Who I am.
What happened
to me.
What I've been
working on.

My story starts in church. Every Sunday I'd say, "Thank you, Lord. Praise you, God. Isn't God wonderful?" — then I'd slide from praying, reading, and writing poetry about God into straight debauchery, and crawl back a month of Sundays later saying, "Lord, I'm so sorry. Lord, I didn't do right."

Over and over and over. Praise, then repent. Praise, then repent. A whole performance with no power behind it.

Then one day a thought came — almost like a door crept open. It said: if God sacrificed His Son, and the Son died for me while we were still enemies... what does He actually, specifically desire from me?

That's where the journey began.

The Bible says Jesus — who is God — says: if you love me, you will obey my commands. And His commands are to love Him with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength — and the second is like the first: love your neighbor as you love yourself.

So I took it like this: you cannot love God without loving people. Obedience is how you love Him. And what He commanded was love.

So my hunt for love started in 1 Corinthians 13, verses 4 through 7. And for the next twenty years, I'd fall into sin — then bounce off the Bible, look up at the heavens, and ask: how can anybody do fifteen things to one person at the same time? Fifteen actions, simultaneously? For twenty years.

Eventually I boiled it down. Love is patience and selfless actions for another's genuine good (kindness). And truth? Truth is the opposite of a lie. Simple. Case closed. I had it figured out.

Patience, kindness, truth — I thought that was the whole thing.

I searched. I asked. I asked a handful of pastors, and none of them had an answer. But one told me: you can't love without God. In my head I thought: patience and kindness? That's doable for anybody. I didn't agree with him.

Marriage gave me access to more mature men — and one in particular, through a men's group, by the name of Lonnie. We built a rapport that turned into a friendship, and we started talking every day.

Getting to know him — he was lamenting. He was trying. He would be scratching and crawling in his marriage. I had never heard that kind of honesty from an older man. It pulled me in. Every day he'd be trying to sacrifice, trying to do his best, trying to be the best husband and father he knew how.

And it marked me. Because before we'd hang up, he'd talk from a place of strength. From a place of wisdom. From a place I respected. So I started following in his footsteps — before I understood why he lived the way he did.

Then I learned: he lives his life straight from what Jesus said. Specifically the Sermon on the Mount — turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, giving the shirt even though they sued him for the coat.

And something I'd known from the beginning hit me all over again: God sent His Son, and His Son put on flesh and died for my sins while I was yet a sinner. Lonnie was living that out in real life — in his kitchen, in his marriage. And I was finally at a place in my life where I could see it.

So I had to add what Jesus taught to what I understood: love isn't just patience and kindness. It's extreme patience and extreme selfless actions for the good of another (kindness) — aligned with the truth. And truth isn't just the opposite of a lie — it's righteousness.

Truth isn't just the opposite of a lie — it's the opposite of evil itself. It's righteousness.

Then walks in the Holy Spirit, and the power thereof.

Lonnie spoke of a power. Jesus spoke of a Helper. And it's not of yourself — you cannot do extreme patience and extreme selfless actions for the good of another on your own. It's a power within, that God gives us, to go in the opposite direction of the world.

The world's whole objective is to gain and get as much as possible. This power — the ability to die to yourself and your selfish ambition, to pour out all of who you are — comes from another world.

It's the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to do the exact opposite of what everybody else does. And the proof it's Him? The fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. That's not personality — that's produce. It only grows where the Spirit is.

So that's how I understand love now: extreme patience and extreme selfless actions for the good of another (kindness) — the Holy Spirit inside you actually doing the loving through your faithful decisions to act lovingly — which aligned with the Truth.

And the most straightforward example of the whole thing? The Good Samaritan. Jesus didn't just preach love — He put it on the road and showed you exactly what it looks like.