A Continuing Testimony
The Book Ended. The Walk Didn't.

Built, and Waiting

A short entry today, and a plain one. I want to tell you what is finished, what is coming, and what I am holding back — because I would rather say it out loud than let anybody find a locked door and wonder.

Three things are built and are not open yet.

The first is a testimony tool. You sit down, it asks you the questions in order, and you write your own story with Christ — what your life was, what He did, what it is now. You never face a blank page. Nothing you write touches our servers; the finished thing saves to your own device and belongs to you. It is free, and it will always be free. A testimony is not a product.

The second is a lineage tool. You start with what is already printed on your own birth certificate, and it hands you the research plan a professional would follow — in order, with the reason for every step. It will tell you when the town you typed did not exist yet, which is the single most common reason a family gets told its history cannot be traced. The paper was never missing. It was filed under whatever county existed the day it was written. That tool costs nothing, it will never ask you to buy a record or spit in a tube, and every method inside it is free. A family should not have to pay to learn its own name.

The third is my own family record, and the book.

All three are coming. None of them has a date I am willing to print except the book, and the book has one: Epiphany. Beyond that, my lineage and the tools open at a time to be determined, and I am not going to invent a date to sound impressive.

Here is why. Right now the work is counties, the State of Texas, and the families who need help today. That is where the mission actually touches somebody this week. I have watched myself get pulled toward the thing that is most exciting to announce instead of the thing that is most useful to finish, and I am not doing that again. The website and the business are live and open — demos, contracts, onboarding, all of it, today. The rest waits its turn.

There is also a vehicle desk, finished, that I am not announcing yet either. It will get its own day.

And one thing I will say once, so it is on the record in my own words. My wife's family line stays private. She and I will keep doing that research together, and it will live where it belongs — with her. Some stories are for a family and not for the world, and a man does not publish his wife's people to make a point about restoration. Her name is hers.

Habakkuk asked God how long, and got told the vision has an appointed time. Not his time. Its time. I have spent most of my life trying to force appointed times, and I have the scars from every one of them. So these sit finished on a shelf, and they open when they are supposed to open.

Built, and waiting. That is the whole entry.

Seventy-Eight Miles an Hour

There is a machine at the aquarium that lets you stand in a hurricane. Today I stood in it. It runs at seventy-eight miles an hour, and it put me straight back on a ship in Rhode Island.

September of 2008. I was twenty-three years old. We were on recall status — living aboard, ready to get underway on no notice, because two storms were coming and nobody knew yet which one would turn. My children’s mother was sent to a friend’s house in Massachusetts to be safe. Everyone I loved was moved away from the water, and I was held at it, ready to sail toward whichever one came.

I looked the storms up. Hanna came first, on the seventh, and she closed five hundred and fifty miles in twenty-three hours and passed thirty miles off Newport. Then Kyle, on the twenty-eighth, still a hurricane at seventy-five knots — eighty-six miles an hour — a hundred and ninety miles off our bow. And here is the part I did not know at twenty-three: Kyle was getting stronger as he came. Seventy knots to seventy-five. The pressure falling. That is not a storm you watch. That is a storm you get underway for.

Neither one took us. Both times, the sea gave us back.

And every single time I came into home port, I went to the same ice cream shop. Not as a treat. As the proof I had made it home. I am sitting in one right now, seventeen years later, an hour after standing in a machine doing seventy-eight — eight miles an hour short of what Kyle was actually doing while I waited to find out if I was sailing into him.

I did not pick the aquarium. I did not set the machine. I did not choose which shop was near it.

Read Psalm 107 again and look at where it ends. Not with the storm cancelled. “So he bringeth them unto their desired haven.” The sailor gets home. That is the promise, and I have been keeping that verse with my feet since I was twenty-three without ever once knowing I was keeping it.

Then read Acts 27, where Paul is held aboard a ship in a hurricane for fourteen days with no sun and no stars, and the word that comes to him is not that the storm is called off. It is this: “Fear not, Paul… and, lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee.” And then: “and so it came to pass, that they escaped all safe to land.” Two hundred and seventy-six souls. Not one lost. That is the promise for a man kept at the water while everybody he loves is sent inland. Not no storm. Everyone who sails with you, given to you.

And here is the one that got me. My covenant with God is the five loaves and two fish — Matthew 14:17. Go read what comes next in that same chapter. Verse 24: “the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.” Verse 27: “Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.” Verse 30, Peter starts to sink and cries out, “Lord, save me.” Verse 31: “And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him.”

The five loaves and two fish and the storm at sea are the same chapter. Thirty verses apart. I did not arrange that either.

My whole book is built on one line — “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind.” Not out of the calm. Out of the storm. At twenty-three I was standing on a deck being put in position to hear it that way, and I had no idea.

I will not preach from arithmetic. You know that about me by now; I have printed the misses in my own book, the days that were nothing. Maybe today was only memory doing what memory does. But two storms in one September, a boy of twenty-three held at the water so his family could go inland, and a man in an ice cream shop tonight who has spent every year since standing between families and the things that tear them apart — that is not a sign in the sky.

That is one life with one shape in it. And I did not draw it.

My Labor of Love

Today is day one of my continuing testimony.

This is my labor of love — my Jeep. One of the coolest vehicles I have ever owned, and a true blessing to our family. We enjoyed every mile of it — our awesome, really fun weekend-warrior Jeep. And if you know me at all, you know I enjoy an awesome vehicle.

Today, I let it go.

The human side of me has to lean on the scripture above, because letting go is hard. But God is first, and a close second is family. My daughter’s car had to be sold because it wasn’t safe to drive, so my wife and I are giving her our 4Runner — and that means my family needs the vehicle that carries all of us. The Jeep is how that happens.

Matthew 6:19 shows us where to keep our eyes — on the kingdom of heaven. As hard as it is to watch this one roll away, nothing compares to the treasures of heaven, and I take real comfort in that. Especially being someone who enjoys awesome vehicles.

Read the book. You’ll get it.