I’ve never written a blog before. Although I love to write, blogs just didn’t seem like my style. I never felt like I had enough to say, or enough life experience to have an informed opinion. But graduating college and moving across the country has challenged my perspective in many ways, including why and thus what I write.

I’d like to say that growing up I understood reality, but that isn’t true. I often lived in the clouds of stories and lofty concepts, and I didn’t often descend to see the ways these stories and concepts mattered to people. College both tempered and encouraged this habit; while I explored the ways people interacted with stories, many of the theology classes left me floating in doctrinal details without considering the lives those theological positions could affect. In fact, it led me to unconsciously prioritize doctrine over people many times.

Don’t misunderstand me—I learned so much from Moody Bible Institute about theology and myself, and I’m grateful for my time there. But I can definitely see the ways that environment also had a negative affect on me.

When I graduated and moved to Portland, I fully realized where I had gone wrong. A pre-tribulation rapture or even a young earth didn’t seem to matter much when I was just trying pay the rent and keep my car from falling apart. Now, I’m not saying that what I believe about God doesn’t matter.

But abstract concepts, while fascinating to me, don’t contribute much to the daily walk I have with Christ—the kind of day where I get up too early and work eight hours and come back home to hear about how my roommate was harassed at work again or my other roommate was blown off by someone when she was vulnerable enough to share about her PTSD.

There’s too much to say about all this in one blog post, so I’ll definitely revisit the nuances of what I’ve said.

Suffice to say, this is where I find myself: too tired after work to even think about the same theology I obsessed over in college and unable to ignore the hurt some of that same theology has caused when I’m confronted by it every day.

I’ve learned that everyone comes from a different life experience and each of those perspectives can teach us something. But life is messy, and it takes digging into the difficult and uncomfortable places to confront our faults and the broken world we live in.

I’m hoping this blog can be a place for me to explore the intersection between concept and reality, what we want the world to look like and the mess we’re actually dealing with. To be honest, I’m not sure what that will look like for each post; I anticipate that my topics will jump around in both subject and genre.

If any of this has interested you, join me on this journey of discovery, but keep Tolkien’s words in mind: “It's a dangerous business…going out of your door… You step into the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”