2 Corinthians 12:9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.(ESV)
There are things I should have said earlier. I didn’t, because I wasn’t sure I was ready to say them honestly. I’m not entirely sure I am now. But faithfulness to this project has always required more transparency than comfort, and that rule doesn’t stop applying when the subject is me.
So let me say some things openly.
To Those Who Started This
This blog exists because God asked me a question.
After a severe car accident left me with a traumatic brain injury, there was a healing event in early 2023 that changed the trajectory of everything that followed. And in the aftermath of that, the question came: What good is the testimony I’ve given you if nobody ever hears it?
There was no acceptable answer to that except to start. So I did. The verse of the day messages began shortly after, and what you’ve been reading ever since grew directly from that moment of obedience.
The Forge framework began to develop along the way and helped to shape what this has become. And roughly five months ago, two people asked me questions I couldn’t answer briefly. Not because I lacked answers, but because the answers were too large for a conversation. Those questions met the framework that was already in place, and what emerged from that convergence was the outline for what would become the Practical Christianity project, produced in an afternoon.
If you were one of those people, I want you to know what you actually did. You didn’t just prompt a writing project. You catalyzed a body of work I believe will outlast all of us. Thank you. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t want it to pass without being spoken.
To everyone who has read consistently — whether you’ve responded, engaged in conversation, pushed back, confirmed, or asked follow-up questions — you’ve functioned as the congregation this work was always meant to serve. I wrote into a void and you made it a room. That mattered more than you know, especially in the stretches where the weight was heaviest.
And to those who read silently — who’ve never responded but have never left — I see you, even without a name. The fact that you keep showing up is its own kind of faithfulness, and I don’t take it for granted.
What Is Changing and Why
Starting soon, the daily message is going to look different.
The format is returning to something much closer to what this was at the beginning: a verse of the day, brief commentary, and enough space for you to sit with the text rather than work through a structured argument. The full Forge-pattern posts — Floatie through Covenant Triumph — aren’t going away permanently. But they are stepping back from the daily rhythm.
This isn’t a retreat from the theology. The doctrine hasn’t moved. The commitments haven’t changed. The standard hasn’t dropped.
But I need to be honest about what it’s cost to hold this pace, and I think you deserve to know the full picture before I ask you to trust the shift.
The Accounting
Let me give you some numbers, because without them the weight doesn’t translate.
The verse of the day emails first launched in May of 2023, fifty-three days after that healing event. It ran five days a week through the end of 2024 — roughly twenty months, approximately four hundred and forty posts. In early 2025 it expanded to seven days a week and has held that pace through now. That’s north of nine hundred posts at the time of this writing.
But here’s what most of you don’t know: the Practical Christianity series will soon become books — five full-length volumes on applied theology. The posts will be the root of the content. What you’ve been reading every day is the raw material of a five-book discipleship arc, produced at over fourteen hundred words per day, seven days a week, and then edited in concentrated bursts after each full draft was complete. The editing alone was its own mountain. Add in other works that I’ve written in this period such as Theology of the Breath, the Forged to Lead discipleship framework, and a full doctrinal rebuttal of Calvinist double-predestination, and the scope of what was happening in the background becomes something that’s difficult to communicate without sounding like an exaggeration.
It isn’t an exaggeration.
Now add the rest of my life during that same period.
A full-time job. A wife. Three kids. Buying and fixing a car for my oldest to drive. Mid-December brought two things at once: the beginning of a ground-up restoration of a 1968 Camaro — a dream I’ve held since I was five, finally within reach — and the start of a work project that ran far past its originally intended scope. My brother and I have an honest arrangement: I help him work through his project backlog with his business so that he has the time and capacity to help me with the car. Labor for labor. It is one of the better things in my life. But working evenings and weekends to hold up your end of that deal, on top of everything else, is not nothing.
Looking at the timing, I’m not sure it wasn’t a load test. The PC series launches, the books go into editing, the Camaro project begins, the pressure at work increases — all within the same compressed window. That’s either an extraordinary coincidence or it’s exactly what it looks like: a test of what the forge has actually built.
The sad part about these tests is that we rarely know when we pass or fail — unless we fail in supreme fashion. I didn’t fail supremely. But I didn’t pass cleanly either.
And then I shattered.
The Fracture
I have to be careful here, because I’m not writing this for sympathy and I’m not performing vulnerability. I’m writing it because concealment would contradict everything I’ve tried to build in these pages. If I’ve asked you to name your wounds, I have to be willing to name mine.
When I broke, I didn’t fall apart visibly. That’s the part that haunts me more than the breaking itself.
I put on a mask (again). And I wore it so well that most people around me would never have known. My wife and kids knew I was under pressure — that much was visible. But the depth of the fracture? They didn’t know. I made sure of it. I told myself it was protection. And maybe part of it was. But part of it was also something older and less noble than protection — a version of me that’s more raw and natural than I want to admit, a survival self that knows how to perform function without actually functioning.
In one sense I became my most natural self. In another, I completely lost myself.
The textbooks have categories for what I walked through. They’re inadequate. The depths of genuine despair make Dante’s Inferno look like an afternoon picnic, and I don’t say that for effect. I say it because anyone who’s actually been there knows that no clinical language gets close to the reality of it.
It hurt to breathe. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that the physical act of drawing breath required conscious effort that I wasn’t certain I had available. I was aware of every blink. Every blink. Because each one cost something. Sleeping took effort — not the falling-asleep kind of effort, but the kind where you lie awake counting your own breaths until the alarm goes off, doing the arithmetic on how many are left before morning, aware that even the silence is working against you. Silence became an enemy. Every bump, bruise, and muscle ache stayed permanently at the surface because the walls that normally filter sensation were gone. The mental barrage never stopped. There was no quiet corner to retreat to. There was no off switch.
I almost stopped eating. A mid-sized bag of Gardetto’s was a weekend’s worth of food. I drank water, soda, and energy drinks by the gallon — drinking calories so I wouldn’t have to stop working long enough to use the bathroom. When the sound of your own breathing starts to hurt your ears and makes you angry, but you genuinely lack the energy to be angry — what’s left? Not much. Not much at all.
When intrusive thoughts start to feel like comfort rather than attack, something has gone profoundly wrong. It means the person has reached a truly empty state. It means the darkness has found the right pitch for the room — not loud, not aggressive, just quiet and reasonable and patient. It says let go. It says the easier path is available. It’s said that to me before, in different seasons, and I recognized its voice this time too. What surprised me — what I will be honest about because honesty is the only currency this project trades in — is that I didn’t have the energy to refuse it forcefully. I found that I also didn’t have the energy to accept it.
I didn’t have the strength to hold on—and I didn’t have the strength to let go either.
And yet the machine kept moving. One foot in front of the other. Eating. Drinking. Smiling. Hitting the keys on the keyboard. Blinking. Pretending to sleep. The automaton still moved even though the light went out. I found out that a human being can stop being truly human while also remaining human. An empty shell, still functional, still producing, still showing up — and nobody in the room would know.
That’s what I mean when I say I hid. Not that I concealed a bad mood. I concealed a months-long war fought in a room that nobody else had access to.
I couldn’t read my Bible for weeks. I would open the book or the app and stare at the words hoping that they would make sense in my head. I followed my habit of daily reading in a physical sense even though the words themselves quickly got lost in the noise inside my head. I want you to understand what that means for someone who’s built everything he does on the Word. The instrument went silent. Not because the Word failed. Because I was too depleted to hold it. I couldn’t pray. The man who writes about prayer, about the Forge, about endurance — couldn’t reach upward. He got out of bed anyway. He went to work anyway. The battle was relentless, and from the outside, almost none of it was visible.
My failing wasn’t that I broke down. Breaking down under that load isn’t a moral failure. My failing was that I reverted. I disappeared behind a competent, functional, unreadable version of myself rather than asking for help. I hid. Not completely, and not forever. But I hid.
I’m not entirely sure the fracture is sealed even now. I’m watching it. I’m being honest about it where I can. And I’m here, writing this, which means something has shifted enough to let the words out.
The First Signs of Morning
Recovery from something like this doesn’t announce itself. It arrives in small data points you almost miss.
Last week I slept through the night for the first time in over a month. That’s not nothing. That’s the body deciding, for the first time in a long time, that it’s safe enough to actually rest.
The timing of other things isn’t lost on me either. One of the projects I’d been helping my brother complete — the work that needed to be done before we could start on our cars in earnest — finished and went home. Three of the five books are fully edited. My son has a drivable car and a driver’s license. The major work project has moved into a new phase, which means the worst of it is behind me though the pressure isn’t going to let up.
I’m aware that this is what recovery looks like after something like a massive cardiac event. You don’t just stand up and resume. You encourage healing where healing is needed while demanding progress where progress is required. You push some things and protect others, simultaneously, and you have to be honest enough with yourself to know which is which in any given moment. I’m relearning that discernment. I’m also rebuilding the damaged places in relationships that bore the weight of those months without fully understanding what they were holding.
I’m starting to pray again.
That sentence is doing more work than it appears to be doing. For anyone who has been where I’ve been, you know exactly what it means.
I can easily see now that when I didn’t have the strength to hold on I was still being held by the author and finisher of my faith. That doesn’t make me special. He does this for anyone who comes to Him. It’s who He is.
2 Corinthians 12:9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.(ESV)
I didn’t have the strength to hold on.
So He did.
What This Is Not
This is not an exit. The books will be finished and released. The editing continues. The theological commitments that shaped this project haven’t moved an inch.
This is not a loss of faith. I didn’t lose my faith. I lost access to some of the tools I use to sustain it, for a season, under a specific and identifiable weight. That’s different from losing the foundation.
This is not an apology for the work. I would make the same choices again. But I’m being honest that the choices were costly, and that the vessel is real, and that pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of teacher I’ve warned you against trusting.
Going Forward
The lighter daily format isn’t a retreat. For many of you it may actually be more useful than the longer structured posts — a verse, a few honest sentences, enough to carry the day. That was the original intent before the scope expanded.
The deeper work will return. The books will come. The longer series will surface in seasons.
But for now, the daily rhythm is going to breathe differently.
Thank you for walking this road. All of you — the ones who seeded it, the ones who stayed, and the ones I’ve never heard from but who kept showing up anyway.
The forge isn’t finished. It never is. But every forge needs its bellows to rest between heats.
This is that rest.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:(ESV)
— Don
Walking With Christ 
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