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An Ordinary Day, an Extraordinary Echo

2026-10-31T08:40:18.172-05:00

As I continue reading Milton and Donne- I found that they actually crossed paths! What must that have been like!

Milton’s disillusionment with Cambridge was sharp. Reflecting later on university education, he complained that young men were:

“sent to those places, which were intended to be the seed plots of piety and the liberal arts, but were become the nurseries of superstition, and empty speculation.”

That is quite an assessment from someone whose appetite for learning seemed almost inexhaustible. He wanted an education that could nourish the mind and soul. What he encountered could leave him impatient with both the institution and its methods.

Then, reading Anna Beer’s biography, I came across a possibility that stopped me.

During Milton’s Cambridge years, John Donne was dean of St Paul’s.

The two writers I have been studying occupied the same world—and could have crossed paths.

Beer describes the intellectual life surrounding the cathedral: sermons at Paul’s Cross, booksellers and printers crowded into nearby streets, people gathering to hear, argue, browse, and exchange ideas. She suggests that this patch of London might have offered as much intellectual vitality as the whole of Cambridge.

Milton was back in London in the spring of 1626. He was seventeen. Donne was about fifty-four.

We have no documented meeting. But imagine one.

A young university student, already gifted and restless, pauses in the churchyard. The older preacher exchanges a few words with him. Perhaps Milton asks a question. Perhaps he simply listens.

Around them, books change hands, conversations drift, and London carries on.

Here is my speculative thought: perhaps encountering Donne—whether through a sermon or a passing conversation—could have given Milton an example of the vitality he found missing in university learning.

Donne had wrestled with desire, ambition, grief, mortality, and faith. His religious language bore the marks of those struggles. This is something that has drawn me to both men: their willingness to acknowledge the powerful forces within human nature while considering their spiritual consequences.

For a dissatisfied seventeen-year-old, hearing such a voice might have mattered.

Perhaps Milton heard learning brought into contact with life. Scripture, poetry, argument, and imagination could all serve the urgent work of examining a soul.

I cannot establish that connection. It is an imaginative possibility, prompted by their proximity and by the questions their writing continues to raise for me.

But the ordinary quality of the possible encounter is what I find most compelling.

Donne might have seen another bright young student with a question. Milton might have seen a celebrated preacher whose words deserved attention. Neither could have seen the centuries of readers ahead of them.

There would have been no reason for a passerby to stop and remember the moment.

Yet here I am, four hundred years later, reading both men and discovering how much their words still have to say about the things that trouble and sustain us.

Perhaps they once shared a few minutes on an unremarkable London day.

Their thoughts and words are still traveling.

Latin Is Dead. I’m Still Kicking (Reading Milton)

2026-10-30T05:35:42.103-05:00

Reading Anna Beer’s biography of John Milton, I came across a description of university life when he arrived at Cambridge in 1625.

Latin was everywhere: lectures, debates, speeches, scholarship. It connected educated people across national borders. For a young man hoping to make his mark, Latin offered a stage.

That brought back a memory of my own university experience.

Latin offered me a stage, too. Unfortunately, mine was an 8:00 a.m. performance every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I entered the University of Alabama in 1982 as an honors student coming out of high school. I was also the first person in my immediate family to attend college. My Aunt Janis had gone, but I arrived with very little understanding of how any of it worked. Even enrolling was a mystery.

An advisor suggested Latin.

“It’s a great introductory language.”

I had never taken a foreign language. Looking back, that might have been useful information for both of us to consider a little longer.

Meanwhile, I was playing football for Coach Bryant. We practiced live tackling, to the ground, every rep. I would walk into Latin covered in bruises and scrapes, looking like somebody had beaten me up in a bar fight.

You think I’m joking.

There were fifteen students in the class. Fourteen had studied Latin before.

Then there was me.

The professor would assign a passage, and we would take turns translating aloud. My classmates read Latin like they were reading the morning newspaper.

Then my turn would come.

“Uh … sky … uh … blue … uh … river. No, lake.”

It was humbling. An honors student in high school, and suddenly I couldn’t tell you whether we were standing beside a river or drowning in one.

So I developed a system.

I stayed up late cramming Latin into my head. Then I would sit in the middle section of the classroom and count ahead. If there were six people before me, I figured out which sentence would be mine and went to work.

And it worked!

By the time the professor reached me, I could deliver my translation at approximately the same pace as the people who actually knew what they were doing.

For a brief moment, I belonged in Milton’s world.

Until one late night and one hard practice too many.

That morning, I counted ahead, found my sentence, worked out the translation …

And fell asleep.

I woke up just as the student before me was finishing a translation with the confidence of an ancient philosopher.

My turn.

I sat up and announced, with vigor and cadence:

“Our city will not be strong because of foolish men!”

Every head turned. The professor. The students on either side of me. Everybody.

I had delivered it beautifully.

It was also the wrong sentence.

While I was asleep, the professor had changed sections.

“No, no,” he said. “Page 65, number six.”

I looked down.

“Uh … tree … uh … grass …”

Apparently, our city was in more trouble than I realized.

Here is where the funny story gets a little sad. I was so embarrassed that I never went back. And because I understood so little about college, I didn’t know there was such a thing as dropping a class.

I just quit attending.

The grade, unfortunately, kept attending on my behalf.

My first semester was a disaster. I ended up on academic probation. And in the football program, poor grades earned you additional running after workouts.

Latin was now hurting me academically, emotionally, and physically.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of my college story. Starting in my second year, I made the Dean’s List and continued making it through graduation. I eventually learned how to navigate college, though the lessons came with a few extra laps.

Reading about Milton now, I can appreciate what Latin meant in his world. It gave people access to learning, credibility, and a conversation that stretched across countries and centuries. Over time, other languages took over much of that work.

I can also look back with a little more sympathy for that bruised freshman trying to survive an unfamiliar world. I needed some guidance. I needed to learn how to ask for help. And I needed to discover that one embarrassing morning didn’t have to end my education.

But I stand by my translation:

Our city will not be strong because of foolish men.

I had some firsthand evidence.

Latin may be a dead language, but I’m still kicking.

Coach Bryant made sure I could keep moving.

Song #10 on Spotify- Where Are We Going From Here?

2026-10-30T04:54:55.857-05:00

Song #10, “Grace Alone,” is live today on Spotify, and it feels like a good time to share where Jayopsis music is—and where it’s headed.

If you enjoy “Grace Alone,”or any of my 10 songs- tap the + to save it to your Liked Songs on Spotify—and follow Jayopsis while you’re there. Thanks for listening!

You can listen to the new song here: GRACE ALONE .

I thought it was a good way to begin Reformation Day weekend.

These first ten songs have given me a chance to take a fresh look at some familiar biblical themes. Today’s release brings those reflections together, drawing from Romans 1–3 and 6–8, Ephesians 1–3, and 1 John 5:11–13. We confront our sin, run out of excuses, and discover that our hope rests in what Christ has done for us. Grace alone. That’s good news worth singing about.

Looking ahead, the next 20 songs will cover a wider range of genres and themes. Beginning November 10, I’m adding something I’m calling “Winter Tune Tues”—seasonal vibes, slower songs, and some chill sounds for the colder months. New Music Fridays will continue, too, with some fun southern rock and country additions along the way.

One surprise has been the response on SoundCloud: 165,000 all-time listens, with an average of almost 10,000 listens a month lately. Spotify has been a much slower start, but we’ll keep putting the music out there and watching it grow. I’m grateful for every person who takes the time to listen.

Through all of it, my purpose remains the same: to add some positive messaging to a part of our culture that often tends to go dark. There’s room for honest songs about struggle, songs about faith and grace, and songs that simply give us a reason to smile.

If one person enjoys something I’ve made and it helps them along the way, I’m satisfied. My hope is that you’ll find something here that encourages you, too.

Thanks for listening—and for being part of Jayopsis.

History Is Merely a Circle: How Milton Would Comment on the State of Our Affairs Today

2026-10-27T07:09:36.377-05:00

For about six months now, I have been working my way through Immortal Poems of the English Language. I have loved every minute of it.

With today’s tools, it doesn’t take long to learn something about a poet’s life before stepping into his words. A little biography, a little historical background, and suddenly a poem written centuries ago becomes a conversation with someone who once wrestled with many of the same things I do.

Sometimes I stop and think, I might be the only human on earth reading this particular poem right now.

Almost certainly an exaggeration—but there is something wonderful about the thought. Someone put those words on paper hundreds of years ago, and here I am, giving them another hearing.

I have now arrived at John Milton. This is going to take a while. He is someone I plan to sit down and camp out with. I added a biography to my Kindle, settled in, and promptly wandered off the poetry trail.

then suddenly-An essay caught my attention.Written to the English Parliament in 1644.

On freedom of speech.

So much for leaving our current arguments behind.

Milton’s Areopagitica challenged Parliament’s licensing order of 1643, which generally required official approval before a work could be printed. England was in the throes of civil war, while the Thirty Years’ War continued its devastation on the European continent. These were dangerous times for arguments about religion, government, and who possessed the authority to decide what others could read.

What especially caught my attention was that Milton was challenging people whose cause he supported. He sided with Parliament against the king. Yet here he was, asking Parliament to reconsider its own restrictions.

In my paraphrase: You opposed oppression. Be careful what you do now that you possess power.

Sound familiar?

I loved this quote:

when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for.

Milton presses a question that reaches well beyond seventeenth-century printing:

Do we protect truth by controlling what people can read, or by teaching them to judge?

His argument assumes that readers have work to do. They must examine, compare, distinguish, and choose. Keeping every mistaken idea out of their reach will not produce the same wisdom as learning to recognize why an idea is mistaken.

One passage stopped me:

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed…”

“Unbreathed” carries the sense of being unexercised or untested. Milton is questioning a virtue that has never had to face opposition—a goodness that remains safely indoors while the struggle takes place outside.

Milton argues that “cloistered virtue” is goodness kept safely in seclusion, protected from temptation and opposing ideas. Its weakness is that it has never been tested: avoiding a difficult choice does not demonstrate the ability to choose wisely. Mature virtue understands why something wrong might be attractive and still rejects it. Reading widely offers a comparatively safe way to develop that judgment. Suppressing every competing idea may therefore weaken the very goodness we hope to protect. Like an athlete who keeps a spotless uniform by never entering the race, sheltered virtue has yet to develop strength through the “dust and heat” of competition.

As an educator and a Christian, I find that challenging.

We have a responsibility to guide. Age and maturity matter. Teaching children requires judgment about what they are prepared to encounter. But preparing them for adulthood must eventually include helping them examine arguments we believe are wrong.

At some point, they will encounter those arguments without us.

Will they know how to think through them? Will they understand what they believe and why? Will they have the confidence to listen carefully without assuming that listening amounts to surrender?

I want a faith that can withstand a difficult question. That requires more of me than arranging a life in which difficult questions never get asked.

With war continuing in Ukraine and fires and chaos in Europe, Milton’s argument deserves another hearing. Fear makes control attractive. When the stakes seem enormous, allowing people to speak freely can begin to look like a luxury we cannot afford.

But those are precisely the circumstances in which I want us to examine our reasoning most carefully.

Who decides which opinions are too dangerous to hear? How do we correct the people making those decisions? And would we trust the same machinery in the hands of our opponents?

That brings me to Elon Musk and X.

I wonder where our public conversation would be had Musk not acquired Twitter in 2022. I cannot prove what would have happened otherwise. It is a question, not a conclusion. But the question matters to me because so much public discussion now passes through platforms controlled by a relatively small number of people and companies.

Musk himself is a contentious figure. Readers will bring sharply different judgments about him to this paragraph. Still, my support for freedom of expression cannot depend on liking the person who owns a platform. The principle has to apply to his critics as well.

If I welcome room for opinions that were previously unwelcome, I must also defend room for people who criticize Musk, challenge my politics, or question convictions I hold dearly. Otherwise, I have simply found a gatekeeper whose preferences happen to resemble mine.

A privately owned platform is different from Parliament licensing a printing press. The comparison has limits. Yet the concentration of power over public discussion should concern us wherever we find it.

We should also remember that permission to speak does not establish the truth of what is spoken. A false claim remains false. We still have to investigate, answer, correct, and sometimes say firmly, “That is wrong.”

Free discussion asks something demanding of its participants.

Milton himself did not apply toleration consistently. His argument excluded Roman Catholicism from the freedom he defended for others. That limitation belongs in our reading of him. A man can recognize the danger of suppression and still make an exception for the beliefs he fears most.

Perhaps that is where the circle becomes most visible.

Each generation discovers compelling reasons why its own exceptions are necessary. Each is tempted to believe that power will be safe this time because the right people possess it.

I cannot know how Milton would vote, which platform he would use, or what he would make of our daily controversies. I suspect he would frustrate anyone trying to recruit him as a reliable spokesman.

But his essay gives me a question to carry into my own affairs:

Am I willing to defend another person’s freedom to make an argument I sincerely wish nobody would believe?

I can answer it confidently in the abstract. The test comes when I recognize the person, dislike the argument, and have the power to make it disappear.

I went looking for a little poetry and found an uncomfortable examination of my own consistency.

I think I’ll camp here a while.

By the way- my time with Milton pushed out a strange little tune.... the word be invented....

PANDEMONIUM

Milton coined “pandemonium”! He introduced it as “Pandæmonium” in Paradise Lost (1667), naming the palace in Hell where Satan and the fallen angels assemble. The name combines roots meaning “all” and “demons”—essentially, the place of all demons.

It later became our everyday word for wild uproar, confusion, or chaos. So when we say “pandemonium broke out,” we’re borrowing from Milton’s capital of Hell!

You can read Milton’s work here: Areopagitica

To write the life of John Milton is thus to survey a century of unprecedented religious, political, social and cultural struggles, and to consider a writer enmeshed in, and fascinated by, those conflicts. Milton’s genius lies in the extraordinary power and beauty with which he wrote from within this turmoil, and indeed wrote out of his own personal struggles – which include his blindness, endured in an unforgiving, pre-industrial society. Throughout his life, he used his astounding learning to articulate and explore with passion and eloquence the great questions that troubled him and his contemporaries: What constitutes human liberty and how can it best be supported? What is the nature of good government and how can it be sustained? How can we understand the divine – and each other? How can we find the strength to bear suffering and death? In reading Milton, therefore, we not only journey to a troubled and exhilarating past, but are challenged, as Milton challenged his readers in his own century, to consider those questions, and to provide some answers of our own.

Beer, Anna. Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (pp. 8-9). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Behind the Song: Wrecked

2026-10-26T08:54:34.280-05:00

This song is LIVE in prep for the song "Grace Alone" on Friday. It will create some head scratching- but hear it out all the way.....

Song Link: WRECKED

“Wrecked” starts under neon lights, with bourbon, smoke, and people laughing at the same old jokes. It sounds like the beginning of a familiar bar room song.

But then the song turns toward a different kind of intoxication:

Mine never came from a bottle on a shelf;
I got drunk on trying to figure out life itself.

That is where the song gets personal.

I know the temptation to believe that if I can just understand something well enough, I can finally make peace with it. Read another book. Work through another argument. Find the missing piece that makes the suffering understandable, the disappointment bearable, the unanswered prayer make sense.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions. I have spent a good portion of my life asking them, and I’m still asking.

But I can turn the search for understanding into a demand: I need an explanation before I will trust You.

And that is a heavy condition to put on faith.

The bottle can numb you for a little while,
Reason can keep you awake all night.
One hides the pain, one chases the “why”…
Neither can carry the weight of this life.

We have different ways of trying to carry that weight. Some are easy to recognize. Others can look respectable—even admirable. Being informed. Being productive. Being the person who always has an answer.

I can recognize someone else’s escape while giving mine a better name.

That is part of what I wanted to explore in “Wrecked.”

When the chorus says, “We’re all just wrecked the same,” I don’t mean that every wound is identical or that every choice carries the same consequences. Some things happen to us. Some things happen because of us. Often, we are living with both.

Being wounded is not the same as being guilty. But none of us gets through life needing only sympathy and never forgiveness.

Romans brings that truth home. “None is righteous, no, not one” (3:10). And then, in Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

All includes me.

That admission takes away the comfortable distance between the person telling the story and the people standing under those neon lights. I need the mercy I hope they find.

Dr. Ray Ortlund, Jr., offers a warning that presses into this song:

“Every time you hear the Word of God preached, you come away from that exposure to the truth either a little closer to God or a little further away from Him, either more softened toward God or more hardened toward God…. What you need is more grace. Nothing else can save you from your deadness. Therefore, fear your own hardness of heart more than anything else. Beware of rigidity, ingratitude, a demanding spirit. Beware of an unmelted heart that is never satisfied.”

That last description gets my attention.

A person can endure disappointment and become more tender toward others. A person can also become harder, more suspicious, more determined to make God explain Himself.

I recognize that struggle. There are times when I am so busy examining what God has allowed that I stop receiving what He has given.

Even hearing the truth can become another occasion to defend myself.

What I need then is grace reaching into the very heart that keeps resisting it.

That is why “Wrecked” belongs before “Grace Alone,” which releases this Friday.

I wanted this song to leave us ready to hear the good news. The recognition of our need doesn’t earn us anything. We don’t become deserving by being sufficiently miserable. But when we stop insisting that we can repair ourselves, we begin to understand why grace is such a beautiful word.

The final chorus starts moving in that direction:

Grace doesn’t ask for perfect;
It only asks what’s true.

For me, that is the moment the excuses begin to fall away. I can tell the truth about the sin, the hurt, the pride, and the questions I still cannot answer. I can come to Christ with all of it.

His love has substance: a cross, a Savior bearing our sin, an empty tomb. My hope rests in what He has done, even when my understanding runs out.

“Wrecked” closes with a simple confession:

The bottle never healed me…
Love did.

I still have questions. I still carry things I wish had happened differently.

But I don’t have to solve every mystery before I can trust the One who loves me.

“Wrecked” is my admission of need.

On Friday, “Grace Alone” follows.

Behind the Song: We All Alibi

2026-10-21T18:00:24.438-05:00

This song is live now- "New Music Friday" on Spotify

We All Alibi

I can usually explain why I did something.

Give me a few minutes, and I can supply the background, clarify my intentions, describe the pressure I was under, and help you understand why things weren’t quite what they appeared to be.

In my younger days I thought it was clever but looking back, many times, it was just pure manipulation... and demonstrated the truth that I really didn't trust God- I was always in charge of protecting myself.

And so over the years I have been in situations where either through interviewing students for discipline cases and trying to be a peacemaker in conflict situations.

I even remember the famous line from the Dr House series: "All people lie"

Those themes and memories is where “We All Alibi” began.

We all know the famous words from Jesus: “The truth will set you free.” I kept thinking about how much effort we put into avoiding the very thing that promises freedom. We justify, rationalize, soften the language, and rearrange the facts until we can live with the version we’ve created.

Sometimes we even believe it.

The title turns alibi into something we do. We all build a case. We all have a story ready when the finger turns our way.

There's always more to my story
When the guilty one is here

There really may be more to the story. Circumstances matter. Motives matter. People deserve a fair hearing. But I have to ask why I’m so willing to consider those things for myself and so reluctant to consider them for somebody else.

The second verse puts that habit into everyday language- I wanted the lyrics to show juxtaposition:

Your anger is a bitter heart
Mine is righteous indignation
Your silence is a punishment
Mine is self-preservation

I recognize those distinctions because I’ve made them. I know what it feels like to give my behavior a respectable name while assigning somebody else the worst possible motive.

And once I start doing that, an honest conversation becomes difficult. I’m already defending a verdict.

This is an old human problem. In the garden, Adam points toward Eve—and even toward the God who gave her to him. Abraham conceals the truth about Sarah because he is afraid of what might happen if he tells it. Moses offers objection after objection when God calls him to go.

Those stories involve different circumstances, but I recognize the fear running through them: What will happen to me if I stand here exposed? What might the truth cost?

I understand that fear. An explanation gives me something to stand behind.

The bridge carries that instinct into a courtroom:

When it's you, I'm the prosecutor
When it's me, I'm the defense
Your worst day becomes the evidence
Mine gets labeled circumstance

That may be the most revealing part of the song for me. I can remember the stones somebody threw at me with remarkable accuracy. The ones that departed from my own left hand tend to require a little more effort.

Writing those lines is easier than letting them examine me.

I could turn this whole song into a complaint about people who won’t take responsibility. I could think of names, recall conversations, and build another convincing case. But then I’d be doing exactly what the song describes.

Before I weigh somebody else’s explanation, I need to weigh my own words. Am I telling the truth? Am I leaving out the part that makes me look bad? Am I explaining what happened, or trying to make sure I escape responsibility for it?

When Jesus speaks about truth and freedom in John 8, He is speaking about something deeper than getting an uncomfortable admission off our chest. He speaks about slavery to sin and the freedom the Son gives. That matters to me because honesty exposes a need I cannot explain away.

I need forgiveness. I need grace.

And yet I can spend an astonishing amount of energy trying to establish that I didn’t really need either one in this particular situation.

That tension led to the ending:

Here I sit in chains
With the key to set me free
All I have to do
Is admit the truth about me

The key is an image of the admission I keep refusing to make. It costs me the story in which I was innocent all along.

I wanted the song to end with that struggle still unresolved. The singer recognizes the cell, understands what he is doing, and still holds tightly to his defense. I know that hesitation. Knowing I should tell the truth doesn’t mean I’m ready to say it out loud.

“We All Alibi” is a song I need to hear myself.

Especially when I’m certain somebody else needs to hear it.

It was me. I was wrong. Please forgive me.

I can write a whole song about those words. I still need to learn to say them.

I know the early Jayopsis Spotify playlist has been dark- but I am trying to build a worldview that hopefully will soon show more light. The worse the bad news is, the better the Good News will be!

Behind the Song: The Abyss

2026-10-20T08:36:57.621-05:00

Update: As this post mentioned, there are a couple of different versions of this song that I have worked and re-worked. We dropped an earlier version - but not the final one (which I thought was a lot better).

Here is the link to the latest on Spotify:

The Abyss

Last spring, I spent a good stretch with Friedrich Nietzsche. I read large portions of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, worked through On the Genealogy of Morals, returned to the Madman passage in The Gay Science, and made my way through most of Kaufmann’s book.

It put me in a rather strange mood, to be honest.

That wasn’t casual reading. It was more like stepping into a different mental world for a while.

I’ve asked myself why I picked him up in the first place. Curiosity? The desire to understand someone whose influence reaches so far? Or was there a little intellectual résumé-building mixed in? Probably some of all of that. I ought to be honest about my motives, especially when reading someone who made me question them.

There is no denying the man’s intellect. Even in translation, the depth and range of his thinking can be breathtaking. I followed the arguments, sat with the tension, and let him press on some fault lines.

I played in his sandbox for a bit.

What I experienced was more than an encounter with ideas. It felt like a test of what I actually believed. What holds when it is challenged? What have I thought through? What have I simply inherited, repeated, or absorbed?

For a while, that was energizing. Then it became clarifying. At some point, I realized I wasn’t moving toward agreement - I was moving toward distinction.

A few things stayed with me. His suspicion of systems made me more attentive to the assumptions inside my own frameworks. I came away wanting to examine those assumptions more honestly, with a little less confidence in my ability to have everything neatly arranged.

I was also drawn to the willingness to ask a question that puts something at risk. There is a difference between asking a clever question and asking one whose answer might require something of you.

And throughout the reading, I found myself thinking about how easily we outsource our thinking—to teachers, movements, cultural trends, even art. Reading about his break with Wagner sharpened that question for me: What is shaping me, and have I actually examined its influence?

That concern reaches into the growing AI age, too. I want these tools to help us discover, inquire, and learn. I worry about letting them do so much of our thinking that we stop doing the work ourselves. There is a responsibility in learning that convenience cannot carry for us.

But the deepest clarification was about where I stand. For me, reality is ultimately personal. There is a Father to trust, a Savior to know, and grace I receive from Someone who knows me. That conviction became clearer during my time with Nietzsche.

Eventually, I knew I had read enough for now. I could respect his intellect, learn from the encounter, and recognize how far apart we remained.

Some thinkers sharpen you and unsettle you. You can be grateful for the visit without making their world your permanent residence.

It was time to close that chapter and move on. But one question followed me out of it: What am I becoming while I contend with the darkness?

His words stayed with me after I closed the books. In particular, I kept coming back to the warning in Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 146:

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

That warning gave “Staring into the Abyss” its central image. But the song’s story began before that season of reading, with a blog post and a line from The Dark Knight:

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

When I first heard it, I thought it was a clever line. The older I get, the more it feels like a mirror.

I didn’t set out to become the villain. I just kept living.

You make decisions. Some are necessary. Some are mistaken. Some seem right at the time and look different years later. You disappoint people. People disappoint you. You gather wounds, learn to protect yourself, and discover that protection can become a habit.

Eventually, you begin to wonder what all of it is doing to you.

The original post was my attempt to put that uneasiness into words. It became a song. Then, after reading Nietzsche last spring, I went back and completely revised it—lyrically and musically.

The question felt closer now. I was thinking about the man I was becoming while trying to stand against the things I believed were wrong.

The first verse begins with the confidence of youth:

Bright-eyed, fearless, full of fire,
I thought I knew the man I'd be.
I knew the villains from the heroes,
And which one looked like me.

I remember that confidence. There is something beautiful about it, and something dangerous. It is easier to imagine ourselves as courageous and principled before those principles have been tested by disappointment, exhaustion, or the temptation to get even.

Then comes the discovery that changes the song:

I went looking for the darkness—
Found some of it in me.

That is a difficult confession. It is also one I cannot afford to avoid.

There is real evil in the world. There are things we ought to resist, people we ought to protect, and moments when silence is a failure of love. But standing for a good cause does not make every impulse in me good. I can be right about an injustice and wrong in the way I treat someone. I can defend the truth and enjoy humiliating the person who disagrees.

I can win an argument and carry its bitterness home.

That is how Nietzsche’s warning reaches me. The battle can begin shaping the person fighting it. Eventually, the anger feels necessary. The armor feels like part of my skin.

Some of the most uncomfortable lines in the revised song are in the second verse:

I learned suspicion dressed as wisdom,
Learned to keep my mercy small.
Built my walls and called them boundaries,
Till I couldn't feel at all.

Experience should teach us discernment. Healthy boundaries matter. But I have to ask whether every wall I build is serving a healthy purpose. Sometimes I am protecting a wound I have never surrendered. Sometimes “I know how people are” becomes my excuse for withholding kindness before anyone has had a chance to receive it.

I may see through illusions more quickly now. I also miss the comfort of having them.

And seeing clearly brings its own question:

But knowing everything that's broken
Doesn't tell you how to last.

You can recognize deception and still need help with your own heart. You can understand what went wrong and still have no idea how to forgive. Awareness alone cannot give me the tenderness I am losing.

This is where the song turns toward Jesus.

I am not suggesting that Nietzsche was pointing toward the Christian answer I find here. His warning becomes the starting point for my own examination, and that examination brings me back to Christ.

As the ugliness around me—and within me—becomes harder to ignore, Jesus becomes more radiant.

He endured betrayal, cruelty, injustice, abandonment, and death. He knew the evil He faced. He suffered it without becoming evil Himself.

Hebrews 4:15 speaks of a Savior who understands our weakness and was tempted, yet remained without sin. That matters to me more as I grow older. His purity endured suffering. His mercy survived rejection.

The bridge reaches for that wonder:

No bitterness upon His tongue,
No vengeance in His wounded hands.
He carried love into the grave
And walked back out again.

The resurrection gives the final chorus somewhere to go. The darkness has been faced, and death has been overcome.

There's a light the dark can't swallow,
There's a stone that's rolled away.

Easter feels increasingly necessary to me. I need forgiveness for what I have done. I need renewal in what I am becoming. I need a hope that can survive both the world’s brokenness and my own.

The grace of God feels like oxygen.

When the song says, “I don’t need to be the hero,” I hear relief from the burden of saving myself. I still have responsibilities. There are still battles worth fighting. But I can surrender the need to justify myself in every encounter, settle every score, and make my own strength sufficient.

I need the One who entered death and came back.

The song ends with a prayer:

So take the anger, take the armor,
Take the man I tried to be.
I went looking for a revolution—
Lord, begin it here in me.

That is where I wanted to leave it. I have plenty of opinions about what needs to change in the world. This song asks whether I am willing to let God change me.

I have lived long enough to recognize some of the villain in myself.

I have also lived long enough to know how much I need the Savior who never became one.

Lord, begin it here in me.

If you want to read more about my time with Nietzsche:

Where Do We Go When the Light Fades Away?

Is Art Lost?

Music Without Lyrics

Would Nietzsche Tweet?

Moving On From Nietz

Best Band and Song You Never Heard Of

2026-10-15T10:43:29.061-05:00

I thought the whole world would eventually know that song.

Song Link: You’ve Got Another Thing Coming

That is what I remember about hearing Hotel’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming.” It had the pace, the beat, the harmonies, and that voice. To my ears, everything was there. Surely it was only a matter of time before everybody else caught on.

Some did. But far fewer than I expected.

Hotel was a Birmingham band, and I heard them at Brother's Music Hall back when I was probably too young to be there. I saw some things I have never forgotten. But after all these years, the music is what stayed.

I loved that band. I loved the album. Even the artwork—the tile and architectural themes on the covers—became part of the experience for me. Those images still bring the music to mind. An album could do that in those days. You held it, studied it, played it again, and gradually the whole thing became attached to a season of your life.

“You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” was the song I kept coming back to.

Hotel had the musicians to deliver it. The familiar six-member lineup included Marc Phillips, Tommy Calton, Lee Bargeron, Mike Reid, George Creasman, and Michael Cadenhead. All six contributed vocals, and those harmonies were a defining part of their sound. They had spent years building a following around the Southeast before the national records came.

Written by Phillips and Bargeron, “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” appeared on their 1979 self-titled album. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 that July, climbed to No. 54 in August, and was gone after eight weeks. Hotel placed four singles on the Hot 100, but none reached the Top 40.

I still find that hard to reconcile with what I hear.

Of course, that summer had no shortage of competition. Cheap Trick, the Cars, Supertramp, Little River Band, and ELO were all putting records into the same crowded musical world. Hotel got a hearing, but the larger breakthrough never came.

I cannot tell you exactly why. I can tell you that the song has outlasted plenty of records that climbed higher.

Years later, I got Marc’s book and contacted him. We got to know each other a little, and in 2011 he spoke at a Briarwood chapel.

The students loved him.

That was a particular pleasure for me. Here was someone whose voice had been part of my younger years, now connecting with students through his own story. They were meeting Marc for themselves. I got to watch another group respond to a man I had admired for a long time.

His story had plenty of hard chapters. In his book, Pouring It Out on Me, he wrote about music, addiction, his battle with throat cancer, and his faith in Christ. There was a great deal of life behind the voice I remembered from those records. www.marcphillipsmusic.com

My last interaction with Marc was a few months before he got COVID.

He was singing at a restaurant in Brook Highland. Just Marc and a keyboard, playing to a small group. We chatted briefly during his break.

I did not know that would be our last conversation. It was simply good to see him and hear him again.

Marc died on January 21, 2021, after battling COVID-19. He was 66.

When I think about him now, I have several memories to hold together: the band at Brother's Music Hall, the albums I loved, the man speaking to our students, and that last evening in Brook Highland.

And through all of them, I can still hear that song.

The title of this post makes a claim I obviously cannot prove. Some of you knew Hotel well. Some of you probably have your own candidate for the best band the world somehow missed.

But if you have never heard Hotel’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming,” give it a listen. I liked many of their other songs as well.

I have been waiting a long time for you to hear it. I think about those memories every time I drive down Lakeshore Drive in Homewood... now it is just a .... hotel. Ironic?

I published a song as a tribute to those memories on SoundCloud:

Brothers Music Hall 1979

Behind the Song: Flora-Bama

2026-10-13T06:36:32.052-05:00

This song will release on Spotify on Dec. 4

Here it is on SoundCloud

Flora-Bama

“Dad, you make people think too much. They just want a good song.”

My daughter may have supplied the most efficient music review I have received.

She had a point. I had a song with a groove people liked, Alabama imagery they enjoyed, and a title that seemed to require a little explanation before we could get to the music.

The song was called “Bama Gothic.” It is now called “Flora-Bama.”

How it traveled from one to the other still makes me laugh.

This actually began with an earlier song called “Southern Gothic,” my tribute to a literary world I have enjoyed: Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and others who could make a Southern landscape feel beautiful, troubling, familiar, and strange all at once.

That world has weathered houses, family secrets, religious language, buried guilt, and people who cannot quite escape what came before them. There is often something funny in the middle of something disturbing. Grace can arrive where nobody thought to look for it.

I wanted to see what that world might sound like in a song.

“Southern Gothic” picked up about 1,500 listens. And for all the weight of its literary background, it was actually a fun song. The music had life in it. That encouraged me to begin building an album around Southern Gothic themes. - “Bama Gothic” came out of that work.

It had moss-draped limbs, an old church hall, a rusted bell, roses behind a door, and secrets creaking through a pineboard floor. The chorus landed in “a cursed, sacred land.” That was the territory I was trying to explore: a South where beauty and brokenness live close together, and the past keeps finding ways to speak.

Then we started getting ready to move the music to Spotify.

A friend suggested that I find a way out of the word “Gothic.” My small vetting team liked the music. They liked the imagery. They liked the Alabama references. But the title was getting in the way. The literary connection that seemed clear to me was not necessarily what other people heard in that word.

Then came my daughter’s observation. I laughed ...... but I listened.

I do like making people think. I also want them to enjoy the song. I love literature but most people don't and would not get the allusions tucked away inside. If the groove gets them through the door, perhaps the ideas can meet them somewhere inside.

My first attempt was “Bama Slamma.”

It sounded like the music: loud, energetic, a little reckless. But it did not sound like the lyrics. I still had buried guilt, a preacher’s lies, dark rivers, and judgment hiding somewhere. Putting “Bama Slamma” over that world did not quite solve the problem.

The answer arrived from an unexpected direction: James Spann’s hurricane coverage.

As the recent hurricane came through, he was showing scenes of the Flora-Bama, and they talked about the place at length. Watching that coverage, something clicked.

I could move the song south on the same groove.

The red clay could meet the rising tide. The old church hall could give way to salt-worn beams. The haunted rooms could become a bar full of people carrying their own memories. I could keep the Southern voices, the worn wood, the ache beneath the noise—and put them beside the Gulf.

Once that idea arrived, the lyric began to move.

Under salt-worn beams where the last call falls,
Old names fade on the bathroom walls.
A steel guitar cries out its blame,
Every old song knows your name.

There was the new setting. But something of the old song was still standing in it.

That mattered to me. I wanted a lively coastal song with people in it, people who had brought a little more to the beach than a cooler and a change of clothes.

A boy arrives with his daddy’s rage and finds a little peace beside the stage. Someone leaves their worries behind, only to discover they are still somewhere nearby. An old friend calls your name. The music starts, and the night makes room for all of them.

And yes, I kept some of my fun lines in it.

One line came out of a convenience store moment I had when a guy was buying a zyn pouch. I said to him, everyone has switched to those pouches and he laughed and said, "Copenhagen ain’t what it used to be."

Some lines survive a move because they sound like somebody you know. I can hear that one coming from a fellow leaning against a railing, offering an opinion nobody asked for.

The chorus found its new home:

At the Flora-Bama—where the night won’t fade,
White sand shores and the bets we’ve made.
Saints and sinners go hand in hand,
Southern drawls where the Gulf meets the sand.

Then came the real test: putting the new words on the track.

It worked.

The meter and rhythm settled into the music, and the song suddenly felt at home on the coast. I sat there laughing.

Somewhere along the way, I started feeling like the Duke and the King in Huckleberry Finn, putting together the Royal Nonesuch. I had traded buried guilt and Southern Gothic shadows for salt air, neon, and the Flora-Bama—and the thing worked. Twain might have appreciated the showmanship. Hopefully, our audience leaves happier.

[Editor’s Note, introducing the scene: Halfway through their trip down the river in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim fall in with a pair of low-grade con artists. One fancies himself a king and the other a duke. Slipping into a small town in Arkansas, the two decide to put on a Shakespeare play, which fails miserably. This leads them to take revenge on the town, as Huck tells us...]
Well, that night we had our show; but there warn’t only about twelve people there – just enough to pay expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy – and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could size their style. So next morning he got some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village. The bills said:
AT THE COURT HOUSE!
FOR 3 NIGHTS ONLY!
The World-Renowned Tragedians
DAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER!
AND
EDMUND KEAN THE ELDER!
Of the London and Continental Theatres,
In their Thrilling Tragedy of
THE KING’S CAMELEOPARD,
OR
THE ROYAL NONESUCH ! ! !
Admission 50 cents.
Then at the bottom was the biggest line of all, which said:
LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.
“There,” says he, “if that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!”

There is something funny about beginning with a tribute to Southern literature and ending up thinking about Twain’s traveling con men. I will leave the implications of that comparison alone for now.

But I like where the song landed.

The original still has its place. So do the writers who helped me imagine it. Their influence remains in the weathered surfaces, the complicated people, and the sense that an old song can know your name.

This version gives that world a little more room to dance.

My daughter may hear it and say, “See, Dad? That’s what I meant.”

She may be right.

For now, the band is playing, the salt air is moving through the screen door, and we are headed through a wild night toward the break of day.

Full Lyrics:

(Verse 1) Under salt-worn beams where the last call falls, Old names fade on the bathroom walls. A steel guitar cries out its blame, Every old song knows your name. A woman walks barefoot through the door, White sand grinds on a pineboard floor. Sunburned shoulders and bloodshot eyes— Where the red clay meets the rising tide. (Chorus) At the Flora-Bama—where the night won’t fade, White sand shores and the bets we’ve made. Saints and sinners go hand in hand, Southern drawls where the Gulf meets the sand. (Verse 2) A boy rolls in with his daddy’s rage, Finds a little peace by the edge of the stage. Smoke drifts out through the neon signs, Like prayers sent up at closing time. Whiskey breath on a salty breeze, Copenhagen ain’t what it used to be. Boots on the boards, footsteps upstairs— You left your worries, but they’re still somewhere. (Chorus) At the Flora-Bama—where the night won’t fade, White sand shores and the bets we’ve made. Saints and sinners go hand in hand, Southern drawls where the Gulf meets the sand. (Bridge) Sea oats bow where the fences lean, Names carved deep from a summer dream. Gulf rolls dark where the moon hangs low, Wash your feet but it won’t let go. Screen door swings and the night breathes in— You hear your name from an old lost friend. (Verse 3) A crowd runs wild in the heatwave haze, With too many plans and too few days. Peelin’ paint and a weepin’ moon, Somebody calls for another tune. Strings bend hard and the drummer turns, Every old flame gets a chance to burn. At the state line, callin’ out your name— Every heart beats with a different ache. (Chorus) At the Flora-Bama—where the night won’t fade, White sand shores and the bets we’ve made. Saints and sinners go hand in hand, Southern drawls where the Gulf meets the sand. (Outro) Carve it deep where the salt leaves marks, Old songs linger when the stage goes dark. At the Flora-Bama we find our way— Through a wild night to the break of day. At the Flora-Bama—where the night won’t fade, White sand shores and the bets we’ve made. Saints and sinners go hand in hand, Southern drawls where the Gulf meets the sand.

AI and the Responsibility of Stewardship

2026-10-09T06:23:06.559-05:00

Back in February, I posted a few thoughts about artificial intelligence on Facebook. I found myself somewhere between the optimism of Star Trek and the anxiety of The Terminator.

I ended with a little apocalyptic humor: “No matter how smart it gets, we’d better be the ones holding the kill switch.” (Feb. 2 FB post)

The joke carried a serious concern. We are developing tools of extraordinary capability, and we need to retain responsibility for what we build and how we use it. A few months later, I am still thinking about that responsibility.

I understand the reluctance surrounding AI. Questions about jobs, creative ownership, privacy, infrastructure, and human control deserve a hearing. So do the concerns of parents and teachers trying to understand what these tools will do to children who are still learning to think.

I also understand the excitement. I have experienced some of it myself.

What troubles me is the possibility that people with serious moral convictions will conclude that their only faithful response is to leave the conversation. If good men and women surrender their place in the discussion, who will speak for the people whose dignity and well-being ought to govern it?

We need to remain engaged. And our engagement needs a purpose deeper than keeping up.

What stewardship requires

I have often said that technology is essentially neutral—raw potential waiting for human intention. I still believe that human intention matters enormously. A tool can help us serve a neighbor or exploit one.

But that statement needs qualification. Technology comes to us with choices already built into it. Let's not be naive about that..... Someone has decided what information it collects, what behavior it encourages, what success looks like, and who retains control. Responsibility begins before the user ever touches the keyboard.

Stewardship reaches across that whole process. It asks what we should build, how we should build it, who should benefit, and what limits we should accept.

It also requires us to hear objections fairly. A community questioning a data center may be asking reasonable questions about its resources and infrastructure. A musician concerned about the use of creative work may be defending something valuable. A teacher questioning an AI assignment may be protecting the learning that assignment was supposed to produce.

The International Energy Agency projects that global data-center electricity consumption will roughly double between 2025 and 2030. These tools have a physical footprint, and their costs belong in the conversation alongside their possibilities. www.iea.org

Calling every objection “fear of progress” would be a failure of stewardship.

So would using the word “inevitable” to end the discussion. AI may continue to develop, but that does not make every application, business practice, or classroom use inevitable. Human choices still matter. We must insist that they do.

History gives us questions

We have encountered disruptive changes before.

The printing press helped carry the Protestant Reformation through pamphlets and other printed works that reached audiences far beyond a single pulpit. It also carried competing religious campaigns and polemics. Expanding the reach of words did not settle which words deserved belief.

Industrial machinery presents another complicated example. The Luddites are often remembered as people who simply hated technology. They were skilled workers protesting machinery used to replace their labor and drive down wages. Their grievances deserve more respect than the label usually receives.

A development can increase production while imposing severe costs on particular people. We ought to remember those people when we speak enthusiastically about progress.

There are also examples of participation that included deliberate restraint. In the 1970s, researchers working with recombinant DNA confronted risks arising from their own discoveries. A voluntary pause in certain experiments, the 1975 Asilomar conference, and subsequent NIH guidelines helped establish conditions under which the work could proceed. (see note at the end about this conference)

That example matters to me. People involved in developing a technology accepted responsibility for questioning and limiting it.

History cannot promise that AI will turn out well. It can help us recognize that curiosity, criticism, caution, and responsible development all have a place in the discussion. Staying involved sometimes means insisting that a particular project slow down—or stop.

The Princeton Response

There is a related lesson in the Christian response to Darwin.

When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Christian responses varied. Some opposed it, some sought ways to accommodate its findings, and some supported it. The familiar picture of a single confrontation between “science” and “the church” leaves out a much more complicated conversation.

Charles Hodge, the Princeton theologian, published What Is Darwinism? in 1874. He examined the arguments and distinguished evolution and natural selection from what he understood as the exclusion of divine design. That last issue stood at the center of his objection. I remember the 1st time I read Hodge's response- it was full of retrained respect and logical analysis- we miss that so much in our drama filled bantering today!

Asa Gray, a devout Presbyterian and botanist, reached a different judgment. He engaged extensively with Darwin and argued that natural selection need not exclude divine purpose.

I am not trying to reopen that entire debate here. What interests me is the willingness to understand the argument, identify the assumptions, and bring Christian conviction into a serious exchange.

Hodge and Gray did not agree. Both participated.

That is a useful reminder for us. Faithful engagement will not produce identical conclusions. It should produce better questions, more careful distinctions, and disagreements that address what someone actually believes.

We need that discipline when discussing AI. A demonstration of what a system can accomplish is one thing. A claim about what that accomplishment means for human identity, moral responsibility, or the future of civilization requires further examination.

We should understand the capabilities and examine the promises being attached to them.

Babel and the Garden

The biblical framework that keeps returning to me is the relationship between Babel and the creation mandate.

In Genesis 1, humanity receives the command to fill the earth and subdue it. Genesis 2 places the man in the garden to work it and keep it. Human beings have work to do in God’s world: cultivating, discovering, ordering, and caring for what has been entrusted to them.

That responsibility gives me reason to welcome discovery. It also places discovery under an authority greater than our appetite for achievement.

Genesis 11 gives us another picture. The builders of Babel are organized, cooperative, and technically capable. They know how to make bricks and construct something impressive. Their stated ambitions include making a name for themselves and avoiding being scattered.

Read alongside the command to fill the earth, their project raises questions about self-exaltation, control, and resistance to God.

Those questions reach into our own ambitions. We can build something remarkable and still build in the wrong direction.

The creation mandate does not give blanket approval to everything we can invent. It gives us responsibility before God for what we do with His creation.

That is why purpose and limits matter. Does this use of AI help people flourish? Does it serve the vulnerable? Does it preserve accountability? Are we cultivating what has been entrusted to us, or seeking a kind of security and significance that leaves no room for dependence on God?

Those questions apply to the companies developing AI. They apply to me when I use it.

My own experiment

I cannot discuss this subject as a detached observer. I have used AI in making music, improved research into many topics, editing and discussion of ideas and I have enjoyed the process of bringing lyrics and musical ideas into something people can hear. If anything, I do it for me- healthy messages make a more healthy disposition. And I can't find new music that has a lot of good messaging.

That enjoyment gives me a stake in the argument. I need to acknowledge it. I should be willing to examine a practice even when it helps me do something I love.

The responses have been interesting. So far, I have experienced a warmer reception on SoundCloud than on Spotify. I have wondered whether differences in the audiences contribute to that response, but it is too early for me to draw a conclusion. Discovery, genre, audience size, and many other factors could be involved. And I have to affirm that I understand REAL musicians distaste for it- but I do firmly believe I am creating things that would not exist without my initiation and work- but I digress....

What I can say is that the experience has made the questions personal.

What is the listener seeking? Some people are moved primarily by what they hear. Others place considerable value on knowing that a person physically performed the music. Both deserve honesty about the process.

I need to respect other creators, describe my own contribution truthfully, and remain open to criticism. Making something meaningful to me does not settle every question about the tools that helped me make it.

That willingness to examine my own enthusiasm is part of the stewardship I am asking others to practice.

How do we know? My drum beat for an updated "Epistemology"

As an educator, I think one of our most urgent responsibilities is to teach students how to judge what deserves their trust.

I have written about epistemology—the study of knowledge and justified belief—for years. I have also found it difficult to generate much interest in the subject. (here is the start of a series here- Epistemology series intro )

Perhaps the word sounds too academic. The problem is immediate.

A student encounters an answer that is polished, confident, and apparently well supported. What should the student do next?

AI gives fresh urgency to questions education has always needed to address. What is being claimed? Where did the information originate? Does the evidence support the conclusion? What is fact, what is interpretation, and what remains uncertain?

In my earlier writing, I called for these habits to be woven throughout education, along with metacognition: examining our own thinking. We need to investigate the information in front of us and the reasons we find it convincing. www.jayopsis.com

Am I accepting this because the evidence is strong? Does it agree with something I already want to believe? Have I mistaken confidence for competence? What would lead me to change my mind?

An updated application of epistemology should make those questions practical.

In history, students can trace a claim to its source and consider its context. In science, they can distinguish observations from proposed explanations. In literature, they can defend an interpretation with evidence from the text. In a Christian school, they can learn to examine theological claims carefully and read Scripture in context.

These habits require subject knowledge. Students need enough understanding to recognize when an answer is questionable. Reading, writing, calculation, memory, and sustained attention give them resources with which to assess what a tool produces.

We should protect the effort that develops those abilities.

A student might use AI to explore a question and then verify its claims, identify omissions, and defend a revised conclusion. The teacher can assess the reasoning and correction alongside the finished answer.

The educational goal is a person capable of responsible judgment.

Teaching students to operate a powerful tool while neglecting that judgment would leave some of our most important work unfinished.

Remaining responsible

My Facebook joke about the kill switch still expresses something I believe: human beings must retain meaningful authority over the systems they create.

But I also recognize the limitation of the image. A complex technology spread across many institutions will not necessarily have one accessible plug. We need responsibility built into its development and use long before an emergency arrives.

Someone must remain accountable for a decision. Someone must be able to hear an appeal, investigate a failure, correct an error, and stop a harmful practice. “The AI recommended it” cannot be the end of the explanation.

There must also be room for conscientious refusal. A person who declines a particular tool may have reasons we need to hear. Staying in the fray can include principled opposition. I am asking us to remain responsible participants in the conversation, willing to understand and willing to challenge.

I do not know how this technological transition will unfold. Its pace makes prediction difficult, and uncertainty should make us humble.

I do know that greater capability brings greater responsibility.

We need good men and women who will learn enough to ask informed questions, speak for those bearing the costs, protect the development of human judgment, and insist on limits when limits are needed.

As Christians, we can approach that work with hope rooted in God, with an honest understanding of human fallenness, and with care for the neighbors our choices affect.

We have a garden to tend. We also have a tendency to build towers for our own glory.

May God give us the wisdom to examine what we are building, the courage to remain involved, and the humility to receive correction along the way.

End Note: The 1975 Asilomar conference leaves a question that technical safeguards cannot answer by themselves: Who should help decide what risks are acceptable, and who bears those risks?

For AI, that would mean bringing educators, artists, workers, families, and other affected communities into the conversation alongside developers. A laboratory containment plan has a relatively concrete purpose; deciding how AI should influence learning, livelihoods, creativity, and trust requires a broader moral conversation.

The Knights Templar: A Cautionary Tale

2026-10-07T03:30:45.196-05:00

I first became interested in the Knights Templar while watching the History Channel’s The Curse of Oak Island. I watched diligently for seven or eight seasons before finally realizing that the actual curse of the island was the show.

For the last three or four seasons of my viewing, I had another reason to tune in. A group on X called the “Oak Island Cursers” supplied a running commentary that was absolutely hilarious. Watching the episode and reading their snarky observations became its own form of entertainment. Another piece of wood. Another suggestive rock. Another discovery requiring a meeting in the War Room.

It was a riot.

Eventually, even that drifted away. But something the show introduced stayed with me. I started reading more about the Knights Templar, and their actual history became more compelling than the treasure theories.

There was courage in it. Faith. Discipline. Wealth. Political maneuvering. Betrayal.

And there was a cautionary tale that eventually became a song:

Every Holy War Ends This Way

The Templars emerged around 1119 to protect Christian pilgrims traveling in the Holy Land. They combined religious vows with military service, and the church formally recognized their order in 1129. Their identity joined two demanding callings: the discipline of the monk and the responsibility of the soldier.

That is where the song begins:

Under the Cross, they rode with vows,
To guard the path through scorched lands and towns.

I wanted the opening to allow some admiration. It is easy, centuries later, to reduce people to the final verdict we have formed about them. But these were men who endured hardship, faced danger, and buried their brothers. Whatever else we say about the Crusades or the world they inhabited, their sacrifices deserve to be taken seriously.

The first verse moves through armor, swords, sand, and stone before arriving at the graves:

Of brothers lost beneath the sand,
With hope and purpose took their stand.

That phrase—hope and purpose—matters to me. A warning about compromised devotion has more weight when we acknowledge that devotion can begin sincerely. People give themselves to something they believe is worthy. They accept a cost. They make promises.

Then time tests what those promises actually mean.

The chorus brings that change into view:

What begins with fire can falter and fall,
The knight’s sworn vow is a name on the wall.
Rust on the armor, blood in the clay,
Every holy war ends this way.

The shining armor of the opening has already begun to rust. The men who rode with purpose have become names in a memorial. Their convictions may have felt permanent, but their bodies were mortal, and the institutions they built were vulnerable.

There is something sobering about putting rust and blood together. One suggests the slow work of time; the other reminds us of the immediate cost paid by human beings. Both remain after the speeches are finished.

As the Templars grew, they developed a network of lands, fortifications, and financial services. They held deposits, transferred funds, and served powerful patrons. An order whose members took vows of poverty became an institution with considerable economic influence.

Verse two compresses that expansion into the language of a song:

They built the banks, the towers tall,
And cities rose at their beck and call.

The cities line is poetic enlargement. I am reaching for the feeling of an institution discovering how much it can command. The verse moves from guarding a path to holding keys and claiming prizes.

Then comes the danger:

But silvered coins can darken souls,
And dreams of power exact their toll.

Money can support a mission. Influence can make good work possible. The difficulty is recognizing when those things begin to govern the mission they were supposed to serve.

An institution can continue using its founding language long after its priorities have shifted. The vows remain in the story. The symbols remain on the walls. But preserving position can gradually become more urgent than honoring purpose.

That is the warning in the second verse. It also requires some historical care. The Templars’ destruction cannot simply be explained as corrupt men receiving their deserved punishment.

In 1307, Philip IV of France ordered their arrest. Charges of heresy followed, supported by confessions extracted through torture or its threat. Their prosecution was deeply entangled with royal power and the struggle with the papacy. Clement V suppressed the order in 1312; its last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in 1314.

The bridge carries that betrayal:

Once sworn as brothers, now betrayed
By hands once clasped in prayer—and blade.

To me, that is the most troubling image in the song.

Hands can pray. Hands can wield a weapon. The same outward language of faith can accompany courage, ambition, loyalty, or cruelty. A religious gesture does not settle the question of what a person is doing—or why.

The Templars had fought in the name of defending Christianity. The campaign against them also claimed to defend the faith. Looking at that history, I have to ask how readily human beings enlist God’s name in struggles for control.

Then verse three turns the question toward us:

For every soul that dares to rise
Must guard the light or compromise.

The song has moved beyond the medieval knights. The listener now (and all of us) has something to examine.

I believe there are things worth defending. As a teacher, coach, and administrator, I have spent much of my life asking people to commit themselves to something larger than their immediate comfort. Conviction matters. Courage matters. There are moments when remaining quiet is a failure of responsibility.

But I also know the satisfaction of being right, and I know how easily that satisfaction can crowd out patience.

I can become more interested in delivering the winning response than understanding the person in front of me. I can excuse behavior from people I support that I would immediately condemn in their opponents. I can let protecting a reputation become more important than telling the truth.

Those are compromises worth noticing while they still seem small.

The title uses the word every, and that is a strong word. I hear it as a warning sounded with the force of a chorus. Human beings should be cautious about declaring their own campaigns holy. Once we believe our cause places us beyond correction, we have given ourselves a frightening amount of permission.

My Christian faith requires me to examine both my convictions and the manner in which I carry them. Jesus told Peter to put away his sword. Paul reminded believers that their struggle was not against flesh and blood. James described wisdom from above as gentle, peaceable, open to reason, and full of mercy (Matthew 26:52; Ephesians 6:12; James 3:17).

I need those words when I am angry. Especially when I am certain my anger is justified.

Can I stand firmly and still listen? Can I acknowledge wrongdoing among my allies? Can I accept correction without treating it as betrayal? Can I remember that the person who disagrees with me also needs the grace I depend upon?

Guarding the light involves that kind of daily attention.

The outro leaves us with a charge:

For every soul that fights for right,
Beware the shadows that dim the light.

I like that the song ends with beware. It asks us to stay awake to what can happen inside a worthy effort—and inside ourselves.

God’s sovereignty gives me room to act faithfully without believing I must control every outcome. I can speak, teach, make difficult decisions, and accept responsibility. I can pray over what I do not understand. And I can leave the final judgment with Someone whose knowledge and righteousness are greater than mine.

I started watching Oak Island hoping somebody would discover what was buried in the ground.

The Templar story left me examining what can take root in a human heart.

That is what I hope the song teaches us: to take our vows seriously, to examine what power is doing to us, and to keep seeking the grace that makes faithfulness possible.

We still have to guard the light...... in love.

One last thought:

The Knights began by protecting people. At some point it became protecting property.

There is an eternal difference between the two......

Nets to Catch the Wind

2026-10-06T07:23:03.783-05:00

This morning I read a short poem by John Webster, “All the Flowers of the Spring.” It occupies a little space on page 79 of an anthology containing 551 pages of poetry. I wonder how often that book gets opened, or how many readers pause over his contribution before moving on.

But I paused. The poem made me smile, made me think, and sent me looking for more about the man who wrote it.

Webster begins with flowers gathering to perfume our burial. Spring is there, with all its beauty and promise, but even the flowers have only their allotted season. So do we. By the end, he has turned his attention to kings who hope their trophies will leave a living name behind. His final image is the one that stayed with me: “And weave but nets to catch the wind.”

There is a lot of work in weaving a net. I picture the patient handling of the threads, the attention to each connection, the confidence that eventually this thing you are making will hold something. Webster seems to understand the effort we put into securing a name for ourselves. We build, accumulate, accomplish, and hope some of it will keep us from disappearing.

Then the wind passes through.

Someone might point out that Webster himself has been remembered for four centuries. Here I am, after all, reading his words and writing his name. But how well known is he? A poem on page 79 of a thick anthology that relatively few people may read is a modest version of immortality. His words have survived, though I wonder whether survival looks anything like what an ambitious writer might imagine.

And then another thought occurred to me: so what?

His poem spoke to me this morning. I enjoyed it. It awakened something in my mind that might otherwise have gone unexamined. Why should that encounter need a larger audience to justify it? I cannot see that its value to me would have increased if a million other people had read it over breakfast.

I remember Coach Bryant saying, in effect, before the Iron Bowl that there were a billion people in China who had never heard of Alabama or Auburn. In a state where that game could seem to determine the emotional condition of an entire year, it was a useful reminder. The world was considerably larger than the thing occupying every inch of our attention.

I think that helped us understand how easily we make something into a bigger deal than it is. You could still prepare, compete, and care deeply about the outcome while remembering that most of humanity would go right on with its day.

I need that perspective in other parts of life, too. When I write something, teach something, or release a song, I naturally hope it reaches people. There is pleasure in knowing that work has found an audience, and disappointment when it seems to pass unnoticed. But I can let the question of how many people noticed consume the pleasure that led me to do the work in the first place. Somewhere along the way, a good experience becomes a referendum on my significance.

Webster gave me a little distance from that this morning.

I do not know how many people will read these words, or how long anything I make will remain of interest. I do know the pleasure of finding a thought expressed well, of sharing something with a student, of hearing from someone who connected with a song. Those moments are available to me now, even while the larger question of what will endure remains unanswered.

On page 79, a man I knew very little about gave me one of those moments. I closed the book with more stirring in my mind than when I opened it.

That seems like a good morning’s work for both of us.

Behind the Song: “Measured”

2026-10-05T06:38:32.670-05:00

Song is live now on Spotify: Measured

There are poems you read, appreciate, and leave behind, and there are poems that seem to keep an appointment with you. You return to them years later and discover that a line you once admired has become a little more personal than you intended. T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been that kind of poem for me. Somewhere along the way, the man wandering through those streets became someone I recognized.

“Measured,” which comes out this Friday, has a long history in that recognition. The coffee-cup imagery reaches back to my own writing in the early 1980s, and I returned to Eliot in a 2022 post about the English poets. There have also been earlier musical versions of this idea. Apparently, I have been trying to finish this cup of coffee for a very long time.

The line that keeps bringing me back is familiar:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

It is such an ordinary object to carry such a devastating thought. A coffee spoon belongs to the small rituals of a day, something you reach for without thinking. Yet Eliot makes it an instrument for taking inventory of an entire life. You can almost hear the spoon touching the cup while another morning passes.

I love the image, though I don’t think the ordinary routines themselves are the problem. Some of the best things in life happen over coffee. What unsettles me is the possibility of moving through those routines half awake, always preparing for a life I keep postponing. The calendar fills up, the years acquire names and dates, and somehow the thing I meant to say remains unsaid.

Prufrock is painfully aware of himself. He imagines how other people see him and rehearses their judgments before they have a chance to make them. Even a small act begins to feel like an appearance before a jury. I find humor in him, but the humor gets uncomfortable when I recognize how much energy a person can spend managing the possibility of embarrassment.

That became one of the central concerns of “Measured”:

I measured my life with empty days, cocktails, and fear,
Held my breath, played it safe, and the years disappeared.

The fear is the part that troubles me most. We usually recognize the danger of doing something foolish. We are less likely to notice what it costs to keep waiting until we feel completely safe. Caution can sound remarkably wise, especially when I am the one explaining it. There is always a reason to wait, another detail to consider, a better moment that ought to arrive eventually.

Meanwhile, time continues without asking whether I am ready.

The song also moves into the language of Ecclesiastes: vanity, toil, life under the sun, chasing the wind. Those images belong naturally beside Prufrock’s coffee spoons. Both bring me to the uncomfortable business of asking what all this activity amounts to, and whether I can actually hold on to anything I have spent so much effort pursuing.

I wanted that feeling to inhabit the verses. 'Dust in a beam of light', 'roses wilting in a glass', 'perfume fading from a room'—each carries the trace of something beautiful that cannot be made to stay. Even the wrinkles in the mirror become a kind of record. The narrator looks at his face and begins reading it for opportunities he believes he has lost.

That is his perspective, and it is a severe one. I don’t believe every wrinkle represents a failure, any more than I believe every quiet day is empty. But regret has a way of becoming an unfair historian. It remembers the unopened door and forgets the good that happened in the room where we stayed. I wanted the song to let that voice speak honestly, even where I would want to question its accounting.

The bridge brings the pressure into focus:

The weight of others’ eyes, each step a tighter coil,
Chasing after wisdom, finding only toil.

There is something exhausting about trying to live while continually watching yourself live. Words get examined until they cannot be spoken. Decisions get revised until the opportunity has passed. Eventually, the narrator reaches the phrase “the sum of my fear,” and the title takes on its fullest meaning. Fear has become the unit by which he measures everything.

I recognize that possibility in myself, but I don’t want to give it the authority to explain my whole life. My Christian faith gives me reason to believe that even the days I cannot make sense of are held by God. I can acknowledge wasted opportunities without assuming that I know the final value of every hour. There is grace for an imperfect life, including the parts I keep returning to with a red pen.

Still, I let the song end with Eliot. The coffee spoons remain on the table, and the listener has to sit with them for a moment. I didn’t want to hurry past the ache that brought me to the song in the first place.

After all these years, Prufrock still gets my attention. I hope “Measured” carries some of that discomfort into a melody—enough to make me consider the conversation I am putting off, the kindness I could offer, or the work I keep waiting to begin.

Friday brings another song into the world. For me, it also brings an old question back to the kitchen table: what am I doing with the time still in my cup?

BTW- as earlier version of this song was the 1st on my SoundCloud catalog to get a larger audience. To date- all versions of this song have over 3,000 listens.

Thoughts on "Absence of Malice" (part 3 of 3)

2026-09-28T03:36:22.685-05:00

I ended my last reflection with an uncomfortable thought. A person can act without malice and still cause great harm. A person can possess integrity, stand courageously on principle, remain consistent with everything he believes and still be wrong. If both of those things are true, then there is another question that eventually has to be asked.

How much confidence should I really have in my own judgment? (important note: that is why big decisions need to happen in a healthy group- husband/wife- an Executive team- a coaching staff- young people with parents- but the group dynamic has to be set up with an understanding that pushback is encouraged and then once a decision is made, it is a unified group to support it)

That question has become more difficult the longer I have lived and especially the longer I have been in positions that require decisions affecting other people. Experience is supposed to produce wisdom, and I believe it often does. You recognize patterns more quickly. You have seen decisions succeed and fail. You have accumulated enough scars to know that some problems are not nearly as simple as they first appear.

But experience can produce something else as well. It can produce confidence, and confidence can quietly become certainty.

The phrase that started these reflections was absence of malice, after watching the old Paul Newman movie by that name. Initially I was interested in the fairly obvious distinction between intention and consequence. We can cause harm we never intended. But the more I have thought about the phrase, the more difficult even the claim of good intention becomes.

How exactly do I establish an absence of malice?

The law has to make judgments about intent, of course. We distinguish an accident from negligence, negligence from recklessness, and reckless behavior from something deliberately done. Those distinctions matter enormously. But a courtroom never actually sees the human heart. It considers evidence, listens to testimony, examines conduct and circumstances, and from those things reaches a conclusion about intention.

In ordinary life we do much the same thing with one another.

The uncomfortable difference is that when I judge myself, I tend to assume that I have access to better evidence. I know what I intended - Or at least I think I do.

One of the more sobering lessons of age is discovering how capable human beings are of assigning noble names to complicated motives. Pride can coexist with principle. Resentment can find a home inside a legitimate concern for justice. Fear can influence what we call prudence. Self-preservation can mingle with responsibility. Loyalty can distort judgment while still feeling exactly like loyalty.

I don't say that cynically. I don't believe every good deed conceals some darker motive or that every principled person is secretly acting from self-interest. There are people of extraordinary integrity who make genuinely sacrificial decisions at considerable personal cost.

I simply no longer believe that sincerity gives us perfect access to ourselves. And this is going to sound cruel and judgemental :

I have known some people in my life whose very DNA is "Integrity"- to give voice to even a little bit of "compromise"... they would rather you cut off their hand. But in reality, I personally don't believe that world exists... it isn't ever that clean... in my opinion.

There are situations you can be so right, you are actually "Dead right" that you kill people with "truth".

That brings me back to something I wrote about some time ago in Invidious. Long-term leadership creates its own peculiar environment for judgment because history accumulates. Relationships, disappointments, loyalties, previous conflicts, institutional memory and personal investment become intertwined with present decisions. You try to separate them. Good leaders have structures and trusted people around them precisely to help identify what they may not be seeing. But no leader ever becomes a completely disinterested observer standing outside the story.

We are always somewhere inside it- again- that is why the wrestling matters.

I found myself thinking about this again through Captain Vere in Billy Budd. Whatever judgment we ultimately make about Vere's decision, Melville does not give us a man casually dispensing justice. Vere understands the gravity of what is before him. He knows Billy. He knows the law. He knows the circumstances aboard the ship. He understands that his decision will have consequences beyond Billy, and yet none of that knowledge gives him the one thing he would need in order to judge perfectly.

He cannot see everything. Neither can we.

There is something healthy in admitting that before making a consequential decision. It does not mean refusing to decide. Leadership cannot function that way, nor can parenting, teaching, courts, churches, organizations or families. Sometimes the information available is all the information we are going to get, the deadline arrives, and somebody has to act.

Perhaps the goal, then, is not certainty. And even though integrity is absolutely necessary...Perhaps it is 'faithfulness' that is the priority

Gather what can be known. Listen carefully. Question the convenient version of events, particularly when it happens to confirm what I already believe. Examine my own motives without assuming that I understand them perfectly. Seek counsel from people willing to disagree with me. Pray. Wrestle. Make the best decision I can make, and then retain enough humility to admit later that I may have gotten it wrong.

That sounds reasonable enough until we confront the burden underneath it. Because some decisions cannot be retrieved.

A reputation may already have been damaged. A relationship may have changed. An opportunity may have disappeared. A sentence may have been imposed. Words cannot always be called back, and consequences rarely remain confined to the boundaries we imagined when we acted.

The "retraction" in newspapers is always buried in an obscure place in the back of the paper. Apologies are never offered. But there is still hope if you keep reading.....

If the moral order of the world finally depended upon human beings possessing enough wisdom to anticipate every consequence of every decision, despair would seem like a fairly reasonable response.

This is where, for me, the question eventually leaves philosophy and enters theology.

The Christian claim is not that human beings, with sufficient prayer and integrity, eventually become reliable judges of everything. Scripture is far less optimistic about our powers of perception than that. The claim is that our inability to see the whole does not mean there is no whole, and our inability to govern every consequence does not mean that every consequence is finally governed by chance.

Joseph's words to his brothers near the end of Genesis have always been remarkable to me: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

That sentence becomes particularly interesting in the context of these reflections because there actually was malice in Joseph's story. His brothers did not accidentally sell him into slavery. Their motives were hardly innocent, and Joseph does not sanitize what they did. He calls their intention what it was.

They intended evil. Yet somehow their intention was not the final intention operating in the story.

Years later, looking backward over betrayal, slavery, false accusation, imprisonment, political upheaval, famine and eventual reconciliation, Joseph could see a pattern that would have been impossible to see from the bottom of the pit. None of the individual evils had become good. Betrayal was still betrayal. Injustice remained injustice. But those events had somehow been gathered into a purpose larger than the intentions of the people who caused them.

Paul makes an equally audacious claim in Romans 8:28 when he writes that God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. I have sometimes heard that verse used too easily, almost as though every painful event needs only enough time before we can explain why it happened. Life has made me much less confident about that.

There are things I cannot explain. There are outcomes I would never call good. There are losses for which I have no satisfying answer, decisions I would change if given another opportunity, and consequences whose purpose remains completely hidden from me.

Providence does not require me to pretend otherwise.

Maybe that is why I increasingly think of providence as mystery rather than explanation.

It does not provide a neat answer for every tragedy or convert every mistake into something we would have chosen. It certainly does not excuse carelessness by allowing us to say that God will work everything out anyway. If anything, our limitations should make us more careful with the lives entrusted to us, not less.

But providence does allow me to relinquish a burden I was never capable of carrying.

I am responsible for faithfulness, not omniscience.

I should pursue truth even though I will never possess all of it. I should examine my motives while acknowledging that God knows my heart better than I do. I should act with integrity without confusing integrity with infallibility. I should wrestle before consequential decisions, remain humble afterward, confess error when I recognize it and repair what I can when my decisions have caused harm.

And then there comes a point when I have to release what remains beyond my control.

That may be the final lesson for me in this strange trail that began with an old Paul Newman movie. Absence of Malice made me question the adequacy of good intentions. Billy Budd made me question whether integrity and law are sufficient to guarantee justice. Both eventually forced me toward the same uncomfortable recognition: human beings must make judgments while possessing only fragments of the truth.

We wrestle because our decisions matter. We remain humble because we may be wrong.

We act because responsibility sometimes requires it. We pray because we know our vision is limited.

And after all of that, there remains something we cannot calculate, control or completely understand.

Providence.

I don't pretend to understand its workings. Perhaps calling it providence while insisting that I can explain exactly how it works would contradict the very thing I have spent these pages trying to say.

I know only that Joseph could eventually look backward and see that the evil intentions of men had not been sovereign over his story.

Most of us do not get Joseph's vantage point. At least not yet. Job went to heaven never knowing the cosmic spiritual war raging in the background. The lens we walk in still has that dusty glass.

So we do the best we can with the light we have, remain suspicious of our own certainty, ask forgiveness when we fail, extend mercy to others who are judging with limited sight as well, and trust that there is a wisdom beyond ours at work in places we cannot see.

For now, I think I am content to leave it there—in the mystery of providence.

Critics will moan and say that is just a "God in the gaps" flimsy retreat. And they may be right. But it is the only choice we have- He is the only one WHO can judge in perfection. And because of that, His rule stays consistent through all eternity. That is all we have.

Looking Backwards

Thoughts About "Absence of Malice" (pt. 2 of 3)

2026-09-27T10:38:30.263-05:00

A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.

That possibility troubles me more than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is relatively easy to understand. Someone professes one standard while knowingly living by another, and once the contradiction is exposed, we know where the failure occurred. Integrity presents a more difficult problem because the person may actually believe what he says, live according to what he believes, accept the consequences of those convictions and still arrive at a judgment that is unjust.

I have been thinking about this since watching Absence of Malice, which prompted an earlier reflection on the difference between intending no harm and bearing responsibility for harm nevertheless caused.

But the question has followed me into another work I have returned to many times over the years, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. The connection between the two initially seemed unlikely. One is a twentieth-century film about journalism and prosecutorial power; the other is a nineteenth-century novella set aboard a British warship. Yet both place decent people inside systems of law and responsibility and then ask those systems to handle circumstances more complicated than their categories.

The central event in Billy Budd is brutally simple when reduced to fact. Billy, a young sailor, is falsely accused of mutiny by John Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms. Billy has a speech impediment that becomes pronounced under emotional pressure, and when Captain Vere orders him to answer the accusation, Billy cannot get the words out. In frustration he strikes Claggart. The blow kills him.

The facts are not especially difficult. Their meaning is.

Billy has killed a superior officer aboard a British warship during wartime, when mutiny is not an abstract concern and discipline is considered essential to the survival of the ship. Captain Vere understands the legal implications immediately. He also understands Billy. He has witnessed the accusation, Billy’s inability to respond and the spontaneous blow. He knows this is not a calculated murder. In one of the great tensions of the story, Vere possesses enough knowledge to recognize Billy’s moral innocence while simultaneously possessing enough knowledge of military law to recognize his legal guilt.

And then he has to decide. (now you know where part 3 will go- back to "Invidious").

This is where I have become increasingly reluctant to make Vere either hero or villain. He is much more interesting than either designation allows. He does not casually sacrifice Billy to an impersonal rule, nor does Melville allow him the comfort of pretending the circumstances are uncomplicated. Vere wrestles because several genuine obligations have collided. He has a responsibility to Billy, but he also has a responsibility to the sailors under his command. He has obligations to military law, to the preservation of order aboard the ship and to his own conscience. Relaxing discipline in wartime may carry consequences well beyond one sympathetic sailor; enforcing it may require condemning a man Vere knows did not act with murderous intent.

Integrity does not solve that problem.

In fact, integrity may make it more painful.

We often speak of integrity as though it were the final measure of moral character, and certainly I would rather deal with a person of integrity than one without it. But integrity describes the relationship between conviction and conduct. A person of integrity attempts to act consistently with what he believes to be true and right. What integrity cannot guarantee is that his beliefs are correct, that his information is complete, or that the principles he is applying adequately account for the situation in front of him.

I wish life was black and white- but we are often struggling to live in a vast sea of gray.

A compass can point faithfully in the direction it has been designed to indicate. That does not guarantee that the traveler has correctly identified the destination.

This is where Billy Budd begins to expose something about the limitations of law itself. Law has to generalize. It cannot be rewritten from the beginning for every person who stands before it. Rules exist precisely because societies, institutions and organizations cannot survive if every judgment depends entirely upon the sympathies of whoever happens to possess authority at the moment.

There is wisdom in that. History provides plenty of reasons to distrust a system in which powerful people simply decide which rules should apply to whom.

But human beings are stubbornly particular - The law sees an act: a sailor struck and killed a superior officer.

Vere sees Billy. Both are true, and yet they are not identical truths.

That distinction reminded me again of the line that first caught my attention in Absence of Malice: something can be accurate without being true. A description can correctly identify every relevant external fact and still fail to capture the reality of the person involved. “Billy Budd killed John Claggart” is accurate. If that sentence becomes the whole account of Billy Budd, however, something essential has disappeared.

Law inevitably performs some version of this reduction. It must translate complicated human events into categories that can be administered: intentional or accidental, guilty or innocent, permitted or prohibited, mitigating or aggravating. Good law attempts to make those categories increasingly sensitive to circumstance, motive and degree, but no category can contain the entirety of a human story.

Perhaps that is one reason judgment ought to produce some degree of trepidation in the person entrusted with it.

I have spent much of my adult life in roles that required decisions affecting other people, and I have never found the most consequential ones to resemble the clean scenarios presented in policy manuals. Usually the policy is the easy part. The difficulty lies in determining what actually happened, weighing accounts that do not completely agree, distinguishing explanation from excuse, considering precedent, anticipating consequences and remembering that the person standing in front of you will continue living with the decision after you have moved on to the next item on the calendar.

There are times when leadership requires decisiveness. Endless hesitation can become its own form of irresponsibility. But I have become increasingly suspicious of judgment that comes too easily.

Trepidation is not necessarily evidence of weakness. Sometimes it may be evidence that a person understands what judgment requires. To make a consequential decision about another human being while remaining conscious of how much one does not know seems healthier to me than the confidence that comes from believing the title, position, policy or law has somehow eliminated uncertainty.

Captain Vere wrestles with it- but you can't detach yourself in the situation- you are in the moment AND your perception of yourself and the consequences live there as well.

He has authority, but authority has not given him omniscience. He knows a great deal about what occurred in that cabin, perhaps more than almost anyone could reasonably expect a judge to know, and still he is forced to make a decision whose moral dimensions exceed the facts available to him.

That may be the deeper limitation we sometimes attribute to law when the limitation actually belongs to us. Laws are written by human beings, interpreted by human beings and applied to human beings. Every stage of the process passes through limited knowledge, experience, judgment and perspective. We try to compensate for those limitations with evidence, testimony, precedent, deliberation, appeals and multiple levels of review. Those safeguards are sometimes criticized as cumbersome, but perhaps they are better understood as institutional acknowledgments of something we are reluctant to admit individually: a sincere person can be sincerely mistaken.

And sincerity combined with conviction can actually increase the consequences of the mistake.

Consider a person whose reasoning is internally consistent. He believes a certain set of facts to be true. He applies a moral principle to those facts. He reaches the conclusion demanded by that principle and then, because he possesses integrity, has the courage to act upon it despite pressure to do otherwise.

We normally admire almost every part of that description. But what if one of the facts is wrong? What if an important fact is missing?

What if the principle is sound but has been applied to a circumstance the decision-maker does not completely understand?

The moral reasoning may remain coherent from beginning to end while the judgment itself has been contaminated somewhere upstream.

That possibility is considerably more unsettling than discovering hypocrisy because there may be no villain to expose and no corrupt motive to uncover. The person making the decision may be trying earnestly to do what is right. He may lose sleep over it. He may accept criticism for it. He may refuse the easier course because he believes principle demands otherwise.

And he may still be wrong.

This is where I find myself returning to Captain Vere. I am less interested these days in deciding whether I would convict or acquit Billy Budd than I am in watching Vere confront the terrible inadequacy of his own position. He has been given the authority to judge, and therefore he must judge. Yet nothing about receiving that authority has made him capable of seeing the whole truth.

Perhaps the danger begins when we forget that distinction.

The most frightening person entrusted with judgment may not be the openly corrupt one. We generally know to guard ourselves against him. It may be the person of unquestioned integrity who has become completely certain that his integrity guarantees the correctness of his judgment.

Quite a pickle.

Integrity is indispensable, but integrity needs truth. And human beings possess truth imperfectly.

That leaves me with a question more uncomfortable than the one I started with. If I can act without malice and still cause harm, and if I can act with integrity and still be wrong, how confident should I be about the one thing I usually claim to know better than anyone else—my own motives?

I am not sure we know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Stew on this one for a few days and then let me present a part 3..... later.

Thoughts About "Absence of Malice" (pt 1 of 3)

2026-09-25T06:15:26.817-05:00

A few nights ago I watched the 1981 film Absence of Malice, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field. I had somehow missed it over the years, which is surprising considering my affection for movies from that era and the fact that Paul Newman is, well, Paul Newman.

I expected to enjoy it as a good newspaper/legal drama, and I did, but somewhere along the way I became less interested in the plot than in the phrase that gives the movie its title. By the next morning, I was still turning it over in my mind.

Good grief .... is this such a relevant topic today!

Absence of malice.

There is something reassuring about the phrase. It sounds almost exonerating. Whatever happened, there was no hatred behind it, no calculated attempt to injure someone, no sinister motive lurking beneath the surface. In ordinary life we make this defense all the time, usually in less formal language. I didn't mean it that way. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was only doing my job. I acted on what I knew at the time.

Those explanations matter. Motive matters. Surely there is a moral distinction between deliberately harming another person and causing harm that was neither intended nor anticipated. Our legal system recognizes that distinction, and so do most reasonable people. But Absence of Malice left me wondering whether we sometimes ask intention to carry more moral weight than it can bear.

One of the central tensions in the movie is the difference between something being accurate and something being true. A newspaper can print facts that are individually accurate and still create an impression that is substantially false. No quotation necessarily has to be invented and no fact deliberately fabricated. Selection, emphasis, placement, context and omission can do plenty of work on their own. The resulting story may survive a technical examination of its individual claims while failing to convey the truth of the person or event it supposedly describes.

That idea reaches well beyond journalism. Anyone who has lived long enough to accumulate a history could probably be portrayed rather convincingly as either admirable or contemptible by someone allowed to select the evidence. Both accounts might contain nothing but facts. Neither would necessarily be true.

This is where the title of the movie began to bother me.

Suppose the person constructing that incomplete picture genuinely means no harm. Suppose there is no personal vendetta, no hatred and no conscious desire to damage anyone. Suppose, further, that the person is operating within accepted professional standards and has every legal right to do what he or she is doing. At what point does the absence of a bad motive cease to answer the larger question of responsibility?

I have spent enough years in positions where decisions affect other people to know how complicated that question becomes in practice.

(In fact- my recent blogpost on Invidious has gone viral- picked up and re-posted by the Council of Educational Standards and Accountability (CESA). I was blown away from the emails from California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina.... thanks again for the encouragement!)

Parents, teachers, coaches, pastors, employers, administrators and judges routinely make decisions with incomplete information. Often there is no luxury of waiting until every fact is known. Competing obligations have to be weighed, credibility has to be assessed, policies have to be interpreted, and consequences have to be considered even though many of those consequences cannot possibly be foreseen.

That is simply part of exercising authority. Refusing to decide is itself sometimes a decision with consequences.

Still, there is a temptation after a difficult outcome to retreat into intention: I meant well. I followed the procedure. I acted on the information available to me. I did not intend for this to happen. All of those statements may be completely sincere, and sometimes they may be the best explanation anyone can give. What they cannot do is make the consequences disappear.

Perhaps that is the distinction I have been trying to identify since watching the movie. The absence of malice tells us something important about the actor, but it does not necessarily tell us enough about the act. It may reduce culpability without eliminating responsibility. It may explain how something happened without settling whether what happened was right.

There is another difficulty with the phrase, particularly when I consider it from a Christian perspective. Absence of malice describes morality almost entirely by what is missing. I did not hate. I did not deceive intentionally. I did not seek another person's injury. That is certainly preferable to hatred, deception and cruelty, but Christianity sets a considerably more demanding standard than merely avoiding the deliberate infliction of harm.

The command is not simply to refrain from hating my neighbor but to love him. Truthfulness requires more than avoiding technically false statements. Mercy asks more of us than the absence of cruelty. The moral life described in Scripture is not primarily an empty space where the worst impulses have been successfully removed; it is supposed to be occupied by something positive—love, truth, justice, patience, mercy and concern for the good of another.

That makes absence an interesting word.

Maybe that is why the title has stayed with me. When the movie began, Absence of Malice sounded like a legal phrase, almost a defense. By the time it ended, I wasn't nearly as comfortable with it. The movie never required me to believe that everyone involved was evil or even badly motivated. In some ways that would have made the story much easier. What interested me was the possibility that people could operate inside legitimate institutions, follow defensible procedures, possess no conscious desire to injure anyone, and nevertheless participate in something terribly damaging.

That is a much more uncomfortable problem because it removes the villain.

And once the villain disappears, I can no longer keep the question safely at a distance.

I am left instead to consider my own decisions, my own confidence in what I think I know, the consequences I did not anticipate, and all those occasions when I meant no harm seemed like a sufficient defense.

Perhaps sometimes it is.

I am increasingly convinced, however, that the absence of malice and innocence are not quite the same thing.

SO if you will be patient and permit me a few posts about this, I want to mull on it together... ask some tough questions, bring in Billy Budd of all things... and then get your feedback.

But the theme will not change I suspect....

A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.

Of course you knew there would be a song attached- it is on SoundCloud now, but will go live on Spotify on Oct. 23.

We All Alibi

Behind the Song: Three-Quarters Empty

2026-09-23T13:04:17.438-05:00

Hear this song now of Spotify: 3/4 Empty

BTW- This song has over 10,000 listens on SoundCloud.

Well.... might as well do them all LOL!

Some songs take a few hours to write. This one took about forty-four years.

The first version of Three-Quarters Empty wasn’t a song at all. It was a poem I started in a notebook in 1982, when I was a student at the University of Alabama taking a creative writing class. I was eighteen years old, which makes some of the existential weariness in the poem a little amusing to me now. I apparently had already grown tired of life before I had done very much of it.

But the image stayed with me.

Quarter-filled cups of coffee.

I’ve always been a coffee drinker. Black. And I have also apparently always possessed the peculiar ability to pour a cup of coffee, drink most of it, become distracted by something else, and discover the remainder much later after it has gone completely cold.

Some habits survive every technological advance. My coffee cups have improved considerably since 1982. They are stainless steel now and engineered to preserve heat for what seems like several geological periods. I can still defeat them.

There is almost always some abandoned coffee sitting somewhere on my desk.

Over time, that became more than an observation. The cup started looking like something else.

There were the projects started but never finished. The proposals written and abandoned. Ideas scribbled into notebooks. Plans that seemed important for a season and then quietly disappeared. Dreams I pursued. Dreams I postponed. Dreams I simply outgrew. A life leaves quite a bit of debris behind it.

That is what the poem was trying to describe.

The Literature Behind It

The original poem carried three literary shadows with it: T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ecclesiastes.

Eliot supplied the most obvious one:

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

I loved Prufrock long before I was old enough to understand much of what Eliot was doing with him. There is something haunting about reducing a human life to tiny repeated measurements—coffee spoons, conversations, rooms, routines. A life can be enormously important and strangely mundane at exactly the same time.

Poe supplied another image:

“A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.”

And then there was Ecclesiastes:

“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”

Those three voices somehow met in that coffee cup.

The poem kept returning to the tension between activity and accomplishment. We can be tremendously busy without knowing whether we are actually getting anywhere. Calendars fill. Papers pile up. Projects multiply. Years pass.

And somewhere in the middle of all that motion comes an uncomfortable question:

What exactly did all of this amount to?

That question sounded philosophical when I was eighteen.

It sounds different in my sixties.

From Quarter-Filled Cups to Cold Coffee

I kept rewriting the poem over the years. I have handwritten versions scattered through old notebooks, folders, Bible margins, and boxes. The version I eventually considered “finished” probably dates to around 1994, although finished is obviously a dangerous word to use with this particular piece.

When I began turning some of my older writing into songs, I naturally came back to it.

The first attempt became Cold Coffee.

It wasn't terrible. But I never really connected with it.

Part of the problem was musical. The genre didn't carry the emotional weight I heard in the original poem. More importantly, though, I had tried too hard to preserve the old language.

Words and phrases like epochs wasted, unrequited desire’s depth, and watched time belonged to the poem—or perhaps belonged to the young man trying very hard to write a serious poem—but they didn't sound natural coming out of a singer's mouth.

I had preserved too much of the artifact and lost some of the feeling.

So I went back to work on it.

Three-Quarters Empty

The breakthrough was realizing that the title had been sitting inside the poem all along.

Not Cold Coffee.

Three-Quarters Empty.

That changed the center of gravity.

The coffee is still there, but now it is the object through which the larger idea can be seen:

Quarter-filled cups of coffee,
Ring-stains bleeding through the grain.
Cold as all the half-formed thoughts
That gather in my brain.

That feels much closer to what I had been trying to say.

And I particularly like where the song goes from there:

Foam collapses into nothing—
Like the hours I try to save.
Little deaths of small ambitions
Settling in their grave.

The older poem was concerned with wasted potential. The newer song feels more concerned with time.

That may be the difference between writing it at eighteen and rewriting it at sixty-two.

At eighteen, unfinished dreams seem tragic because there is so much you intend to accomplish.

Forty-four years later, you understand something the younger writer couldn't possibly have understood: every life will contain unfinished things.

There will always be another project. Another idea. Another road you might have taken. Another version of yourself you never quite became.

And I'm not sure all of those things qualify as regrets.

Some are simply the cost of having lived one life instead of every possible life.

That is why one of my favorite images in the new version is:

I keep walking, though I’m sinking,
Ash and mud in both my hands.

There is resignation in that line, but there is also something else.

I keep walking.

That matters.

The song is dark. I don't want to pretend otherwise. There is Ecclesiastes in it, and Eliot, and probably more than a little Prufrock. There is the suspicion that much of what we chase eventually turns gray and that some of our grandest ambitions wind up as nothing more than old papers in a box.

But the person in the song hasn't stopped.

Maybe that is something I couldn't have written into it in 1982 because I hadn't lived long enough to know it yet.

The cup may be three-quarters empty.

But it isn't empty.

There is still something left.

And apparently I'm still working on the poem.

Which, considering what the poem is about, seems just about right.

Maybe I'm finally finished with it.

For now.

Behind the Song: Weight of the Absurd

2026-09-23T12:39:17.115-05:00

Song is live on Spotify- click on the title to hear:

Weight of the Absurd

The Weight of the Absurd was originally released in October 2024 as an alternative rock song. At the time, I simply described it as “inspired by Camus.”

That was true, but it was hardly the whole story.

In the early 2000's I read Albert Camus’ The Stranger, a book I found fascinating, disturbing, and more personally uncomfortable than I expected. Camus gets placed under the broad umbrella of existentialism, though he resisted that label and developed his own philosophy of the absurd. Whatever category we put him in, he was wrestling with a question that has followed human beings for a very long time: What do you do when you desperately want life to mean something, but the universe appears unwilling to provide an answer?

Meursault, the central character of The Stranger, seems almost frighteningly detached from the world around him. His mother dies, and he barely grieves. He enters a relationship without much conviction. He drifts into friendships without much consideration of their consequences. Eventually, almost inexplicably, he kills a man.

He doesn't so much choose a life as allow life to happen to him. That was the part that bothered me.

Because beneath the murder, the trial, the famous Algerian heat, and all the philosophical machinery of the novel, I recognized something in Meursault that I didn't particularly enjoy recognizing.

Passivity.

Left to myself, I can drift. I can become mechanical. I can perform responsibilities, complete tasks, solve problems, and move through a day efficiently while remaining strangely detached from the emotional life taking place around me. There is a part of me that can sit back and watch life rather than enter it.

Reading Meursault was like seeing that tendency carried to its horrifying conclusion.

Without Christ, where does my own tendency toward detachment eventually lead?

That question stayed with me long after I finished the novel.

Later I began reading Howard Mumma's Albert Camus and the Minister, in which Mumma recounts conversations he says he had with Camus while serving at the American Church in Paris. The book presents a Camus who is searching, questioning, and increasingly dissatisfied with the answers available to him.

I found that Camus even more interesting than the novelist I had encountered in The Stranger.

Whether every detail of Mumma's recollection can bear the historical weight sometimes placed upon it is another question. What captivated me was the intellectual and spiritual tension: a man who had spent his career articulating the absurdity of existence continuing to ask whether there might nevertheless be something beyond it.

And that is where The Weight of the Absurd really began.

I admire something about Camus. His honesty.

He refused cheap answers. He had witnessed the brutality of his century—war, fascism, suffering, death—and he wasn't interested in pretending that existence made sense simply because we wanted it to. If the universe was silent, Camus intended to stare into that silence without blinking.

And yet he refused surrender.

That is one of the paradoxes I find so compelling in him. If life is absurd, you still live. You resist. You confront injustice. You love. You create. You push the stone back up the hill even though you know perfectly well it will roll down again.

There is something almost heroic about that.

And something terribly sad.

That tension became the heart of the song:

Can I carry it alone?
Is my heart enough to hold
All the questions, all the pain,
When the answers slip away?

Those aren't theoretical questions for me.

I know my own capacity for rebellion. I know my ability to construct walls with arguments, explanations, work, busyness, and self-sufficiency. I also know that eventually those walls crumble.

So the song doesn't attempt to defeat Camus in an argument.

It walks with him for a while.

It acknowledges the darkness. It allows the questions to remain questions. It admits the attraction of standing alone in the rain with your fists clenched against a universe that refuses to explain itself.

But eventually my road diverges from his.

But there’s a cross on the horizon now— Where the storm rolls in, but grace won’t bow. Maybe strength’s not what we bear alone, But the love that steadies us and brings us home. I’m still walking, but now I know— I’m not alone. No, I’m not alone.

That is the turn.

Christianity doesn't require me to pretend that suffering isn't real or that the world isn't bewildering. Scripture itself is filled with people asking God why. Job does it. David does it. Habakkuk does it. Ecclesiastes sometimes sounds close enough to existentialism to make respectable church people nervous.

The difference is not the absence of absurdity - The difference is that absurdity does not get the final word.

And strangely enough, Camus has challenged me as a Christian because of that.

Camus could envision fighting when there was no ultimate victory coming. He could advocate resistance against injustice without believing history was moving toward some final divine restoration. There is a kind of ferocious courage in that position: fight anyway. Love anyway. Create anyway. Push the rock anyway.

Then what excuse do I have?

If I actually believe what I say I believe—that history has a destination, that death has been defeated, that Christ is risen, that justice ultimately belongs to God, and that our labor in the Lord is not in vain—shouldn't there be more urgency in me rather than less?

Shouldn't I love harder? Shouldn't I fight injustice more fiercely?

Shouldn't I create, teach, serve, forgive, risk, and live with considerably more energy than someone who believes the stone eventually rolls back down the hill for good?

That question still convicts me.

I once wrote that if heaven is rest, we ought to live in such a way that we actually need it. Too often, including in my own life, the American church seems to have about as much need of eternal rest as a narcoleptic needs a sleep aid.

Camus reminds me how embarrassing comfortable Christianity can be. But he also reminds me why I need Christ.

Because ultimately I cannot carry the weight of the absurd alone. My heart isn't large enough. My intellect isn't strong enough. My defiance isn't permanent enough. Eventually my fists unclench.

And for me, that isn't defeat - It is grace.

That is why the song begins with a man standing alone, demanding meaning from the rain, and ends with something very different:

And I hope listeners will stay with the song long enough to hear this part.....

I'm still walking, but now I know.......
I'm not alone... no, I'm not alone!

Maybe that is the real story behind The Weight of the Absurd.

Camus helped me understand the nobility of the struggle.

Christ gave me a reason to believe the struggle is going somewhere.

PS-

For those wanting to get previews of that is coming to Spotify, I have created a playlist on SoundCloud called "Choices"- every song on this list has been approved for play on Spotify. What I haven't disclosed is the ORDER that these songs will drop. Do you have a favorite that you want to move up the list? Just let me know!

Here is the SoundCloud List- CHOICES

The Story Behind “Withstood the Wind”

2026-09-22T13:06:44.309-05:00

Thanks for the question- and note: The Song was originally titled 'Hemingway' but responses from others suggesting it complicated the message- but he was complicated......

You can hear the song on Spotify here:

Withstood the Wind

I taught Hemingway for seven years as part of an American Literature course, and I never quite knew what to do with him.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who kept teaching him, but maybe that was part of the attraction. I respected Hemingway more consistently than I enjoyed him. I understood why he mattered. I could teach the iceberg theory, the sparse prose, the dialogue, the code hero, “grace under pressure,” and the enormous influence he had on American writing. But I never particularly loved the cadence of his prose. Sometimes the simplicity felt almost too deliberate to me—an impersonation of simplicity rather than simplicity itself.

Still, Hemingway stayed with me.

Really, that whole Modernist period did. It was one of my favorite stretches of American literature to teach because it was fascinating, dark, occasionally maddening, and unusually honest. The writers who emerged from World War I and lived through the upheavals that followed had good reason to be suspicious of easy optimism. The expatriates were especially interesting to me. They seemed to be looking back at America from a distance, questioning assumptions about progress, prosperity, heroism and the good life that an earlier generation had been more willing to trust.

It made for quite a classroom: Fitzgerald and the beautiful corruption of Gatsby; Faulkner digging through memory, guilt and the past; Steinbeck finding dignity among people who had almost nothing; Pound, brilliant and deeply troubling; and Hemingway, determined to strip away anything that sounded too easy.

They were fun to teach precisely because they weren't particularly fun. They were truthful.

And Hemingway may have been the most complicated of them for me.

There is a lot about the Hemingway persona that invites admiration. He was adventurous, physically courageous and seemingly determined to experience life at full volume. War, hunting, fishing, bullfighting, boxing, travel—there is almost a cult of difficulty surrounding him. If life wasn't hard enough on its own, Hemingway seemed willing to go looking for places where it could become harder.

But I was always a little suspicious of that, too.

How much was Hemingway, and how much was Hemingway playing Hemingway?

The public figure became almost as famous as the writer: Papa Hemingway, the tough guy, the drinker, the sportsman, the war correspondent, the man who had been there and done that. Was the mythology simply an extension of the man, or did the man eventually become trapped inside the mythology? Did readers love the writing, or did some of them love the sensational life surrounding the writer? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone can completely know.

There was an evasiveness about Hemingway that bothered me as much as it fascinated me. He could be emotionally manipulative while appearing emotionally detached. He could leave enormous things unsaid and somehow make the silence carry more weight than an explanation would have.

Jake Barnes's final response to Brett in The Sun Also Rises has always haunted me: “Isn't it pretty to think so?”

There is an entire life inside that sentence—a life that will never happen.

That is Hemingway at his best for me. I may resist the style, but I can't dismiss what is underneath it.

And that tension eventually found its way into “Withstood the Wind.”

The obvious Hemingway reference in the song comes from A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

It is one of those Hemingway lines that has escaped the novel and become almost inspirational. Put by itself, it is beautiful. I believe there is truth in it. Life breaks us, and sometimes healing creates a kind of strength that wasn't there before. The scar isn't merely evidence of the wound; it can also be evidence of healing.

But Hemingway doesn't stop there.

The rest of that passage is considerably darker. Life also kills the very good, the very gentle and the very brave. And if you are none of those things, Hemingway says, you can be sure it will kill you too; there simply won't be any special hurry.

That isn't exactly something you put on a motivational poster.

And yet I appreciate the honesty of it.

The world does break people. Being brave doesn't exempt you. Neither does being good. Sometimes we heal beautifully at the broken places, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes the next wind comes before the last wound has completely healed.

That is where the Hemingway hero becomes fascinating to me.

He stands.

He maintains the code. He does the job. His hands may tremble, but he behaves with courage anyway. He accepts that he cannot control the world, so he controls the manner in which he meets it. Hemingway called that kind of courage “grace under pressure,” and there is something undeniably admirable about it.

But after years of teaching those characters, I was left with a question I never completely resolved:

Is standing enough?

Is the Hemingway hero actually a hero, or is he simply an existential man who stands because standing is the only meaningful act left to him? If there is no larger purpose to the suffering, no redemption beyond endurance, then what has he accomplished when he withstands the wind?

I don't ask that as a criticism so much as an honest question. Hemingway himself makes it harder because the mythology of toughness eventually collides with a life that ended sadly. I don't want to use the end of his life to explain the man or judge him. Human beings are more complicated than that. But neither can I read all that language about courage, breaking, endurance and standing without feeling the weight of what we know came later.

That tension became the man in the song.

At first we see the Hemingway hero almost exactly as we expect him:

Through the dusk, the hero stands,
Grace under pressure, trembling hands.

But I didn't want to leave him there.

I wanted to meet him after everyone else had gone home.

So later we find him in a room at two in the morning:

Medals rest beside the bed,
But ghosts still speak of things unsaid.

For me, that is where “Withstood the Wind” really begins.

The medal tells the public story. The room tells the private one.

He stood when he was supposed to stand. He did something difficult. People may even have called him courageous. But now there is no crowd, no battle and no one watching. The medal still shines, but the scar still aches.

Scars don't shine in silver light—
They ache the most when it's this quiet.

So what now?

I don't think the answer is pretending that strong people don't break. In fact, the chorus deliberately admits the opposite:

Let the wind come—we won't bow.
It may break us—not us now.

That phrase matters to me: it may break us.

This isn't a song about invincibility. I don't believe in that kind of strength anymore, if I ever did. The scar itself proves we were vulnerable. We were hurt. Something happened that left a mark.

But we're here.

And that brings me to the bridge:

I almost laid my purpose down,
Almost let the silence drown.
But something in me still won't bend—
A quiet voice that says, “Stand.”

Maybe the most important word there isn't stand.

Maybe it's purpose.

That's where I think I finally part company with the Hemingway hero—or at least where my questions about him become my own. I admire the man who can stand in the wind. I admire grace under pressure. I admire courage that doesn't need an audience.

I'm just not convinced that standing, by itself, is enough.

I need there to be a reason to stand.

And perhaps that is why, after seven years of teaching Hemingway, after admiring him and distrusting him, enjoying him and arguing with him, he somehow ended up in one of my songs.

I still haven't settled the argument.

Maybe I don't need to.

The wind comes. The world breaks all of us eventually. Some wounds heal stronger. Some continue to ache at two in the morning. Courage doesn't mean pretending otherwise.

Sometimes courage is considerably less dramatic.

Sometimes there is no safari, no battlefield, no great fish on the line, no one watching to see what you will do.

Sometimes there is only a quiet room, a scar, a reason you haven't completely surrendered, and a voice barely loud enough to hear.

Stand.

And for tonight, maybe that's enough.

The Story Behind "Ask Me Dangerous"

2026-09-22T06:32:04.021-05:00

“Ask Me Dangerous” is now on Spotify, and this one has had an interesting journey.

You can listen to it here:

ASK ME DANGEROUS

The original idea came from something I had been thinking about for a while. We live in a world of shallow talk. We scroll, nod, say “I’m good,” and move on. We know how to have entire conversations without really saying anything, and most of us have gotten pretty good at knowing which questions to ask and, maybe more importantly, which ones not to ask.

I’ve always liked the old Lynyrd Skynyrd line, “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.” It’s a great line, but there is probably more truth in it than we would like to admit. There seems to be an unspoken agreement we make with each other: don’t dig too deeply into my life, and I won’t dig too deeply into yours. Mutual Assured Destruction applied to relationships.

But when I read the Bible, God doesn’t seem to honor that agreement.

God asks questions. Not because He doesn’t know the answers, but because we often don’t.

He asks Adam, “Where are you?” He asks Elijah, “What are you doing here?” Jesus asks the woman at the well about her husband. He asks Peter, “Do you love me?” These aren’t requests for information. They are questions designed to make someone confront something they might rather avoid.

They are dangerous questions.

That was the idea behind the first version of “Ask Me Dangerous.” It was actually a pretty fun song. It had a good tempo and almost a Brad Paisley kind of country feel. I liked it. I especially liked a couple of the lines:

I’m the duke of polished lies,
A thousand faces, none are mine.

And:

Pull that question like a knife,
Cut beneath what you can see.

So I put it out there for my usual test audience and waited.

Not much happened.

People didn’t hate it. That might have been easier. It just didn’t seem to connect with anybody. I still liked the idea, but the song wasn’t resonating.

That is not exactly an unusual problem for me. I can get fascinated with an idea and forget that everyone else hasn’t been living with it inside my head for the last several weeks. Maybe the song was too cerebral. Maybe it was a little obtuse. Maybe I understood what “Ask Me Dangerous” meant because I already knew what I was trying to say.

So I went back to it.

The first change was musical. I slowed everything down and moved it into more of a Southern Gothic sound. That helped. The response was better, and the darker sound seemed to fit the subject better. But the more I listened, the more I thought the problem wasn’t really the music.

For a song called “Ask Me Dangerous,” I wasn’t actually asking many dangerous questions.

I was writing about vulnerability without being particularly vulnerable.

That realization changed the song.

Instead of talking generally about masks and truth and hiding, I started trying to write the questions I might actually prefer that someone not ask me.

Ask me why I need the room,
Why I need to come through.
Ask me who I am when no one
Needs the things I do.

That felt different.

Why do I need to be needed? How much of what I do for other people is service, and how much of it has become tangled up with my identity? Who am I when nobody needs an answer, a decision, a solution or anything else from me?

Then came:

Ask me who I’ve hurt while thinking
I was helping all along.

I don’t particularly enjoy that question either.

Neither do I especially like:

Ask me who I’d be tomorrow
If the cheering disappeared.

But that became the point. If I could answer every question in the song easily, they weren’t dangerous enough.

One line from the original survived all the rewrites: “I’m the duke of polished lies.” I still love that line, probably because I think there is a kind of dishonesty that doesn’t require saying anything factually untrue.

You can tell the truth and still hide.

I can give you an honest answer that reveals exactly as much as I want you to know. I can tell a story about a failure that makes me appear humble. I can confess something while carefully avoiding the thing underneath it. As the newer lyric says, “I can make confession sound sincere and never let you get too near.”

That was getting much closer to what I had wanted the song to say in the first place. Sometimes we don’t need someone to catch us lying. We need someone who won’t let us hide inside the truth.

There was one other idea from the original song that I knew I wanted to keep: “Don’t let me put God in the gaps.”

That one gets complicated for me because faith is supposed to take me toward truth, not protect me from it. But religious language can become another defense mechanism if I let it. There is a difference between trusting God in something I don’t understand and invoking God because I don’t want to examine something I might understand all too well.

The final version says:

And when I reach for something holy
Just to make the questions stop—
Don’t let me put God in the gaps.

Then comes the line I added afterward:

Let God be God.

I like where that landed. I don’t need God as the explanation that ends the uncomfortable conversation. I need Him to be God, even when the conversation gets more uncomfortable.

Once I finally felt good about the lyrics, the song took another strange turn.

I completely remade it as a hip-hop song.

I’m not entirely sure why, other than the fact that this whole music experiment has given me permission to try things I never would have tried before. But something happened in that version. The rhythm changed the way some of the words landed. It gave the song an edge that hadn't been there before.

Then, because apparently I can't leave anything alone, I took what I liked about that version and remixed it again as a country song.

So “Ask Me Dangerous” started as an up-tempo country song, became a slower Southern Gothic song, wandered off and became hip-hop, and eventually came back home to country carrying a few things it picked up along the way.

That may actually be my favorite part of the whole process.

The various versions have now gotten around 6,000 listens on SoundCloud, which is far more than I expected when I started playing around with this song. Friday, the final version makes the move to Spotify, and I’m curious to see what happens with it there.

But whether it connects with a larger audience or not, I think I finally found the song I was originally trying to write.

The first version essentially said, “We should ask each other deeper questions.”

The final version makes me answer them.

That is a much more uncomfortable proposition.

I still think we have an unspoken agreement with one another that keeps most relationships relatively safe: I won’t look too closely at the things you have learned to hide if you extend me the same courtesy. We can know a lot about one another without ever allowing ourselves to be truly known.

Maybe breaking that agreement requires giving a few trusted people permission to ask something dangerous.

Not everybody. But somebody.

So as “Ask Me Dangerous” comes out Friday, that is probably the question I’m left with:

Who in my life has permission to ask me the question I don’t want to answer?

And if they actually did, would I answer it?

Or would the duke of polished lies find another way out?

You can find my Spotify page here: Jayopsis on Spotify

You can find my SoundCloud page here: Jayopsis on SoundCloud

What He Said Comes Next

2026-09-16T17:14:43.398-05:00

Basic Foundations for Understanding a Difficult Scripture

Matthew 24 / Mark 13 / Luke 21

Update: I made this into a song:

“What He Said Comes Next.”

There may be no section of the Gospels that has generated more speculation than what is commonly called the Olivet Discourse, recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. Jesus speaks about the destruction of the temple, wars, persecution, false prophets, tribulation, cosmic signs, His coming, judgment, and the end of the age. It is not difficult to understand why Christians have spent centuries trying to determine exactly how these events fit together.

I have participated in that discussion myself.

I have read and studied these passages for more than thirty-five years. During that time, I have been exposed to most of the major approaches to biblical eschatology. I grew up hearing the popular premillennialism associated with teachers such as Hal Lindsey. I remember A Thief in the Night. Later I read and listened to teachers representing premillennial, amillennial, postmillennial, partial-preterist, and other approaches.

I have benefited from people with whom I disagree. I have also changed my mind about some things.

That experience has made me increasingly cautious about highly detailed systems that claim to explain precisely how every prophetic passage will be fulfilled. The scholars of Jesus' day knew the Old Testament exceptionally well, yet many failed to understand what the prophets had said about His first coming. That should produce some humility in those of us attempting to explain His second coming.

Humility, however, does not mean that we cannot know anything.

Jesus gave His disciples substantial information about what was coming. More importantly, He gave them very clear instructions about how they were to live in light of it.

I have become convinced that we sometimes spend so much time debating the information that we neglect the instructions.

Begin With the Setting

Matthew tells us:

Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

The disciples then ask the obvious questions:

“Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Mark adds an important geographical detail. Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple when Peter, James, John, and Andrew questioned Him privately.

That context matters.

Jesus was not conducting a seminar on speculative end-times chronology. He had just made a remarkable prediction about a real building that His disciples could see from where they were sitting. The temple represented the religious and national center of Jewish life. Jesus told them it was going to be destroyed.

Approximately forty years later, Jerusalem was devastated by the Romans and the temple was destroyed in AD 70.

Any responsible interpretation of the Olivet Discourse must take that historical event seriously. Jesus was speaking to first-century disciples about circumstances that had meaning for them.

One interpretive principle has helped me considerably over the years:

A biblical text cannot mean to us something that it could never have meant to its original audience.

That does not mean every prophecy must have been completely fulfilled during the lifetime of the original hearers. Biblical prophecy frequently contains patterns, types, and fulfillments that extend beyond the immediate historical situation. It does mean that we should resist the temptation to read our newspaper, political circumstances, technology, or international crises back into a first-century conversation without first asking what Jesus' words meant to the people sitting in front of Him.

Prophetic Language Requires Care

Another difficulty is the nature of apocalyptic language itself.

Scripture contains different literary genres. Historical narrative does not communicate exactly like poetry. Proverbs function differently from epistles. Apocalyptic and prophetic passages regularly use images, symbols, numbers, cosmic language, and Old Testament references that would have been familiar to their original readers.

This does not diminish the truthfulness or authority of Scripture.

Figurative language can communicate literal truth.

Jesus Himself said that not one stone of the temple would be left upon another. The temple was indeed destroyed, even though stones associated with the larger temple complex remain. We understand the statement because ordinary human communication allows emphatic and figurative descriptions of real events.

The same care is necessary when interpreting language about stars falling, the heavens being shaken, beasts, dragons, numbers, horns, trumpets, and other prophetic imagery.

The question should not be, “Do I interpret the Bible literally?”

The better question is, “What kind of language is the biblical writer using, and what truth is that language intended to communicate?”

Taking Scripture seriously requires us to take its genre seriously.

AD 70 and the Future

I believe a significant portion of the Olivet Discourse concerns the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Several statements make good sense in that setting. Jesus tells people in Judea to flee to the mountains. He speaks about circumstances in which someone should not return home for a cloak. He tells them to pray that their flight will not occur in winter or on a Sabbath. He describes extraordinary tribulation. Most significantly, He says:

“Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”

Those statements deserve to be interpreted in their historical context rather than immediately transferred thousands of years into the future.

At the same time, I am not convinced that AD 70 exhausts everything Jesus is teaching.

Matthew 24:14 says:

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

The discourse also moves toward the unmistakable coming of the Son of Man, final judgment, and the necessity of being prepared for an hour that no one knows.

For that reason, I am comfortable recognizing both historical fulfillment and continuing or ultimate fulfillment. The destruction of Jerusalem can be a real fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy while also participating in a larger biblical pattern that culminates in the final Day of the Lord.

This should not surprise us. Scripture frequently presents historical acts of judgment and deliverance that anticipate greater acts of judgment and deliverance.

The important point is that we do not have to resolve every disputed chronological question before we can understand the primary application of Jesus' teaching.

Jesus repeatedly tells us what to do.

Do Not Be Led Astray

The first command deserves attention because it comes before the wars, earthquakes, famines, and persecution:

“See that no one leads you astray.”

Deception is one of Jesus' principal concerns.

He warns about false messiahs and false prophets. He even warns that impressive signs can accompany false claims. The existence of spiritual language, apparent supernatural activity, confidence, popularity, or influence does not establish that a teacher is telling the truth.

The Christian response is not paranoia. It is biblical discernment.

We should know the teaching of Christ and His apostles well enough to recognize teaching that contradicts it. That requires ordinary practices that are considerably less dramatic than end-times speculation: reading Scripture, participating in the church, learning sound doctrine, praying for wisdom, and remaining teachable.

This is particularly important when people claim to possess special knowledge about current events or the prophetic calendar.

Jesus' instruction is straightforward.

Do not be deceived.

Do Not Be Alarmed

Jesus then says:

“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed.”

This may be one of the most neglected commands in the passage.

War is real. Natural disaster is real. Persecution is real. Political instability is real. Human evil is real. Jesus does not minimize any of them.

He tells His disciples not to panic because of them.

Every generation of Christians has been able to produce a list of events that appeared unprecedented. Wars, disease, economic upheaval, natural disasters, political instability, cultural change, and technological development can make a particular historical moment feel uniquely apocalyptic.

Modern communication intensifies that feeling because we now learn about suffering throughout the world almost immediately. We can consume an uninterrupted stream of alarming information.

Christians should pay attention to the world. We should care about suffering. We should respond to injustice. We should pray, serve, give, vote, work, teach, protect, and help where God gives us responsibility.

But anxiety is not the same thing as vigilance.

Jesus specifically tells His followers not to be alarmed.

The existence of chaos does not indicate the absence of God's sovereignty.

Be on Guard

Mark records another command:

“But be on your guard.”

The context here includes persecution.

Jesus tells His disciples that they will be brought before councils, governors, and kings. Some will be betrayed by members of their own families. Some will be hated because of His name.

Christian faithfulness does not guarantee cultural acceptance or personal safety.

At the same time, “be on your guard” does not require Christians to seek persecution or behave recklessly. The Book of Acts provides examples of believers standing publicly when necessary and leaving dangerous situations when appropriate.

There is no virtue in unnecessary suffering.

There is virtue in refusing to abandon Christ when obedience becomes costly.

Wisdom may tell us to speak. Wisdom may tell us to leave. Wisdom may tell us to wait. What wisdom cannot tell us to do is deny Christ in order to protect ourselves.

Endure

Jesus repeatedly connects faithfulness with endurance:

“But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

Christians have debated the timing and nature of the Great Tribulation for generations. Those discussions have value, but persecution is not merely a theoretical future possibility.

There have been Christians throughout history for whom following Jesus has involved imprisonment, displacement, poverty, violence, or death. There are Christians in the world today for whom those possibilities remain real.

The relevant question is therefore larger than whether Christians will experience a particular period labeled “The Great Tribulation.”

The question is whether we are developing the kind of faith that endures tribulation whenever it comes.

Endurance is rarely developed during the crisis itself. It grows through years of ordinary faithfulness: worship, prayer, repentance, Scripture, fellowship, obedience, and trust.

We ask God for grace now because we will need His grace then.

Stay Awake

Jesus repeatedly tells His disciples to stay awake.

This command is not primarily about sleeping. It is about spiritual attentiveness.

His comparison with the days of Noah is instructive. People were eating, drinking, marrying, and continuing ordinary life. Those activities were not inherently sinful. The problem was that ordinary life had become ultimate life. They were unaware of approaching judgment because the normal routines of existence had convinced them that tomorrow would always resemble today.

That remains a significant spiritual danger.

Careers matter. Families matter. Recreation has value. Houses need maintenance. Bills need paying. Games are played. Trips are taken. Meals are enjoyed.

Christianity does not require us to reject ordinary life.

It requires us to remember that ordinary life is temporary.

Worldliness does not always arrive as obvious wickedness. Sometimes it appears as complete absorption in good but temporary things.

Jesus says: stay awake.

Be Faithful to the Assignment

Jesus follows His teaching about His return with the illustration of a servant whose master has gone away.

The central question is simple: What will the servant be doing when the master returns?

The faithful servant continues doing the work assigned to him.

The unfaithful servant interprets the master's delay as permission to live as though the master will never return.

This illustration has increasingly shaped how I think about eschatology.

The purpose of studying the return of Christ is not merely to identify when the Master might return. It is to make sure He finds us faithfully doing what He assigned us to do.

That means feeding His sheep. Making disciples. Teaching His Word. Loving our neighbors. Caring for those entrusted to us. Proclaiming the gospel. Seeking justice. Practicing mercy. Raising our children. Serving the church. Doing our work faithfully. Repenting when we sin. Forgiving when we are wronged. Continuing until He comes.

A detailed prophetic system is no substitute for obedience.

Birth Pains

Jesus uses the image of birth pains to describe the events He has discussed.

I continue to find this image helpful for understanding the biblical presentation of history.

Birth pains repeat. They can increase in intensity. There can also be intervals between them. Most importantly, birth pains are not meaningless suffering. They are moving toward an appointed conclusion.

That keeps us from making two opposite errors.

The first error is assuming that every crisis means the end must occur immediately.

The second is assuming that because similar crises have happened before, nothing is moving toward an end.

Christianity teaches neither endless historical repetition nor constant date-setting.

History has a destination.

God may show remarkable patience between periods of judgment and upheaval. Scripture tells us not to interpret that patience as indifference. Peter explicitly connects the apparent delay of Christ's return with God's patience and salvation.

The delay is mercy.

It is also temporary.

The Fig Tree

Jesus also tells His disciples to learn from the fig tree.

Patterns tell us something.

When branches become tender and leaves appear, summer is approaching. We understand this principle in ordinary life. Certain conditions indicate what is likely to follow.

Jesus expects His followers to observe the world intelligently.

But observation is different from obsession.

The purpose of noticing the leaves on the fig tree is not to spend every day measuring them.

It is to live with an awareness that history is moving somewhere.

The Days of Noah

Jesus' reference to Noah adds another dimension.

Judgment arrived while people were conducting ordinary life.

The emphasis is not on their ability to calculate when the flood would begin. The emphasis is that they were unprepared when it came.

That helps explain Jesus' statement that no one knows the day or hour.

There is a deliberate tension in the passage.

Jesus tells us enough to know that He is coming.

He refuses to tell us enough to calculate when.

That tension appears intentional.

If we knew the exact date, sinful human beings would undoubtedly organize our lives around the deadline. Instead, Jesus requires continual readiness.

Where I Currently Stand

I still have opinions about the disputed questions.

I believe the “last days” began with the redemptive events surrounding Christ's death, resurrection, ascension, and the giving of the Spirit rather than referring exclusively to a short period immediately preceding His return.

I believe much of the Olivet Discourse has a genuine historical fulfillment connected with Jerusalem and AD 70 while also participating in patterns that ultimately culminate in Christ's return and final judgment.

I generally interpret apocalyptic numbers and images symbolically unless the context gives compelling reason to do otherwise.

I do not currently hold a pre-tribulation “Left Behind” understanding of the rapture. I expect the gathering of believers to Christ to occur in connection with His return.

My understanding of Revelation is closest to an amillennial framework, though I appreciate elements of postmillennial expectation and the confidence it places in the continuing advance of the gospel.

I believe the church should expect both gospel advance and serious opposition.

I believe Jesus will return bodily and visibly.

I believe there will be a resurrection of the dead and final judgment.

I believe evil will finally be defeated.

I believe God's people will be with Him.

Those last convictions matter much more to me than my ability to arrange every event between now and then.

Faithful Christians disagree about many of the other details. Those disagreements should produce careful study rather than unnecessary division.

Theology Should Lead Us to Christ

I remain strongly committed to theology.

The answer to bad theology is not less theology. Christians need doctrine because doctrine tells us who God is, who we are, what Christ has done, what God has promised, and how we should live.

But theology can become distorted when our system becomes more important to us than Scripture itself.

We can begin forcing passages to fit our framework rather than allowing Scripture to correct our framework.

Worse, we can become fascinated with the message while growing cold toward the Person the message reveals.

Jesus told the religious leaders of His own day that they searched the Scriptures because they believed that in them they had eternal life, yet those same Scriptures testified about Him.

That warning should apply to every theological system, including my own.

The goal is not to win the eschatology argument.

The goal is to know Christ, trust Christ, obey Christ, and be found faithful when Christ returns.

What He Said Comes Next

After all these years of reading Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, Daniel, Thessalonians, and Revelation, I am less confident that I can tell you exactly how every detail will unfold.

That does not bother me as much as it once might have.

I still study these things. I still have conclusions. I still think some interpretations fit the biblical evidence better than others. I also expect that continued study may require me to modify some of my conclusions.

What has become clearer is what Jesus expects from His people while we wait.

He told us not to be deceived, so we should know the truth.

He told us not to be alarmed, so we should trust His sovereignty.

He told us to be on guard, so we should develop discernment and courage.

He told us to endure, so we should build patterns of faithfulness before difficult days arrive.

He told us to stay awake, so we should refuse to allow temporary things to consume our attention.

He told us to be faithful, so we should continue doing the work He has given us.

These commands apply whether Christ returns during my lifetime or a thousand years from now.

That is one reason I find the Olivet Discourse more encouraging today than frightening.

Jesus does not pretend that history will be easy. He describes deception, conflict, natural disaster, persecution, apostasy, lawlessness, suffering, and judgment with remarkable directness.

But none of those things surprises Him.

He tells His disciples about them in advance precisely because they are not evidence that events have escaped His control.

The Christian hope has never been that history will gradually become predictable.

Our hope is that history belongs to Christ.

I do not know precisely what comes next.

I know that Christ will return.

I know that He will complete what He began.

And I know what He told His people to do in the meantime.

Perhaps that is the most useful way to study what comes next:

Pay attention to what He said comes next, and then pay even closer attention to what He said to do until it does.

BTW- I think the song is really cool! I hope you do too!

The Story Behind “Fri. Night Lights”

2026-09-16T03:13:20.105-05:00

The song "Fri, Night Lights" hits Spotify tomorrow- it has been playing before games in our stadium for 2 years... here is the backstory.....

In the fall of 2024, we started the football season 0–5.

I had never been 0–5 in my life.

And it wasn't as if we were simply showing up every Friday night and getting run off the field. We lost 38–28 to Oak Mountain. Then 28–7 to Homewood, 23–14 to Ramsay, 20–7 to Carver, and 20–14 to Wenonah.

It felt like bad break after bad break. We were competing. We were fighting. We just weren't winning.

The Monday after the Wenonah loss, I went back to Wenonah for a JV game. I was pretty down. When you've coached as long as I have, you learn not to make too much of any one game or season, but 0–5 was unfamiliar territory for me.

The Wenonah varsity players were working the chains that night. I walked over toward the sideline, and one of their players—a really big guy who I believe was their starting offensive tackle—saw me.

He smiled.

“Coach, last Friday night, man... THAT WAS A GAME!”

Then he gave me a hug.

That stuck with me. Their kids were terrific. And I was reminded that beating Briarwood still meant something to them. Our record didn't matter. They knew what kind of fight they had just been in.

Then he said something else.

“Coach, it was a war! That big #90... I felt him.”

Number 90 was Garrett Witherington, one of our defensive linemen. Garrett is now a freshman defensive lineman at Virginia Tech. He has been playing a good number of snaps this season under James Franklin.

But that night, he was just #90.

“I felt him.”

For some reason, those three words hit me.

Here I was thinking about 0–5. Wins and losses. What had gone wrong. All the things coaches think about when the scoreboard isn't cooperating.

This kid wasn't thinking about any of that. He remembered the battle. He remembered the guy across from him. He remembered what it felt like to compete against somebody who gave him everything he had.

And suddenly I remembered something too.

That's part of what Friday night football is supposed to be about.

I went home that night and wrote a song.

I originally called it “You Felt Me.”

The chorus said:

Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight
We battled like soldiers under those lights
Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line
When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind.
'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see,
It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me.

I wrote it about two players walking away from a football game knowing something about each other that nobody sitting in the stands could completely understand.

And then something pretty crazy happened.

We didn't lose again that season.

The following Friday, September 27, we hosted Leeds. We were 0–5.

Before the game, our “Voice of the Lions” Scott Kellner, started playing a song over the stadium speakers. He hadn't told me he was going to do it.

It took me a second. Wait a minute. That's my song.

Then we went out and beat Leeds 31–14.

Afterward, people started asking about the song. One of our assistant coaches told me his daughter had actually tried to Shazam it during the game. When he told her it was Coach Mathews' song, apparently she gave him a somewhat bewildered look—which is probably the appropriate reaction.

Our offensive coordinator's wife, who teaches at the school, found me and said, “I loved the song.”

The next week we beat Corner 31–6. Then John Carroll, 21–17. Then Hayden, 50–16.

On November 1, we played our final game. We had missed the playoffs, and McAdory—a 6A playoff team—came to our place. We won 55–35 in one of those wonderfully fun Friday-night football games.

A few more people asked afterward:

“Was that your song they played before the game?”

And I just said yes... it really is no big deal... just fun!

Somewhere along the way, the song became part of our Friday-night routine. We still play it just before kickoff at home games.

And here's a completely meaningless statistic that I nevertheless enjoy: since we started playing it before home games, we're 10–3 at home.

I don't believe in superstition, so I'm not taking credit for those ten wins, but I do love what the song has come to represent.

Because the strange thing is that “Fri. Night Lights” wasn't written after a win.

It was written when we were 0–5.

It came from an opposing player. It came from a Monday night JV game when I was discouraged and a young man on the other team unknowingly reminded an old coach what was important.

The season eventually turned around. We finished with five straight wins.

But that's almost beside the point.

The kid from Wenonah had already given me the lesson before we won another game.

The cheers fade. The scoreboard gets turned off. Most people eventually forget who scored what.

That's the story behind “Fri. Night Lights.”

The song officially releases on Spotify Thursday, September 17.

And every time I hear it playing in our stadium before kickoff, I still think about being 0–5, standing on the sideline at Wenonah on a Monday night, and one big offensive lineman with a huge smile saying:

“Coach... that big #90—I felt him.”

BTW- I hope other stadiums get to enjoy it, it is a fun pre-game song celebrating a good part of the American experience!

Here is the Soundcloud Link: Fri Night Lights

Verse 1: Friday night lights, the whole town’s here Band’s playin’ loud, you can feel the cheer Mud on my cleats, leather in my hand Drums pound the beat, I’m a warrior in the land. Whistles blowin', crowd on its feet Sweat in the air, it's time to compete But all that noise, it drifts away When it's just you and me in this 4-quarter fray. Chorus: Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight We battled like soldiers under those lights Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind. 'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see, It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me. Verse 2: Grass stains on my jersey, pain in my bones But you gave it back, every inch we owned Could hear the cheerleaders, fans in the stands But out here, it’s just me and this man. Helmet to helmet, down to the wire Pushin’ through mud, through the dirt and the fire When the game clock ticks down to none We’re both standin’ tall, knowin’ what we’ve done. Chorus: Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight We battled like soldiers under those lights Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind. 'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see, It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me. Bridge: All the cheers, they’ll fade away But that war we fought will always stay The glory ain’t in the crowd or the fame It’s in the respect we earned in the game. Chorus (repeat): Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight We battled like soldiers under those lights Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind. 'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see, It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me. Outro: Friday night lights, they’ll shine again But it’s that handshake, man, that says where we’ve been.

Come find me on Spotify- I have new songs coming out soon!

The Men of Ephraim — 15 Years Later

2026-09-11T05:27:39.395-05:00

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a post on Judges 12 called “Ephraim’s Evil and Our Wicked Ways.” I recently went back and read it again, which is always an interesting exercise. There were parts that made me smile because I could hear my younger voice so clearly, and there were other parts where I found myself wanting to interrupt and say, “Yes, but there is more going on here than that.”

I still believe much of what I wrote. I have now spent even more years working in churches, schools, teams, and organizations, and nothing in those additional years has convinced me that gossip, dissension, bitterness, and the recruiting of people into factions are minor problems. If anything, I probably take those things more seriously now. What has changed is that I am less certain that Judges 12 gives us the simple division I once saw between troublesome people and the strong leader willing to confront them.

The story comes immediately after Jephthah’s victory over the Ammonites. Rather than celebrating what God has done, the men of Ephraim confront Jephthah and demand to know why they were not called to participate in the battle. Their complaint quickly becomes a threat: “We will burn your house over you with fire.”

What makes the incident particularly interesting is that we have seen this before. Back in Judges 8, after Gideon’s victory over Midian, the men of Ephraim approached him with essentially the same complaint. Why did you go into battle without us? Why weren’t we called?

There does seem to be a pattern here, and that was what caught my attention fifteen years ago. God had given Israel a victory, but Ephraim seemed less interested in the victory than in the fact that the victory had occurred without them at the center of it. There is something very human in that response. We can be surprisingly capable of taking something good and immediately filtering it through the question of how it affects us. Someone succeeds and, rather than celebrating, we wonder why we weren’t included. A decision works out well, but we remain bothered because no one asked our opinion. Before long, the perceived slight becomes more important than the original issue.

I have seen enough over the years to know that grievance can become a kind of culture. People repeat complaints to one another, interpretations harden, motives are assigned, and eventually something that began as a legitimate concern can become a settled narrative. The story gets told often enough that nobody remembers exactly where the facts end and the assumptions begin.

Scripture takes that kind of behavior seriously. Proverbs lists the one who “sows discord among brothers” among the things the Lord hates, and Paul includes dissensions, divisions, rivalries, jealousy, and fits of anger among the works of the flesh in Galatians 5. Churches have sometimes been very good at identifying certain obvious sins while being much more tolerant of sins that slowly poison relationships. Gossip, factions, whisper campaigns, half-truths, anonymous accusations, and the constant questioning of motives can do enormous damage while the people participating in them remain convinced they are simply defending what is right.

I still believe all of that.

What I see differently fifteen years later is Jephthah.

When Ephraim confronted Gideon in Judges 8, Gideon found a way to lower the temperature. He appealed to their pride, gave them credit for what they had accomplished, and the confrontation ended. When I wrote the original post, I was somewhat dismissive of Gideon’s response. I saw it as appeasement, perhaps even as the kind of response that encourages difficult people to keep behaving badly because they learn that confrontation works.

Jephthah certainly did not appease them.

He defended himself and apparently had good reason to do so. He reminded Ephraim that he had called for their help and they had not come. The Ammonite threat could not simply be placed on hold while everyone worked through their feelings, so Jephthah acted, risked his life, and God gave him the victory.

The argument could have ended there, but it didn’t.

The disagreement became a battle, and the battle became a slaughter. Jephthah’s Gileadites defeated Ephraim and captured the fords of the Jordan. As the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross, they were required to pronounce the word “Shibboleth.” Their dialect betrayed them because they pronounced it “Sibboleth,” and that single word became enough to identify them for execution. By the time the episode ends, 42,000 Ephraimites are dead.

Fifteen years ago, I read that primarily as the eventual consequence of Ephraim’s rebellion. Today I find it much harder to read past the 42,000 bodies.

This does not look like a leadership success story. It looks like another stage in the tragedy of Judges.

Israelites are killing Israelites. The people who should have been united against the enemies surrounding them have turned their weapons against one another. A disagreement that began with wounded pride has escalated until brothers are standing at a river identifying other brothers by their accents so they can kill them.

That makes Judges 12 considerably more uncomfortable for me now, because it is no longer a passage that allows me simply to identify the difficult people in an organization and warn against becoming like them. It forces me to look at both sides of the river.

There is certainly an Ephraim problem worth examining. I have to ask whether I carry grievances longer than I should, whether another person’s success bothers me when I was not involved, or whether I have ever discussed a problem with several people before discussing it with the person who could actually address it. I have to consider how easily I can believe a negative interpretation of someone once I have become frustrated with that person, and how tempting it is to assign motives that I cannot possibly know.

But there is also a Jephthah problem, and I probably understand that one better now after fifteen more years of leadership.

Anyone who leads for very long will eventually be criticized unfairly. Decisions will be questioned by people who do not know everything that went into making them. Motives will be assigned. Partial stories will circulate. There will even be times when a leader can demonstrate that the criticism is factually wrong.

The danger comes when being right begins to justify everything that follows. You can be so right that you are dead right- you can kill people with the truth.....

There is a subtle progression in conflict where defending the truth can become defending ourselves, and defending ourselves can eventually become defeating the people who oppose us. That progression can be especially difficult to recognize because it often begins with a legitimate grievance. Jephthah really had called Ephraim. They really had failed to come. He really had risked his life, and God really had given him victory. None of that prevented the situation from eventually becoming a catastrophe.

Years of leadership can make this more dangerous rather than less. Experience teaches us to recognize patterns, and that can be a tremendous gift. After enough years, you have seen certain behaviors before. You recognize how gossip moves, how factions form, how a small complaint can become an organized grievance, and how quickly inaccurate information can become accepted truth.

But experience has another edge. Wisdom can slowly harden into cynicism. We can become so skilled at recognizing the men of Ephraim that eventually we begin seeing Ephraimites everywhere. A leader who has been wounded enough times can begin preparing for battle before anyone has actually declared war.

That is one reason the scene at the Jordan strikes me differently now.

The Jordan River carried enormous meaning in Israel’s history. Their fathers had crossed that river together when God brought them into the Promised Land. It had been a place associated with God’s faithfulness and Israel’s identity as one people. Yet here, at those same waters, Israelites are using a word to determine which Israelites belong to the wrong group.

There is something hauntingly contemporary about that.

We have our own Shibboleths. Sometimes they are political words, theological expressions, institutional loyalties, leadership philosophies, social-media positions, or opinions about whatever controversy happens to be consuming us at the moment. We learn the vocabulary of our group, and sometimes a surprisingly small difference in language is enough for us to decide whether someone belongs with “us” or “them.”

Sadly, I can write someone off just because they don't say the Jesus words correctly- and I know God sits up there sometimes and says- "Who is the real man of faith? One with the right words, or one with the right heart?"

Once people become categories, it becomes easier to stop listening to them. Once they become opponents, it becomes easier to justify treating them in ways we would never treat a brother.

That does not mean disagreement is wrong, nor does it mean leaders should tolerate destructive behavior indefinitely. I still believe churches and organizations must confront gossip, persistent dissension, anonymous attacks, and efforts to undermine people through private campaigns. Matthew 18 remains a far healthier model than talking everywhere except to the person involved. Healthy organizations need honest disagreement, but healthy disagreement requires courage, specificity, charity, and accountability.

What I would add fifteen years later is that the person confronting discord must guard his heart every bit as carefully as the person creating it.

Ephraim needed repentance, but Jephthah needed restraint, and Israel needed something neither of them could ultimately provide. That is part of the larger tragedy of Judges. The book keeps showing us people doing what is right in their own eyes. Even its deliverers are deeply flawed. Victories are followed by failures, and eventually the external battles against Israel’s enemies give way to internal battles among Israelites themselves.

So if I were writing the old post again—and I suppose that is what I am doing—I would spend less time identifying “the Men of Ephraim” around me and more time asking what the passage exposes in me.

There are times when I have been Ephraim, too concerned with my place in the story, too willing to nurse a grievance or too quick to assume I understood another person’s motives. There are probably other times when I have been Jephthah, legitimately frustrated and perhaps even factually correct, but too ready to view the disagreement as a battle that needed to be won.

After fifteen more years, I am less interested in deciding which side of the Jordan I would have been standing on. I am more interested in why brothers were killing brothers at the river in the first place.

Perhaps that is the warning I missed the first time. The greatest danger in conflict is not always that we will lose. Sometimes the greater danger is that we will win, only to discover that somewhere along the way we began fighting the wrong people.

When I read these old posts, I am so tempted to hit delete- but that was who I was then... and that is OK. Maybe someone reading this will be encouraged to keep growing and allow time, Word, and Spirit to keep moving forward.....

Contributing to the Delinquency of a Culture

2026-09-10T21:25:46.726-05:00

There is an old legal expression, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, that assigns responsibility beyond the person who actually commits the offense. The minor may have made the choice, but the law recognizes that choices do not always occur in isolation. Someone may have encouraged the behavior, provided the opportunity, supplied what was needed, or created an environment in which misconduct became easier and increasingly normal.

I have been thinking about that phrase lately, though in a somewhat different context.

Is it possible to contribute to the delinquency of a culture?

That question becomes more complicated the longer I consider it because culture is one of those things we routinely discuss as though it exists somewhere outside of us. We complain about what "the culture" celebrates, what social media has done to public conversation, how entertainment has changed, what technology is doing to children, how politics has become increasingly hostile, or how standards that once seemed reasonably settled can disappear within a generation.

There is certainly plenty worth examining in all of that. What bothers me, however, is how easily I can speak about culture as an observer when I am obviously one of its participants.

I live here too.

I consume the products, use the technology, follow the news, watch the games, listen to the music, carry the phone, scroll through the feeds, click the links, participate in the conversations and, on occasion, become irritated by strangers I have never met over subjects about which I probably know considerably less than I think I do. I can complain about our shortened attention spans and then reach for my phone during thirty seconds of inactivity. I can lament the superficiality of social media while paying attention to how many people viewed something I posted. I can criticize sensationalism while clicking on a headline precisely because it was sensational.

At some point it becomes difficult to maintain the fiction that culture is merely something happening around me.

I am contributing to it.

That realization creates an interesting problem for anyone attempting to take seriously the biblical instruction concerning our relationship with the world. John quotes Jesus rather plainly, "Do not love the world or the things in the world," and throughout Christian history believers have wrestled with what faithful obedience to that instruction should actually look like.

One solution has always been withdrawal. If the world is corrupting, create as much distance from it as possible. There is an understandable logic to that instinct, and there are certainly occasions when separation is both wise and necessary. Yet complete withdrawal creates its own theological problem because Jesus, in His prayer for His disciples in John 17, specifically says, "I do not ask that you take them out of the world." A few verses later He adds, "As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world."

Apparently, removal was never the assignment. Neither was assimilation.

The Christian is therefore placed in an uncomfortable position: sent deliberately into a world he is simultaneously warned not to love. We are expected to participate without being absorbed, to engage without surrendering discernment, and to influence an environment that is inevitably influencing us at the same time.

That has probably always been difficult, but our technological age has added another dimension to the problem. Most of us are no longer simply consumers of culture. We have become distributors of it.

For most of human history, relatively few people possessed the ability to broadcast an opinion to hundreds or thousands of others. Today we carry that capacity in our pockets. With almost no effort, we can promote an idea, circulate a rumor, celebrate an accomplishment, humiliate another person, recommend a book, spread misinformation, encourage a friend, share something beautiful, intensify an argument, or introduce hundreds of people to something they otherwise would never have encountered.

We are all, in some small way, publishers now. And publishing means contributing.

This is where I have begun thinking about the idea of adding to the noise. The phrase is usually used negatively, but perhaps the issue is not simply whether I am making noise. Participation is unavoidable, and silence itself can sometimes become a form of participation. There are moments when refusing to speak demonstrates wisdom, just as there are moments when refusing to speak demonstrates cowardice.

The more useful question may be what my participation is helping to amplify.

That question reaches farther than whether something is technically right or wrong. I can be correct about an issue and still contribute something unhealthy to the culture surrounding it. I can defend truth while behaving contemptuously toward people. I can criticize outrage while becoming outraged. I can oppose vulgarity using language and methods that gradually make me vulgar. I can become so preoccupied with defeating something that the thing I oppose begins determining the kind of person I am becoming.

Social media makes this particularly difficult because its machinery often rewards precisely what wisdom tells us to restrain. Anger travels quickly. Nuance rarely does. Certainty attracts more attention than humility, accusation more than careful inquiry, and controversy more than ordinary goodness. The temptation, therefore, is not simply to believe questionable things but to become the sort of person the system rewards.

Even our disapproval can become part of the machinery. We share the offensive video to demonstrate how offensive it is, repost the ridiculous statement so everyone can see how ridiculous people have become, and circulate the latest example of cultural decay while wondering why cultural decay receives so much attention.

We condemn the noise while helping increase its volume.

None of this means that Christians should retreat from public life, entertainment, technology, politics, education, business, athletics, art, or the countless other places where culture is made. If anything, the opposite seems closer to the biblical picture. Jesus sends His followers into the world, which suggests that presence is not an unfortunate consequence of being alive at the wrong time; it is part of the vocation.

The difficulty is learning how to be present without allowing the surrounding culture to establish all the terms of our presence.

Perhaps that requires changing some of the questions we ask.

Instead of asking only whether I am permitted to watch something, I might consider what repeated exposure to it is cultivating in me. Instead of asking whether an article confirms what I already believe, I might wonder whether sharing it contributes truth or merely reinforces my tribe. Instead of asking whether my criticism is justified, I might ask whether the manner in which I express it reflects the character I claim to value.

The same questions apply positively. What deserves amplification? What is worthy of attention? What kinds of conversations make people more thoughtful rather than merely more agitated? What music, writing, humor, art, teaching, friendship and public discourse remind us of things that are true, excellent, beautiful or humane?

Culture, after all, is not produced only in Hollywood studios, corporate boardrooms, news organizations, universities or Washington. It is produced around dinner tables and in classrooms, locker rooms, churches, offices, text threads and social-media feeds. It develops through countless decisions about what receives our attention and what does not, what earns our praise and what earns our silence, what we tolerate long enough to normalize and what we care enough about to resist.

Which brings me back to that strange legal phrase.

Perhaps contributing to the delinquency of a culture rarely looks dramatic. Most of us will never possess enough influence to change society in any obvious way. Our contribution will be much smaller than that, consisting largely of ordinary decisions whose significance is almost impossible to measure individually.

But that is probably how culture has always been formed.

We inherit something from those who came before us, live inside it for a while, alter it through millions of choices we scarcely notice, and eventually hand some version of it to those who come after us.

The question, then, is not whether we will contribute.

We already are.

The question worth asking is what we are adding to the noise—and what kind of culture those contributions are quietly helping to create.

All of this hits home tomorrow when I will see jayopsis music go live on Spotify......

Before Anyone Knew the Ending

2026-09-05T07:39:25.978-05:00

Note: Christopher Vizzina will start tonight vs LSU and Arch Manning will start for Texas today as well. I'm excited to watch CV and I know what kind of person he is and WHO he trusts in. This is a cool memory as we get set for football.

On June 5, 2021, I took Christopher Vizzina to Clemson for a summer football camp.

CV was a rising junior quarterback at Briarwood Christian, and we already knew he had ability. He had the size, arm talent, athleticism, and temperament you look for at the position, but at that stage of the process, potential is still mostly that—potential. Summer camps are where players begin turning projections into evaluations, often while competing alongside dozens of other quarterbacks trying to do exactly the same thing.

CV had a great morning workout.

Good enough, as it turned out, that he was one of only a handful of quarterbacks who threw in both the morning and afternoon sessions. That was significant by itself. More repetitions meant more opportunities to be evaluated, particularly with Clemson's coaches watching closely.

Then the afternoon took an unexpected turn.

Arch Manning showed up.

Even then, the Manning name carried its own gravitational pull. Arch was already becoming one of the most discussed recruits in the country, and when he walked into the Clemson facility, there wasn't much mystery about who had arrived.

Eventually the quarterbacks moved into one-on-one work against defensive backs. CV and Arch ended up throwing in the same rotation, with another quarterback between them.

And something interesting began to happen.

A crowd gathered.

The Clemson coaches gathered.

Dabo Swinney was watching.

And CV and Arch started putting on a show.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was creating a record of the afternoon because I was texting a group of friends back home as the drill unfolded. Reading those messages now is almost like finding an old play-by-play sheet.

“Both are 3 for 3 so far in last drill.”

A few minutes later:

“Both 4 for 4.”

A beautiful throw was dropped. Both moved to 4-for-5.

CV went to 6-for-7, then 6-for-8 with two drops, then 7-for-9.

One of my friends texted:

“Dabo watching all this part.”

He was.

So were the other Clemson coaches.

What had begun as another camp drill was becoming something different. There was energy around it now. Coaches were congratulating both quarterbacks after throws, and the crowd was responding to the competition.

At one point, Dabo called for a double move.

CV hit it for a touchdown.

My sophisticated scouting report to the group back home:

“Dabo just called a dbl move that CV hit for TD — everyone wooped lol.”

The numbers kept accumulating.

CV: 9-of-11.

Then 9-of-12 after his first bad throw.

Arch: 7-of-12.

CV hit a speed-out to go 10-of-13.

There was even a third quarterback caught between the two of them in the rotation. Since I didn't know his name and had noticed him wearing a distinctive wide-brimmed hat, my texts simply referred to him as “Brim Hat.” After he threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown, my entire report consisted of:

“BRIM HAT pick 6.”

We eventually discovered his name when he handed out a recruiting card: Aliam Appler from Dutch Fork High School.

But the real drama remained the two quarterbacks on either side of him.

Arch had a bad throw and went to 7-of-13.

Then came one of my favorite texts of the afternoon:

“CV hits pearl in perfect rhythm 11-14.”

Arch moved to 8-of-14.

CV missed badly: 11-of-15.

Arch answered with a deep touchdown: 9-of-15.

“ARCH bomb for TD.”

Arch completed another to move to 10-of-16.

CV finished his sequence 12-of-16.

Then the bell sounded.

My final text:

“And the Bell sounds — what a show!”

____________

Five years later, that afternoon looks very different to me.

Not because the throws have changed, or because my unofficial statistics suddenly carry some great historical importance. They don't.

What has changed is that now we know what happened next.

Arch Manning went on to become one of the most closely followed recruits in the country and eventually landed at Texas.

CV's recruitment took off as well. Clemson offered him, he committed, and eventually he returned to the very place where that memorable afternoon had unfolded.

But his story didn't immediately produce the glamorous ending we sometimes expect in recruiting.

He had to wait.

For three seasons, CV worked behind Cade Klubnik. In an era of college football when the transfer portal offers quarterbacks an increasingly easy escape from waiting, he stayed. He developed. He competed. He kept working.

And now, on Saturday night, September 5, 2026, Christopher Vizzina will walk into Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge as the starting quarterback for Clemson against LSU.

Arch Manning is now the starting quarterback at Texas.

Both made it.

And that is what makes those old text messages so fascinating to me.

There is an almost irresistible temptation, when looking backward, to impose the future upon the past. Once we know how something turned out, we begin remembering it as though the ending were somehow inevitable.

It wasn't.

On June 5, 2021, there were no guarantees.

There were no college depth charts. No starting jobs. No certainty about where either quarterback would eventually play. CV didn't even have a Clemson offer yet.

There were simply two very talented high-school quarterbacks standing a few yards apart at a summer camp, competing in front of a growing crowd.

One of them happened to carry the most recognizable last name in football.

The other was the kid I had driven up from Briarwood.

And he belonged.

That's probably what I remember most clearly.

CV didn't seem overwhelmed by the moment or distracted by the attention surrounding Arch. If anything, the competition appeared to sharpen him. He simply kept stepping into the rotation and throwing.

Completion. Next rep. Touchdown. Next rep. Bad throw. Forget it.

Next rep.

There is something wonderfully honest about competition before anyone knows the ending. Reputation matters less once the ball is snapped. Recruiting rankings can't complete a deep out. A famous last name can't read the coverage for you. Eventually somebody blows the whistle, a defensive back lines up across from a receiver, and the quarterback has to take the snap and make the throw.

That afternoon, both of them did.

Five years later, they are doing it on a much larger stage.

Saturday night, when CV takes his first snap as Clemson's starting quarterback in Death Valley, Louisiana, I suspect my mind will drift for just a moment to another summer afternoon in another Clemson facility.

Turns out, it was just beginning.

Post-script 2 (9/23/26)

Dabo announced Tait Reynolds would be the started against UNC and the team did pull out a win. I have some concerns about the process as a guy who has been through QB battles as a coach- but will leave it at that. God is in control and he has CV's best in His providence. CV's attitude has been great BTW-

POST SCRIPT (9/7/26)

Postscript — The Process Continues

Five years after that Clemson camp, CV finally got the moment he had worked and waited for: walking into Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge as Clemson's starting quarterback.

It didn't go the way any of us hoped.

LSU was very good, Clemson struggled across the board, and Death Valley provided exactly the kind of hostile environment its reputation promises. After a nearly two-hour weather delay, more than 100,000 people were there to watch LSU take control early and eventually win 51-10. LSU finished with 644 yards of offense in a game that became difficult for Clemson in virtually every phase.

CV finished 10-of-16 for 83 yards, completing 62.5 percent of his passes. He didn't throw a touchdown and had one interception—the costly first-quarter pick-six that helped LSU turn an early 10-3 lead into 17-3. Clemson eventually played freshman Tait Reynolds as well before CV returned later in the game.

It wasn't the debut we had imagined. But perhaps this is where that old story from 2021 becomes even more relevant.

I've watched CV long enough to know that his story has never really been about one afternoon, one recruiting ranking, one depth chart—or now, one difficult Saturday night. It has been about the process.

Before the game, CV had talked about wanting his composure and poise to be characteristics people saw in him. He also spoke openly about his journey at Clemson: “It's all in the Lord's plan, and I've been trusting that.” and I thought some of the best evidence of that composure came after the LSU game.

There was no hiding from what happened. On the interception, CV simply acknowledged that he never saw the defender and called it a throw he wanted back. That's what quarterbacks have to do. Own the mistake. Learn from it. Go back to work.

And I was proud of him. Not because he played a perfect game. He didn't. Not because Clemson won. They didn't.

I'm proud because there is something revealing about watching a young man handle a night when the dream doesn't unfold the way he pictured it. Success tells us something about a player; disappointment often tells us considerably more.

CV waited three years for this opportunity. Now he's experienced the other side of getting it—the hard part. The film won't be pleasant in places. There will be corrections to make, criticism to absorb and another week of competition ahead. Dabo Swinney said Sunday that Clemson will evaluate both quarterbacks and “reset, and go get better.” That's football and life

The process doesn't stop simply because you finally get the opportunity you've been waiting for. Sometimes getting the opportunity simply begins another part of the process.

Keep working, CV. We'll keep watching the process.

Belongs In the Ring