Thank you for reading. Seriously. These take a long time to make, and the fact that you read what I write means the literal world and keeps me writing.

It’s been almost a year since my last newsletter, and I’m going to be honest: doing these is scary. It’s difficult to examine the space between past letters and the preset and evaluate what’s been achieved or sat on the steaming back burner.

I am however committed to keeping these coming.

As I work towards my EP release this fall, you will be receiving much more music, writing, and other creative drops that you won’t want to miss out on.

So again, thank you for reading. It means the whole world to me.

A Life Update

• I moved to Nashville, Tennessee in October.

• I live in a small house with a few other Catholic men called the Joseph House on Delta Avenue.

• I played with the Regnum Christ Music Collective in Idaho, Texas, Kansas, and all across the southern coast.

• I now work on Broadway at Ole Red after restaurant-hopping a bit to find somewhere flexible to support my music.

• I played five weeks of summer camps this summer. Yes. Five.

• I completed my first half-iron man this past month,

• I’ve been working on and will be releasing my first-ever EP (any batch of songs that go together but aren’t enough to make an album) and it comes out this fall. A HUGE step for me.

• I turn 26 next week.

An Excerpt | It’s Just Swimming

As my breath slowed, I rounded the buoy (after having a few of the kayak-mounted lifeguards verbally confirm I was doing “okay”), and set out for the next one.

And slowly my breathing stabilized.

I continued like this for about twenty minutes, swapping between freestyle and breast stroke (who named these anyway?) and keeping my heart rate down in the 140’s.

And then the realization that I was going to survive kicked in. Right about as I rounded the second buoy.

All of a sudden I became aware of the perfect temperature of the water. The sunlight dancing off the ripples, the splashing of the other swimmers around me. The lack of venomous creatures in the beautifully murky Tennessee water.

And I smiled.

“Oh,” I thought, “it’s just swimming.”

My friends. My family.

How many times have we been halted at an impasse in life, scared to move forward, scanning our surroundings in bleak despair, only to realize the way forward simply required moving, well, forward.

I, for one, have felt that way of late.

Psyching myself out with fears that may not ever come to pass. Attempting to swim the entire lake in my mind before I’ve crossed even the first buoy.

Before I’ve sunk into a rhythm.

Before I’ve sunk into a prayer.

And the warm, familiar embrace of my Heavenly Father.

You see, as powerful of a motivator as fear can be, there comes a point past frenzied action when fear transforms into a crippling, anxious force. A force that scares our childlike minds into going no further.

A fear that turns our tricycles around and crushes dreams that have only begun to breathe.

Sainthood, achieving the fullness of who we’re called to be, isn’t difficult. It’s just swimming.

But the fears wrapped around it like mangled hands make it seem impossible to achieve. The anxiety like a thorny weed that envelopes what once shone purely and undoubtedly from the bottom of our souls until all we’re left with is a heavy mass in our chest.

A lump in our throat.

A raised heart rate in the middle of a murky lake.

I can deny all I want that I’m scared. I can swim forward hard and fast as long as my lungs will allow for it until, tired of treading water, I slip under the surface and drift to the bottom.

I was made to thrive. To smile. To swim.

God help the evil one when I finally learn that instead of logically thinking through all the many fears he’s entangled me with, I must simply slow my heart rate. Acknowledge the sun. Acknowledge the waves. Put my face in the water.

And keep swimming.

Unas Cositas

(A few little things)

I’m crazy ADHD so I’m usually reading a stack of books, have a list of artists that spans most genres, and can’t stick with a TV series after the first episode. Here’s a few little things that I’ve been consistent with.

A Book

• The Space Trilogy (C.S. Lewis) - I have no words. If you enjoy books like 1984 and Brave New World, this series is a serious Christian’s take on where the world is headed, expressed through his natural gift of storytelling.

  You can find it here:

A Song

• Conversations with My Wife (Jon Bellion) - Jon Bellion is an artist that I aspire to be in every sense of that word, and all of his music is the perfect blend of simplicity and intimacy. WARNING this song does contain profanity, but it’s well placed and honest. He has a way of writing songs with a commercial sound that take one deeper than the usual commercial sentiments.

  You can find it here:

A Podcast

• And the Writer Is (Ross Golan) - I’ve been listening to this podcast for about a year now, and if you want the stories behind artists and songwriters and the real human growth behind their career, go give this podcast a listen. It’s a life goal that I end up on it one day.

  You can find it here:

A Film

• F1 (2025) - As a young man looking to settle in different aspects of his life, but with a heavy adventure streak, watching this movie changed my perspective on what being, well, a badass, entails. The protagonist (Brad Pitt) learns what it means to have a real community based on his identity and not on his achievements.

  You can find it here:

An EP

Over the last few years I’ve been writing and recording songs with my heard-earned serving money, and this fall I finally get to release five of those songs together. An EP is musician speech for extended play, which is any number of songs released together that doesn’t constitute an album.

Don’t get me wrong.

There will be an album.

Just not yet.

But before I release an album I need to garner a significant amount of fans so my music gets listened to and noticed…

I love creating for its own sake, but to build a career on this I need to focus on building a real fanbase.

If you’ve read this far down, then I would assume you’re interested in or are already a huge part of that real fanbase. In that case, get hype.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE UNRELEASED SONGS

Share it with AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE.

This link builds my text list of fans and allows me to advertise directly to the people who want to hear my music. Eventually it will turn into shows. Then a tour. Then more music.

You get the picture.

This fall five of these songs will be yours on all streaming platforms.

A Closing

This past year was extremely difficult. Change is never easy, even for someone accustomed to major changes more often than others my age. I've learned some hard lessons about growth, community, identity, and time.

All of which have confirmed that I have, in fact, moved to the right place.

That I will write, record, and perform music until the day I die.

That I will lead worship and help spark a revival in my Church which I hope long outlives me.

And that I need to slow down.

This fall I’m taking less travel gigs and working to settle myself in Nashville and dedicate time to my craft. I’ve developed greatly as a songwriter in the 10 months that I’ve spent in Nashville, and it has everything to do with the amount that I’ve written.

If you would like to hop on a call in the upcoming months and stay in touch or grab coffee if you’re local, I can be found at 225-235-3042.

In Hoc Signo Vinces

And like any good athlete who never went pro, I peaked in high school, and ever since have watched professional sports not as an onlooker but as a self-titled sideline coach.

Damaging chips and dip more than a defense and whispering to anyone who might be listening how important keeping strikers offsides is in a World Cup game.

Sound familiar?

If not then you’re a better person than I. Consider it a stepping stone.

However, when my dad texted me in the spring and told me he was going to compete in a half Iron Man race in August close to Nashville (close, mind you, means over two hours away), I told myself this was one thing I could do so that he would never be able to accuse me of never having worked on our relationship.

Which is optimal, by the way.

I do my best not to fail, he does his best to hide his criticism.

Like I said: optimal.

I took this race as an opportunity to work towards a common goal together, hoping maybe it would take his mind off of the goals he would rather me work towards. In my family, we don’t do things halfway.

So this common goal was a 70.3.

A 1900 km swim

A 56 mile bike

And the cherry on top, a 13.1 mile run, or in layman’s terms a half marathon.

All in lovely 97 degree Tennessee August weather.

In my family, it takes things that have the potential to break to fix things that have been broken.

Fast forward.

I’m wearing a tight swim cap, tight triathlon shorts, and standing on a wet dock surrounded by an alienish crowd of similarly-clad triathletes. A sea of yellow-capped, anxious, muscular, tattooed humans staring out at the mile of water we were about to swim. And here I was, an anxious alien desperately controlling my breathing as I sized up the lake circumference ahead.

Anxious actually doesn’t quite cut it.

Terrified.

Yes.

Terrified.

The terror of understanding the full weight of what I had committed to do, and seeing for the first time in my life a mile of water between me and my goal of, not finishing, but beginning a 56-mile bike.

Now I’m a Louisiana boy through and through: I’ve seen plenty of water. Enough to know that the water I was about to swim was empty, at least in my terms. No alligators, snapping turtles, or even copperheads. Just fish,

Unlike me: a very muscular, non-fish attempting to do for an hour what they do for a lifetime.

And my terror slowed me down. Immeasurably. A swim that should have taken about 45 minutes (based off of how I had been training in between travel weeks) took me about an hour and fifteen minutes.

1:15

Because I was terrified.

The first buoy to reach was about a fifth of the entire distance I had to swim, and the moment I panicked was the moment I looked up after Aussie-crawling for what felt like fifteen minutes.

And I was halfway there.

Panic set in slowly, like how a chill creeps its way from your fingertips into your very chest, and I felt my heart rate increase as I looked around and realized I was the last yellow cap (these designate the ones dumb enough to attempt a half iron man) for a few hundred feet, and the next segment of the race, those attempting the sprint (a far smaller distance) were grouping up to start.

I looked down at my watch and realized my heart rate was at 175. I was freaking out. The realization that I couldn’t expend all my energy on this first event flared through my brain and I began to shift my focus from the yellow buoy to slowing my heart rate.

And I crept forward.

Foot by foot.

Painfully slow.

But slowly my heart rate sank and I began to breathe as normally as one can in the middle of a large body of water.

As my breath slowed, I rounded the buoy (after having a few of the kayak-mounted lifeguards verbally confirm I was doing “okay”), and set out for the next one.

And slowly my breathing stabilized.

I continued like this for about twenty minutes, swapping between freestyle and breast stroke (who named these anyway?) and keeping my heart rate down in the 140’s.

And then the realization that I was going to survive kicked in. Right about as I rounded the second buoy.

All of a sudden I became aware of the perfect temperature of the water. The sunlight dancing off the ripples, the splashing of the other swimmers around me. The lack of venomous creatures in the beautifully murky Tennessee water.

And I smiled.

“Oh,” I thought, “it’s just swimming.”

My friends. My family.

How many times have we been halted at an impasse in life, scared to move forward, scanning our surroundings in bleak despair, only to realize the way forward simply required moving, well, forward.

I, for one, have felt that way of late.

Psyching myself out with fears that may not ever come to pass. Attempting to swim the entire lake in my mind before I’ve crossed even the first buoy.

Before I’ve sunk into a rhythm.

Before I’ve sunk into a prayer.

And the warm, familiar embrace of my Heavenly Father.

You see, as powerful of a motivator as fear can be, there comes a point past frenzied action when fear transforms into a crippling, anxious force. A force that scares our childlike minds into going no further.

A fear that turns our tricycles around and crushes dreams that have only begun to breathe.

Sainthood, achieving the fullness of who we’re called to be, isn’t difficult. It’s just swimming.

But the fears wrapped around it like mangled hands make it seem impossible to achieve. The anxiety like a thorny weed that envelopes what once shone purely and undoubtedly from the bottom of our souls until all we’re left with is a heavy mass in our chest.

A lump in our throat.

A raised heart rate in the middle of a murky lake.

I can deny all I want that I’m scared. I can swim forward hard and fast as long as my lungs will allow for it until, tired of treading water, I slip under the surface and drift to the bottom.

I was made to thrive. To smile. To swim.

God help the evil one when I finally learn that instead of logically thinking through all the many fears he’s entangled me with, I must simply slow my heart rate. Acknowledge the sun. Acknowledge the waves. Put my face in the water.

And keep swimming.

It’ll be a red day for that little devil on my right shoulder. Hell, the current might even spirit him away.

You know the feeling.

God moved some special things in my soul (churchese for f*cked with my sense of purpose and identity) and I needed to walk in the woods and let my mind wander a little.

I’m new to Nashville, so I found a small set of trails out in Franklin that I could walk with impunity in my chacos and let myself attempt to process the divine in the short time I had before my evening engagement.

God has a way of saying exactly what I need to hear without it being what I wanted to hear, which brings small joy and great frustration. But while I was looking for answers in the “what am I supposed to do now God now that I moved my whole life up to Tennessee” he simply answered with

“You’re not bitter anymore.”

Mind you I’ve been bitter for a long, long time. Although I’m certain this is absolutely foreign to your saintly ears, this concept of bitterness.

It’s the same sensation of arriving to your destination with a bag that’s slightly too big. You and your friend look at you and wonder why on earth you packed so much, and you immediately feel self conscious for pouring a glass and packing half your wardrobe.

Bear with me this is going somewhere I swear.

When I arrived to Nashville I felt like I was walking around with a massive Appalachian Trail - size backpack on full of trauma and hurt. And I’m a generally positive person. I can only imagine the backpacks some of y’all carry around, and I hurt for you.

But recently I’ve noticed the bitterness fade, almost like a wine stain on a nice shirt. I’m simply too young and naive to consider it fading for good, and frankly too tired to continue to apply bleach.

And herein lies the rub,

that I’ve only ever considered forgiveness to be the constant application of bleach to a stain that has stubbornly sunken into the very threads of the fabric of my soul.

And like it or not I have a Bucee’s gas pump line of folks that I need to forgive, and I can only assume the same for you, too.

But my issue with forgiveness as it seems to be taught in CCD is that it lies on us to forgive and eradicate any sense of bitterness we may be feeling, stubbornly applying a compress to a wound we haven’t yet taken the time to examine.

Treating forgiveness and the removal of bitterness as a button on a gaming console, rather than a stain that takes time to wash out.

Feelings don’t disappear. Hurt doesn’t simply melt into the shadows. Wine stains on white clothing don’t simply wash out with a deep and frustrated scrub.

Nope.

Share

I moved to Nashville with a backpack full of bitterness, that I had carefully loaded inside since I didn’t have the slightest clue how best to deal with it. Layer upon careful layer would take time to unpack and deal with individually, and my early writing sessions gave me the perfect opportunity.

And write I did.

I have numerous songs now that I’m planning on releasing this coming year that cover the various stages of heartbreak and depression I walked through in the past year before I moved. I’m proud of them, and they’re honest.

Painfully so.

But can I be even more honest for a second?

I feel as if the wash cycle of my forgiveness is complete on many of the things I was writing about. And I’m perfectly fine with that.

There is a notable difference between healing and wallowing. The first requires a sort of passion and resurrection, with pain as an inevitable and necessary room in the cavern approaching the heart. The second is a reliving of that shallow cavern, with no particular end in mind.

Heaven forbid I spend the rest of my time in Nashville in that first shallow cavern.

You see, reliving our pain is completely necessary. Examining the stain to understand how deeply it has seeped into the threads of our fabric is entirely necessary and effective.

But once that’s done, the remaining bitterness can be shed almost like a snakeskin. There is no need for the protective layer anymore. It is in fact itchy and dull, old and used.

There is no place for bitterness in the Kingdom of God.

This is not to say that it is a simple matter to lay down bitterness and bury the hatchet for good.

A thousand times not.

The hatchet was earned, the war was fought, and the wounds may be still fresh for many of us.

But the peace we’re offered by the Great Spirit (if you will) makes our bitterness pale-faced in comparison. This peace is only attainable in releasing our bitterness, in completing the washing cycles necessary to remove the stains of hurt, and in loving more.

“This kind can only be driven out through prayer.”

I pray for each and every one of you that we all strive together to rid ourselves of the bitterness of past hurts and step into the joy offered to us by He Who suffered all.

Amen.

Seriously it’s almost 1 in the morning, but I’ve been in restaurants for the last 6 years and my body clock is, how you say, unusual.

At night I find that in the same way a dog circles it’s bed a few times before settling, my mind needs to circle my room much like the ghost of Christmas past before resting itself on my thin pillow.

Tonight as my mind circles the couch I’m writing on, I ask myself why it is that I simply cannot seem to surrender.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to church, I’ve been a musician for the last couple of years for goodness sakes.

I know how to live with less.

But this evening it’s occurring to my wandering mind that the less I’ve learned to live on and the small concessions I’ve made in my surrender to God’s control have become tethers.

Chains I wrap around myself.

You see, surrender brings peace. No pun intended.

Yesterday I sat next to a pond and watched the unintelligent squirrels and chipmunks scavenge for their food for the day, and disappear in to crackly shrubbery.

Idiots.

No google calendar, no financial advisor, and no Wal-Mart pickup order arriving in a matter of hours.

How do they even survive? Do you think they count their instagram followers?

I am of course being facetious, although it pains me to say that I would most likely subscribe to a squirrel YouTube account as they have my same attention span.

But there is a beauty in the way they rely on the Creator.

A beauty in the fact that they don’t need calendars.

We who know all things need control. We need to know what’s around the corner.

I need to know what’s around the corner.

So what’s the moral of this brief fable? To envy the Lillies of the field and the birds of the air?

Yes. A thousand times yes.

I envy the Lillies because they know they will be provided for, and their sense of self and identity is not wrapped up in their performance or list of achievements during the day,

I envy the lilies because they grow as generously as they can during the day, and at night rest in the peace that their Creator will bring that same sun out the next day, and the minute they feel parched they smell rain.

I envy the lilies.

And as I sit on my couch and write this brief reflection on how little I do know of my future, I who know all things, I muse on what simplicity my Creator has woven into the fabric of his earth and what this simplicity could do for me.

I’m sitting in my kitchen writing next to my roommate in Nashville. He’s a hard-working accountant, and I’m a broke musician who pretends to work. I’ve only been here for two months but we’ve become fast friends, jamming Mumford and Sons in the kitchen with out-of-tune guitars.

Yeah no one cares when the cameras are off.

I have a stack of journals next to me dating back to the spring when I discerned out of the Legion (a chronicle I’m preparing for another time) to this afternoon praying through resolutions for the new year.

A stark reminder of the fact that God has, in fact, taken care of me.

A stack of five journals (mostly from the last year and a half) are a firm testament to his goodness and care. There are entries from Guadalajara, Abidjan, Bologna, and random patches of trees in the Pisgah National Forest.

He’s been so good to me.

Driving into New Orleans for a family Christmas celebration, I called a close friend of mine to pass the time.

We concluded that I am, in fact, hopelessly disorganized.

But more importantly we concluded that this past year for both of us had been one of challenge and change, and that the personal growth we had both experienced was exponentially linked to the amount of both of these.

I don’t really do math.

But I noticed that the more challenge had entered our lives, the more things that had changed, the more we strapped on our guns and started to become the men in our cowboy dreams.

Why am I writing this? To wax poetic about the man I feel like I’m becoming?

To list off a year’s worth of achievements that I’m not even responsible for?

Okay maybe a little bit of the first one: progress and growth are hard things to keep quiet about.

But definitely not the second. I’m certain all of us are bored to tears scrolling through our instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds to remind ourselves just how much more others achieved this year than we did.

I am.

So allow me to steal the next five minutes of your coffeeshop time attempting to churn up in your heart and mine a recognition of what our Father changed this past year, and what he could be asking you to change in the new one.

To describe the change, I need to begin with the challenge that started it all,

I don’t think the word “challenge” quite summarizes what many of us went through this past year. If it does then I’m happy your low moments don’t call to mind descriptors like “desperation,” “hopelessness,” “terror,” and the like.

There’s no belittling tone to detect here: I truly am happy for you. The last few years of seminary were full of little “challenges” for me.

The last few years out here on the range have left a different aftertaste.

But in order to maintain a consistency with the title, we’ll stick with “challenge.”

And one thing in particular challenged me most this past year.

Facing my unhappiness.

It’s easy to deaden or numb the throb of unhappiness in my heart. A few drinks (forgive me I am Catholic), an hour or so in the gym, a dream gig or two. But simply suppressing the ache doesn’t make it disappear.

Forgive me again: I’m young, naive and learning many of these things for the first time.

And the ache grew until living by myself was torment. Staring at the ceiling night after night trying to fall asleep but not wanting to wake up. I made all sort of lifestyle changes. I got rid of my TV, I traded my evening bourbon for an evening tea, picked up a good book (more like seven), and convinced myself that I simply hadn’t put my finger on the right hurting muscle.

Does this sound familiar? I hope it doesn’t.

If it does then I may have to diagnose you with a mild (but soon to be severe) case of unhappiness.

It calls to mind a cutting scene from the New Testament, where Jesus had once again gone up on the mountain to speak with his Father while his disciples remained at the base to man the ship.

The novice farm hands attempting to wrangle a steer while the real cowboy catches up on some R&R. Don’t worry: he’ll be back.

A man brings his son to them who is possessed by a demon. Easy enough. They’d watched the Master cast out dozens of these spiritual pricks with a wave of his hand and a reference to his divine Father.

Give me two seconds we’re getting to the point I promise.

Well, the disciples try all the means at their disposal and embarrass themselves in front of the child’s father (much to the demon’s amusement as well I’m sure).

And this past year I found myself in the same shoes. Or sandals, rather.

I had tried to change so many habits of my current lifestyle in order to face the challenge of my unhappiness that I too got frustrated and almost kicked the proverbial bucket.

You heard me right: a story for another time. End scene and enter Jesus.

I can imagine the caring but confused look on the Master’s face as he descends the mountain. As he throws a rope over his shoulder, buckles on his spurs, and casts a concerned glance over his dirt stained disciples.

Why the myriad of small changes? Why not begin with the basics?

Oof.

Now I know what you’re thinking. I do pray. I do fast. I go to daily mass.

I said the same thing.

Jesus, I’m praying every day. I’m not watching TV. I’m going to the early mass (I’m painfully not a morning person, especially not after leaving religious life).

So why am I still unhappy?

The truth, friends, is not that we haven’t made the perfect resolution. Nor is it that we simply don’t pray or fast enough, and it’s time do double down and buckle up.

The truth lies rather in the nameless but benevolent young man who approached our Lord and asked him what was “left” for him to do after living a life of extreme virtue.

After having been looked upon by our Lord and loved by Him. (the look in Jesus’ face, He who loves ALL people, can only be described as one of a particular “love”).

Notice what he doesn’t say is “go, download the app, pay $70, and start Exodus 90.”

Or even “go, sign up online, and start at your local Crossfit gym.”

He says “follow me.”

The distinction here, friends, is not the amount of prayer but rather how we’re praying.

And this distinction is what drove me to the edge.

Praying with your whole life, plans, trajectory, and even desires is a completely separate sort than that of pulling up Hallow and keeping our streak.

Yeah I went there and I’m not sorry about it.

Praying in this sense can be exchanged with “listening.”

And praying as listening is what led me from my unhappiness in Baton Rouge, over the candy cane forests and the sea of whirly, swirly gumdrops to Nashville. After a few stops of course (mostly to eat gumdrops).

Praying as listening is what led me to face the challenge with the only change that would lead me closer to Him and closer to happiness.

A total uprooting and placing of my desires and dreams in His hands, and a concrete listening with the intent to change. And all of this in a way that I haven’t been comfortable with in a long time.

Not ever: just in a long time.

You know my faults. By no means have I achieved the sainthood that I desire. But I can say that the demon that festered, the ache I tried to suppress, is, how do you put it?

gone.

It’s difficult to harbor unhappiness in the depths when the depths have been plumbed and given over to the light. When the things previously providing small doses of comfort and numbing have been thrown in the biohazard box and left behind to rot.

My stack of resolutions last year has been narrowed to less than fifth of the page, mostly because I’m letting Him fill in the rest.

But they’re starting with a true abandonment to His will for me. A selling of my comforts and an attempt to follow His leading in my prayer without ceasing.

The rest I’ll share later over coffee if you and I get the time.

But know that this new year I’m praying that all of us have the courage to change the things that matter, and face the challenges that can shape us into the people who walk in our dreams. We aren’t all in the station of life where God is asking us to hop on a different train and head to a different ranch entirely.

But we can all commit to listening with intention in our prayer to see what train the Master is arriving on, and if we are in fact happy where we are.

Happy twenty twenty-six.

No. That’s not an encouraging way to start off this train of thought.

Starting over.

Okay, but how am I supposed to be grateful when it feels like there are a multitude of prayers hanging in the balance between me and God, the elephant in the room of our awkward candlelit table for two?

Does anyone else feel this way? That sometimes we have more than a simple hallelujah to say after we throw up our hands in worship? Maybe we’re not overcome by sheer gratitude, but feel the stinging in our heart and at the corners of our eyes from the prayers unanswered?

Okay thank God. Because that’s how I feel now that I’m turning twenty-five.

Providence and Pain.

Like I wish the world would come to a screaming halt so me and God can go over the growing list of prayers that I feel he should have answered, asking him what better things he has out there to do. I mean, he is the King of the universe, no?

It shouldn’t be that hard.

But birthdays seem to get harder the older I get. When I was younger and in seminary, they were full of excitement and the promise of good things to come around the corner.

Expectations didn’t matter as much when I was younger as they seem to now.

So what changed?

Stress. Pain. Hurt.

You know those things.

When I was younger I could look past the hurtful possibilities and focus on the things I was hoping would come about. It almost seemed like as difficult as things would get, there was no doubt they were going to pass soon. The sun was always on its merry way up, and I just had to hold on a little longer: wait for Gandalf to ride over the crest of the hill and bring said sun along with him.

My gosh: how the definition of “a little longer” has changed along with me by twenty-five.

I used to look over my shoulder and sigh deeply on having a difficult weekend. That weekend would turn into a week, and I’d be at the end of my rope until I felt the light shining again and me and Jesus could look back and pat each other on our respective backs for making it through.

Now those long weeks are turning into months, and slowly those months into years.

One almost wishes he could ground Peter Pan, and beg him for even one of his happy thoughts while Wendy and the boys fly off to Neverland. I think it would have taken a little more than a happy thought and a sprinkle of pixie dust to get me off the ground.

I mean, how hopeful can one be while continuing to walk the venerable “dark valleys” that we sing about so often in church and are immortalized in contemporary christian music?

Providence and Pain.

Maybe some of us know that feeling of asking for a raise. We do our best to appear as if we don’t need one, and in the end we sell ourselves short and ask for a pay margin far below what we would have been promised. Many times as a musician I’ve (well, I’ve gotten paid nothing before…) given my “usual rate” to a venue or private party only to have them agree to pay it in a heartbeat.

How disheartening.

If I would have expected a higher number, or maybe even waited for them to suggest a number, I could have gotten paid much more than I was hoping to be.

What if, the older I get, the more I treat God as a stingy boss I don’t trust? What if I’m starting to view him as a flighty venue and not as a generous donor, or even an agent who wants the highest payment possible for me?

What if my expectations should be getting higher?

Providence and Pain.

Providence teaches us to trust in the Lord to provide.

Period.

Not that He will provide the bare minimum. Nor that He will provide twenty percent while we slave for the other eighty. Not even to cheat us into doing it ourselves.

Jaweh-Jireh. On the mountain, the Lord will provide.

Maybe you remember Abraham, who received a Word from the Lord that was terrible even to speak aloud. Do you remember what happened to him? Did he end up drawing even a drop of blood from his only beloved son?

No. Instead, God provides.

Oh that word. How it keeps me up at night.

How my pain has spoken into the desires of the good things I used to have, and convinced me that the knife will fall. That no angel will arrive to stop the blow. That I am the only one who can provide.

I’ve become like a child too scared to run down the stairs on Christmas. Instead I hide under my covers and swallow the fear that there’s nothing under the tree, end tell myself to be grateful for what I already have. Why do I weep in my misery?

Pain.

I’ve been hurt.

And my pain scares me into expecting less of the Provider.

Pain clouds the remembered Providence of the past and replaces it with the memories of hurt, my unanswered prayers, divine debts unpaid. In short, the things I feel like I’m missing.

Providence reminds me that He will provide for me.

Not as my final recourse, when the mast is down and my sails are in tatters. But first. Long before the storm is even spotted. And the wild thing is:

He wants to provide for me.

I’ve seen him provide for me. An opening at a camp that I wasn’t expecting to get into. A call from an Italian friend inviting me back to Italy, after failing to get a job I was so confident about. Offers to be paid more than I thought and exactly what I needed.

And so much more. Yet I continue to lower my expectations of said Providence every time I get hurt.

In doing this, I convince myself that He doesn’t in fact want the best for me. That he’ll never cash in on the blessings promised those who follow him, or worse: they’ll be smaller blessings that I somehow missed along the way, and should have been grateful for.

My friend: you can’t miss the small things when you’re expecting an abundance.

They’re just part of the abundance.

Providence and Pain.

But you’ll miss the abundance if you only expect small things. In fact, you might not even trust that the abundance is coming. Worst of all, might live as if this mystical abundance will never come, like the dogs that wait for the scraps from the master’s table. They’re not being rewarded.

They’re surviving.

My friend, the Provider has much more than scraps in mind for you.

He did not fashion you out of clay to survive.

Going into twenty-five, I’m going to live as if this abundance is real. As if the Provider really does in fact want to shower grace upon grace on me, and waits like an expectant father for me to unwrap the gifts under the tree.

As if He wants me to thrive.

Oh, and this Providence? I’m going to abandon myself to it.

Still hot, just a little harder to see.

Although it does call to mind foggy harbors: ships berthing at the docks champing at the seafoam that rocks them slowly from side to side, straining at the ropes keeping them tied.

My little jeep patriot was no ship, but it was loaded about as full as an English navy schooner and humming as I sat with my hands on the wheel, taking a few deep breaths after cramming my guitar next to my trunk next to my mandolin next to my camera gear (and my board games, I’ll admit).

You get the picture.

I shut off the engine and crept back inside to tell my parents goodbye without waking up the rest of the house (I’m the oldest of 10). I was headed to North Carolina for the summer, to work a camp I had signed up for on a whim after a bad breakup (I’ve never heard of a good breakup, but I’ve heard of them hurting a lot less) and a college graduation that was more anti-climactic than propulsionary.

Not much of a graduation instagram caption.

I was hurt, broken, and deeply in need of more than a reset. The last couple of weeks since my return from a brief trip to Africa had been hellish, a re walking of every memory I had made in Baton Rouge and had no interest in re living.

A sort of highlight reel that only played the depressing parts (backed fully by an entire string section and mood lighting). I had to get out.

I had filled out an application for a worship camp in Ohio, and a backpacking camp in North Carolina. Fully expecting the same radio silence that my job applications received, I was surprised when the backpacking camp reached out after a few days to schedule an interview.

Evidently camps are more in need of counselors than marketing agencies are in need of butts in seats. Convenience or Providence? You tell me. They also happened to need a counselor to teach guitar, and it was the only slot available.

We’re gonna go with convenience (but whisper Providence).

I’ve been telling my parents goodbye for years. I attended boarding school through high school and spent two years as a novice (basically a monk), so homesickness was no stranger to me.

Leaving and not knowing when you’re coming back has a different shade to it, though. “See you soon” sounds much different than “I hope I see you soon.”

Hope. That’s the difference. And I didn’t have a lot of hope in my backpack as I stepped up to the front door.

Mostly half-finished prayers and miscellaneous camping gear.

I hugged mom, hugged dad, and swallowed the lump in my throat that was threatening to turn into tears. My gosh: this hadn’t been hard in years.

Maybe it was the general sadness of the last couple of months. Or maybe it was the hard work in therapy finally paying off, and I was finally feeling things.

Either way, it was hard. Harder than I thought it would be.

I watched them disappear into the fog as I drove off, a twelve-hour drive ahead. I put my drive into Mary’s hands with a short Hail Mary, and sat back as my thoughts like my tires spun in circles, taking me closer to whatever was next.

Next.

That’s a word I had sat with for weeks. A word that can haunt graduation parties, engagement festivities, and baby showers. People seem to have all sorts of social guidelines and respect for the general feng shui of a conversation before they utter “so what’s next?” and shatter the carefully crafted euphemisms for “I don’t know.”

Next.

As if you haven’t drank over it. Or cried over it. Or done other things to cope with its existence and the dark, empty void ahead it seems to imply. As I crossed state lines, inching closer to North Carolina, I worked on digesting the fear of the unknown and the sadness of the season of life left behind.

What I didn’t foresee coming next was the painting in the camp dining hall that greeted me when I entered: the painting of the very image for Jesus that I’d been praying with the last few weeks, wrestling for space with the void of “next” in my brain.

The image of Aslan.

The words “Courage, dear heart.”

Aslan utters this phrase to Lucy many, many times in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, as she questions his guidance and expresses her fear concerning the path ahead.

She does this many, many times.

And I do it more.

But Jesus, like Aslan, rather than becoming frustrated with the ant of his creation that dares to question his almighty reasoning, simply cracks a smile and responds to all my doubts with “courage, dear heart.”

He also reminds me:

“Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there” (Matt 6:10).

I have the tendency to move quickly, to leave things half-finished in the hopes of snagging more things. Of upping and leaving as soon as the conversation dies, convinced I can find greener pastures elsewhere instead of sitting in uncomfortable silence,

But Jesus doesn’t. He stays. He lets the wine run out, lets the rain thicken and the waters rise. He’s not concerned with the next thing: he’s dangerously in the now. He knows the peace the present can bring, even when the future looms dark and empty.

But it’s hard.

It takes courage. It takes courage to put the planner down, turn off the phone and stop justifying the present moment by what’s around the corner. It takes courage not to let our identity depend on the magnitude of what’s to come. Even Jesus had his agony, where he struggled to remain present in the garden as he pictured the horrors the morning would bring.

“Courage, dear heart: stay there until you leave.”

Jesus invited me this summer to remain present, to heal from scars dealt too quickly, and to understand that receiving the gift of the now doesn’t have to depend on more gifts to come.

I hope he invites you to the same.