Latest Post
I never thought I would be defending Pastor Greg Laurie but some of you are getting completely out of hand and somebody needs to say something. Let me start with the basic facts that a...
The Writing Life
There was no single lightning bolt moment. It was more like a slow accumulation. Peretti. LaHaye and Jenkins. Dekker. Book after book building something in me that eventually had nowhere to go but out. I had been consuming stories for years and somewhere in that consumption a pressure built up. A need to make something...
The Writing Life
What got me about Dekker’s Black was not just the story. It was the structure. Thomas Hunter lived in two worlds simultaneously. The modern world — our world, recognizable and grounded. And an ancient world that felt prehistoric and elemental and completely different in every way. When he was in one world the other was...
Faith Flow
Most worship is easy when things are going well. The promotion came through. The relationship is good. The health report was clean. The bills are covered. On those Sundays the hands go up without effort and the gratitude is real and the words mean what they sound like. That is worship. It counts. But it...
The Writing Life
Ted Dekker did something to me at the end of Black that I had never experienced before. He let his main character make the unthinkable choice. Thomas Hunter encountered the black water and he went in. And that was the end of the book. Not a resolution. Not a safe landing. The character I had...
Faith Flow
Somewhere along the way grace got redefined. It became the theological reason a man does not have to change. The divine permission slip for staying exactly where he is. The comfort that says God loves you as you are and stops there without finishing the sentence — loved as you are, but not left as...
The Writing Life
I came to the Left Behind series after Peretti and I never looked back. Twelve books. Twelve full length novels following the same cast of characters through the tribulation period, the rise of the Antichrist, the bowl judgments, the battle of Armageddon, and ultimately the return of Christ. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins built...
The Writing Life
I want to talk about what it means to finish a book you did not think you could read. This Present Darkness was five hundred pages. For a teenager who had never voluntarily read anything longer than a school assignment that number was significant. It was a wall. The kind of wall that makes you...
Faith Flow
There is a version of Christianity that is almost entirely painless. You show up on Sunday. You know the songs. You dress right, greet right, say the right things in the right rooms. You have a Bible app on your phone and a verse in your Instagram bio. You believe in God the way most...
The Writing Life
Before Frank Peretti I did not know a book could do that. I did not know a story could make you feel like the walls of the room you were sitting in were thinner than you thought. Like something was operating just on the other side of what your eyes could see. Like the spiritual...
Faith Flow
There are seasons where heaven feels like a wall. You pray and the words go up and nothing comes back down. You open the Bible and the pages feel flat. You sit in church and the worship moves around you but does not move you. You are doing the right things and feeling nothing. And...