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At the end of every year we all tend to look back and reflect over all that has transpired. As a contemplative, reflection is a daily if not sometimes an hourly consideration, but since so many of my audience fade in and out throughout the year, I like to wrap up with a summary.

Within my family, 2025 has been the full spectrum of life’s wavelength. We celebrated my daughter’s wedding which brought us tremendous joy and was certainly the highlight of the year. We also celebrated the life of my mother-in-law who passed after suffering for years with dementia and who fell and broke her hip. Both the marriage and memorial took place one day apart, and were both beautiful in their own time and in their unique way of reflecting the joy of family, love, human connection, and legacy.

My wife and I celebrated 29 years of marriage and enjoyed a reflective weekend in the mountains where we charted the course for our Q4 of life. As we round the corner to retirement, we aligned ourselves with our planning, praying, and contingencies. None of us know what the future will hold, so we design things with an open hand, and a trust that “if the Lord wills” we will faithfully step into the next thing before us. To that end, I have retried from coaching High School Mountain Biking after 9 years of work. The previous year I won “Coach of the Year” and I felt it was time for new leadership, and I truly desire to create space for what may be next.

From a ministry standpoint, my podcast reached a milestone of 500 episodes, which is something less that 1% of all podcasts ever achieve. I’m grateful for this and for all of those who tune in week after week. My podcast audience ebbs and flows, ranging from 1,000-30,000 downloads a week, and since I did almost no promotion, I watched this number hang around the lower end of that spectrum. Since I was focused on teaching about cosmology for young adults, as well as expanding our understanding of christology, the fewer numbers made life easier for questions, coaching, and feedback. I enjoy this rhythm. My podcast isn’t political, and only has meaning to those for whom these questions have already emerged. I didn’t see the need to expand an audience who hasn’t come to these questions yet.

This year was a focused year for my online ministry. The first half of the year I focused on completing and launching my book: “OBLIVIOUS“. It was over a decade in the writing and it felt amazing to finally have it down. That joy was quickly met with the insecurity of putting oneself out there in that way. The feedback has been polar opposites. Those who have read it (usually more than once) tell me it was truly transformative. Others who mean well, have told me the book taunts them because they know they want to read it, but there remains a dissonance which makes them also want to throw it out of sight. This tells me it’s a truly spiritual book, so I can’t wait to explore how it plays a role in people’s lives.

My website hosted nearly 100,000 visitors this year, but only half were people exploring the content, the rest were people trying to hack into my website. The new format is darkened, quiet, contemplative, and I’ve begun using AI images to add a layer of Visio-Divina, for those who even know what that is. I like that all of my work is “evergreen” content that I offer to all comers for free and with no request for recognition. I still have no ads, popups, or affiliates. Everything reflects what is in my heart to give away and to all comers. The most common downloads still remain the Marriage series, the parenting series, and the Hell series. These have taken on a life of their own, and at the suggestion of my wife, leads me to some things I’m working on for 2026, they are:

1. I will offer a tool I’ve been creating called: “Marriage School” to serve people who are struggling in marriage but definitely don’t want to go the route of psychology to fix it. This is surprisingly a much bigger audience than I realized. The Psyche-bubble has popped and most moderns realize that the growth of psychology corresponds to the explosion of anxiety, depression, unhappiness, and relational confusion, not the healing from them.
2. My podcasts will be restructured. They will be shorter, more focused, and even if I still teach in a long-form series, I will present them as if they are stand alone pieces. I’ll still continue to offer my Socratic exegesis with its balance of deconstruction and reconstruction, but I hope to make it easier for more people to understand. Feedback has been that I’m a bit “professorial.“
3. Last year I fielded hours of coaching sessions from industry experts who told me to be on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Amazon and how to bias the algorithm’s into growing my audience. I’m pleased to announce that I will continue to ignore their advice and not try and enter the world of online influencer. I know that my platform and audience and content is ripe for development and promotion and many wish I’d do it, but my goal isn’t to be famous, or known, or recognized. I’m already financially established, I don’t need money, recognition or any of the things that make influencers covet being influencers. I seek only to take each person who comes into a deeper experience with God and to put them back into their lives so they can participate in its complete redemption. My audience is full of healed, redeemed, delivered, and empowered people. That’s all I want for 2026.
4. I’m in the process of finding a pastor and church in my area who will collaborate and is open to a voice like mine, and desires taking their congregations to a deeper level. If God puts the right leaders in my path who can appreciate a John the Baptist spirit animal like me, then I hope to bring a contemplative voice and practice into these over-hyped, over-busy, noisy, distracted congregations. I hope to inspire congregations to free themselves from being full-time clergy, and re-allocate their resources toward serving others.
5. If such a person doesn’t exist (which most of my audience is convinced doesn’t), then I’ll continue developing my local ministry and begin some mid-week, late night contemplative training and spiritual direction, or offering some kind of one-day retreat. I’m open handed about how this looks but it is in my heart to explore.
6. My stretch dream would be to take over a failing local church with a completely new model of ministry where no pastors are paid, where the services are not “shows” to entertain, and the entire experience is unlike anything available today. I hope to begin testing this in quarterly retreats in the near future. But that is what is behind the picture of the small stone chapel.

I would like to end this year by saying thank you to so many of you who have been with me since I went online in 2012. I’d like to say thank you to all of you whom have joined and visited me along the way. I recognize that I’m an acquired taste and that I don’t fit into any real category, but I trust that if you keep coming back, it’s because you recognize that the living experience of God and the message of the Gospel are both distinct from religion. Salvation or freedom or healing are the work of God in our lives (which are in themselves Christological expressions) as our lives, and we don’t need a “thing” to subscribe to, a “team” to pick, or a “tribe” to align ourselves with. Turning loose of those childhood best friends is scary at first, but then gets easier and more beautiful as we grow up and leave our three-sided prisons.

This ministry is here, and as long as I am here, to serve you within your unique journey and life of discovering yourself in God. I will not tell you what to do, what to believe, nor give you anything other than your faith in Christ to depend upon. I’m not starting a church, I’m part of The Church which according to the Bible, includes all others from every nation, tribe, tongue and religion. I’m excited with what God can do with dirty sinners like me, and you, as we join together in prayer and our work, to love and serve those in our spheres.

Thanks for making this year such a special one, and I look forward to seeing what God does with us in 2026.