Reintroducing Myself
I am a sixty-five-year-old husband and father who has lived in Columbus, Ohio, since 2001.
I pastored for thirty-four years, then eventually stumbled upon a chaplain role in a retirement community where I continue to learn and serve. Since February 2025, I’ve also been a life coach-in-training. Just over a year ago, my wife and I found a home in the Anglican church, which has been a delightful blend of scripture, sacrament, and sensitivity to the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Three Reasons I Write
First, I write because I must. I write to live. I feel disoriented until I form sentences and look at them. I choose writing as an intentional interruption of the amorphous mumbling of scoldings, worries, imagined threats, and vague sensations that assault my interior like graffiti, a constant, menacing spray paint.
Writing is a way for me to resist these endless, smoke-ring fears, resentments, and despair.
Second, I use words to look for God, hoping to see how He has been present in experiences that suggested His absence. I use my pen to make marks, wondering if I am the one hiding. I write in the spirit of the psalmist who asked God, "Search me and know me." I look for his beauty in previously unexplored regions of my heart and history. I hope to be able to name some things and pronounce them "good."
Third, I write to find and open the gift of being myself. I try to express what it's like to be me and resist the feeling that this is self-centered. I put my work out there, in public, to say, "I see and feel something that matters, something beautiful that comes with an ache, something needing to be named as a gift to the reader."
My hope for you, the reader, is that you will be empowered to tear off some of the wrapping paper on the gift of being yourself.
What I Write About for Readers
My writing explores writing as a spiritual practice and the fluid and sometimes uncomfortable story we tell of our lives.
Everyone has a "story"—not merely a list of events and achievements but an interpretation of your accumulated experience. It’s the tone and feel of your life.
A story is the accumulation of imperfect and selective memories, embodied feelings, and the sometimes arbitrary and negative meanings we’ve assigned to our experiences.
Your story, then, is more of a "felt" thing than something articulated consciously by your reasoning. It tends to operate below your conscious awareness. Though my story feels "true" to me, it can be wildly inaccurate in bestowing praise and condemnation on me.
Story influences how you go forward, which can paralyze you or perpetuate self-defeating actions. The question is, "Can a story be clarified and become a resource rather than a reproach?"
When your story becomes more of a resource than a reproach, you are “story-rich.” Like wealth, it can become a resource that enables a reassessment of your story, a questioning of the filters, arbitrary meanings, and judgments you are used to.
