The last year and a half was quiet for a reason. I left the work that had named me for three and a half years, took on a different one, bought a house, had two bones removed from my feet, and have been trying — slowly, unevenly — to figure out what comes after a season ends.
This is the long version of all that.
The work
In January 2025, my time as a vocational minister at Two Cities Church came to an end. Three and a half years of mentorship and responsibility, held by people who took chances on me before I had earned them. The final week wrapped with about fifty people standing in a circle to pray for me. My official last act in the role was a Christmas party video I'd cut for YouTube — not subtle, very well received, exactly the right note to leave on.
What I miss most is also what made it the hardest to leave: the work was inseparable from who I was. When you spend years being the person who shows up for the church, the church becomes part of how you answer "what do you do?" — and then, more quietly, "who are you?" Walking out of the role didn't feel like changing jobs. It felt more like changing rooms inside the same house and discovering the new room was unfurnished.
I'm now Marketing Director at Keith Smith Construction. The CEO, Chris, is a friend — someone whose character I'd watched closely during his father's passing, and decided I'd want to work for. The job draws on what Two Cities taught me about telling a story with a camera, but the audience is different, the stakes are different, and I'm spending a lot of time learning what actually gets built (literally) and how to talk about it well. It is a good thing, on this side of thirty, to be a beginner at something again.
The house
In the same season, I bought my first house — a place in the Ardmore neighborhood of Winston-Salem, with two roommates and a steady rotation of new neighbors to learn. There is a particular kind of joy in owning the front porch you sit on. There is also a particular kind of sobering in being the one who has to fix the back door when it sticks.
I'm convinced there's something worth being part of in this city. Quietly. Slowly. Unless I'm called somewhere else, which I try to hold loosely.
The longer I'm here, the more I believe the kingdom tends to show up in small places — a Sunday table, a known name across the fence, the sentence do you want to come over? That's most of the work, honestly. Build the table. Set the chairs. See who arrives.
The body
About a year and a half ago, I started getting sudden ankle pain in both feet. None of the Winston-Salem doctors could name it. Duke Medical eventually could: a rare bone condition mostly seen, of all things, in ballet dancers. The surgeons took two bones out of my feet.
Sitting and standing are easier now. Walking long distances and running are still negotiations. I'd hoped to be playing sports again by this past January; that target slid, as targets do.
You cannot outrun your body. Eventually it catches up to you and asks, plainly, for the time you owe it.
There's a theology in that I'm still working out — something about a slow hope, about bodies as part of the story rather than the part you tolerate so the rest can happen. I'll let you know when I get further with it.
What I'm reading, what I'm trying
Two things I'm doing on purpose, both reluctantly.
Restore. A church program for working through what you've been through. I am not naturally drawn to this kind of room. I am also a person who has noticed that the things you don't deal with don't actually go anywhere; they just relocate. So.
The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker. I got too excited about it too fast and now need a co-host before I try to throw twelve dinner parties in a season. Recommended without reservation, especially if you'd also like to make the rooms of your life a little better.
About these letters
For a few years, I sent an occasional newsletter from a church account. I'm moving the writing here now, to my own corner. No support to ask for. No subscription to manage. Just a place where the writing — and the photographs, and the films, and a book I'm slowly working on — can be found by anyone who cares to look.
If you're reading this because you found me, hi. If you're reading because you've known me for years, also hi. I'd rather one good email back than ten thousand quiet reads. So if anything here landed: write me.