I am a father, a soldier, a Southerner and an attorney. I live in Maryland with my wife and three kids, and I get paid a lot of money to do estate planning for very rich people. I spent seven years as an infantryman in the Army National Guard.
But this blog is mostly about spirituality and my personal spiritual journey.
Part of becoming a mature, self-actualized human being means trying to figure out what I actually believe. Do I believe in God? Am I a Christian? Do I want to be? Does that matter? Do I believe in the Bible, and what does it even mean “to believe in the Bible?” If the meaning of life isn’t what I was taught as a child, then what is the meaning of life, and how do I figure it out? If Christianity is so compelling to me, what do I do with spiritual feelings that I have that appear to have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity?
How can I find answers to these questions? Do answers to these questions even exist? How much can I really know, and how much do I simply have to decide to believe? Honestly grappling with this stuff has taken me some incredible and surprising places, and this blog is kind of a spotty chronicle of that journey.
The simple fact is that I hunger for the Divine. I’m not content to just live a completely secular life. The further away from spirit that I am, the more dissatisfied and restless I feel. I want to touch divinity, and I feel like this stuff is more important–or at least more interesting–than almost anything else.
Furthermore, as I have sailed forth, I have come to an increasing awareness that “spirituality” encompasses far more than that with which we usually associate it. Concepts like art, music, literature, poetry, food (beer!), identity, tradition, culture, history and home are deeply embedded with Spirit, and to ignore them as I try to puzzle out the meaning out of human existence and/or find God would be to make a fundamental mistake. So as time rolls on and I continue to blog this journey, it will address those tangental-but-not-tangental artifacts of Byzantium more and more.