About Me

For all that I write and create, I often find that I have a hard time writing about myself...

Previously, I had been sharing that my wife, Amanda, and I had been married for a few years (six now!), that we live in Anoka, MN, and that we only had a few plants dependent on us. Plants that usually died a water-less death. We had planned to work on that before we upgraded to anything living. Well, we’re now coming up on a year that we’ve had Daisy. We got her from an adoption agency called Second Hand Hounds, who were wonderful to work with. Additionally, we also recently added a mini human! We’re absolutely smitten with him and plan to keep him. The new grandparents are planning to spoil him rotten, considering that he is the first grand baby on both Amanda’s side and mine.

As far as the working world goes, I am also coming up on a year that I have been working for an Emergency Medical Services agency in the Twin Cities. I am currently an Emergency Medical Technician, and I plan to start paramedic school in January 2020. I’m hoping that I will have enough energy to write some reflections about that, but between the new child, continuing to work, and going to school full time, we’ll see how that goes. Nevertheless, here’s hoping.

Before I got hired to work on the ambulance, I did a whole smattering of things because I was in between trainings. I joined the Minnesota Army National Guard in October 2016 and that kicked off a whole series of changes that I had hoped to write about extensively. The reflections were not as extensive as I would have hoped. In that intermediary time (which lasted somewhere between a year and 15 months, depending on how you counted it), I worked for the Boy Scouts, I did some substitute teaching, I certified some people for Red Cross First Aid/CPR/AED... lots of stuff.

Amanda and me standing in front of her grandmother's rose garden just after
we were married. How young we looked!

But previous to all of that, I started my career at a charter school in Minnesota, located a little north of where I live now. I was teaching the 9th grade Language Arts courses . I treasured that work because I was able to walk with teenage adolescents in such a tumultuous, transitional time in their life when so little felt right. My sense of 9th grade was that they weren't content with what they'd done and they were too anxious to get to what they wanted... as long as it didn't take too much work to get it. My job was to give them the work that would push the bounds of their comfort zone, force them to articulate what they knew and be able to say it with conviction. You know, easy stuff like that...

A large number of posts on this blog serve as something like a record leading up to and during my time as a postulant to the diaconate in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. Yes, there was a time that I was in formation to be ordained. It was an incredibly tumultuous time in my life and some of that frustration made its way onto my blog.

In summation, this blog is a lot of things for me. There are a some periods on the timeline that you will notice that I have published more, and some that I have published less. The content is all over the place. When I started, I really wanted to be ordained and work in the church so the blog was a president sort of thing for sermon writing. Since then, I’ve switched careers and enlisted in the military. There’s a lot of thought and deliberation between those two things and some of it made it onto my blog. So please just take this blog space for what it is now. And thank you, dear readers. You know who you are.