the tremor of fear, we do everything we can to unconsciously arrange our lives not to approach that boundary again, in the hope that we can avoid the discomfort. This is, perhaps, a mistake. In the interest of growth, it may be worth it to sit on the edge of that boundary and inspect it for what truth is it conveying?
Am I afraid because I made something other than God my source?
Am I afraid because I don’t want to disappoint others or myself?
Is this fear rational or emotionally driven? Is this fear a product of worry about the future or regret about the past?
Sitting at the edge of your fear will give you INFORMATION. This information if you allow it to can inform you of the path towards growth.
This is not easy work. Easy work makes for a hard life.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”
Live.Ordietryin 