Twenty years ago I was in Los Angeles chasing an acting career, and I was not looking for Jesus. I want to tell you what I’ve learned since — through years of learning what obedience even meant, stepping into full-time ministry in 2009, marrying Joelle in 2010, raising two kids, walking through a season where my own mind stopped cooperating, and fifteen years of writing here. The short version is this: almost everything I planned fell through, and the one thing I never planned on is the only thing that held. Jesus is King. He was King before I knew Him, He has been King through every season since, and He will be King long after my time here.
I Was Chasing a Name. He Gave Me a New One.
In LA, everything was about becoming somebody. Get the right role, meet the right person, land the thing that finally makes you matter. I don’t say that with bitterness — I loved it, and I gave it everything I had. But looking back I can see what I was really auditioning for. I wanted an identity. I wanted to be known.
Then I heard the Gospel, and it “wrecked” the whole plan. Not because someone argued me into it, but because I finally saw that the God of the universe already knew me completely and loved me anyway, and that Jesus had already paid for everything in me that was broken (Thank you Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley and Francis Chan).
Here’s the first lesson: Jesus doesn’t need your plan. I thought following Him meant adding Him to what I was already building. He was never interested in being a supporting character. Twenty years later I can tell you that the thing I was most afraid to lose — the career, the version of me I had worked so hard to build — was the very thing He needed to take so I could be free of it. I’ve never wanted it back.
I Had to Learn What Obedience Even Was
Nobody warned me about this part. I said yes to Jesus and assumed the rest would come naturally. It didn’t. I was a brand new believer with almost no framework for what following Him actually looked like on a Tuesday, and I had to learn — sometimes the hard way, often with a lot of stumbling — that obedience is not a feeling. It’s a direction you keep walking when your feelings vote the other way.
Some of what I learned in those early years cost me things I didn’t want to give up. Plans. Relationships. A picture of my life I was pretty attached to. At the time it did not feel like blessing. It felt like loss, and I’ll be the first to tell you I didn’t always understand what God was doing or handle it well.
That’s the second lesson, and it took me years to be able to say it plainly: obedience is hard and good and worth it, all at the same time. Those aren’t in tension. The Christian life doesn’t get easier as you go; it gets clearer. Looking back from twenty years out, I cannot find a single instance where obeying God cost me something He didn’t ultimately replace with something better — usually something I never would have known to ask for.
And I’d add this for anyone brand new: you don’t have to have it figured out to start walking. I certainly didn’t. Nobody sat me down and taught me how to follow Jesus day by day. If that’s you, find people who will. Ask the questions you’re embarrassed to ask. It is not weakness — it’s how this works.
2009: Ministry Became the Work
In 2009 I stepped into full-time ministry, and that changed a lot of things entirely. There’s a difference between believing something and being responsible for helping other people believe it well.
Ministry taught me things a blog never could have. It taught me that people’s real questions rarely match the questions we prepare answers for. It taught me that faithfulness looks like showing up for the same handful of people over and over, not building an audience. It taught me my own pride, quickly and repeatedly. And it taught me that we try not to say “no” without an explanation — that people need to know why, and that taking the time to get into someone’s life is the whole job.
Seventeen years in, I still love it. But I’ve learned to hold it correctly. Ministry is something I get to do; it isn’t who I am. Every good thing about my work belongs to Jesus, and if He asked me to set it down tomorrow, it would change nothing about what’s most true.
2010: Joelle
I met Joelle volunteering at 121 Community Church, and we married in 2010. Sixteen years later, the thing I most want to say is that her love has been the steadiest earthly picture of God’s grace I have ever been given. Not because she’s perfect and not because we’ve had an easy road, but because she has loved me consistently in the seasons when I was hardest to love — when I was anxious and not myself, when I was overcommitted and running on empty, when I was wrong and slow to admit it.
There’s a version of my story where I’m the guy who figured it out. That version isn’t true. The truer version is that God gave me a wife who kept choosing me while He was still doing a lot of work on me. “He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord” (Proverbs 18:22). I understand that verse differently at forty-two than I did at twenty-six.
Then came our kids, and with them, some of the most humbling seasons I’ve ever been in. Our two are teenagers now. Nothing has exposed my selfishness faster or made me want Jesus more. Some of the most powerful moments in our home have been the ones where I had to walk back into a room and say, “I’m sorry — I lost my cool, that wasn’t loving. Will you forgive me?” They watch that. It teaches them repentance in a way no lecture ever could, and it keeps reminding me that I’m not the hero of my house. I’m a man being changed in front of the people who know me best.
Third lesson: God usually does His deepest work on you through the people He gives you, not apart from them. My wife and kids have discipled me as much as any book or sermon ever has.
He Is King Even When Your Body and Mind Break
Years into all of this — married, kids, a job I loved, a church plant on the horizon — I was sitting in a staff meeting when my heart started racing and my fingertips went cold and wet. I was certain I was having a heart attack. The ER ran every test. My heart was fine. It was an anxiety attack, and it began a multi year journey with counselors, doctors, and Scripture that I never asked for.
A counselor eventually told me I’d been asking the wrong question. I had been asking why is this happening? He pointed out that nobody asks why a ninety-year-old breaks a hip. Bodies break. And Scripture makes no separation between a broken body and a broken mind — both live under the fall, and both are waiting on the same King to make all things new.
Fourth lesson: Jesus is King over the parts of your life you cannot fix. There were nights I read Scripture through blurred vision. Nights when the only prayer I could get out was His name. The peace that showed up in those moments genuinely surpassed my understanding, because nothing about my circumstances had changed. He never needed me to be well in order to be Lord.
The full story: The Struggle With Anxiety Is Real
Faithfulness Is Measured in Decades, Not Moments
I started this website in 2011. For a long stretch of those years, almost nobody read it. I wrote anyway because it was never about that. It was just a journaling experiment in obedience. Over time I wanted to make a difference to encourage at least 1 person in their faith to take their next step of obedience and there were definitely times I wondered honestly whether I was wasting my time or not.
Fifteen years in, there are more than 700 teachings here and over 52,000 people who subscribe and read, comment, and engage with the content. I’m not telling you that to impress you. I’m telling you so you can see the shape of it: the fruit showed up long after the obedience did.
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23). Notice who the audience is. After all those years in LA performing for people, God gave me work whose entire value is that only He has to see it.
The Thing That Was True the Whole Time
Here’s what I actually want you to take from twenty years of this.
Every good thing in my life has been a gift, and none of it has been the point. My marriage is a gift, not my foundation. My kids are a gift, not my identity. Ministry is a gift, and if it disappeared tomorrow it would change exactly nothing about what is most true.
What is most true is that Jesus Christ is King.
- He is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15–17).
- He has been given the name above every name, and one day “every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:9–11).
- On His robe and on His thigh He has a name written: “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Revelation 19:16). “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations” (Psalm 145:13).
That was as true when I was in Los Angeles with no idea who He was as it is today. My belief didn’t make Him King. My obedience doesn’t maintain His throne. My failures have never threatened it. He was reigning while I was chasing a career, while I was fumbling my way through learning obedience, and while I was pacing the house at 2AM.
And He will be King when I’m gone. That’s the part that gets me now, at forty-two, with teenagers in the house and more life behind me than I sometimes realize. The ultimate thing was never going to be my story. It was always His kingdom.
If You’re Somewhere In the Middle of This
Maybe you’re where I was at the start — building something impressive and quietly wondering whether it will ever be enough. It won’t. Not because it’s bad, but because it was never designed to carry that weight.
Maybe you’re in an act of obedience that’s costing you something right now and you can’t see the other side of it. I can’t promise you any type of outcome, but I CAN promise you He IS worth it, and that He is not careless with what you surrender.
Maybe your body or your mind isn’t cooperating and you feel disqualified. You aren’t. He is King over that too, and He sympathizes with your weakness more than you know.
Or maybe you’ve never actually come before the cross at all. That’s the entire reason this site exists. Start here: How Can I Know I Am Saved?
Twenty years ago I would have told you I was writing my own story. I’m grateful beyond words that I was wrong. He is King — He always was, He is right now, and He always will be.
