‭‭”And herein I give my advice: for this is expedient for you, who have begun before, not only to do, but also to be forward a year ago.” – 2 Corinthians‬ ‭8:10‬

Are you “forward a year ago”? Can you look back on 2023 and say with confidence, not that you have arrived, but that you have made a forward movement?

As I sit here on January 1, 2024, reflecting on the past year, I want to be able to say with certainty that I am not the same man I was on January 1, 2023. I want to tell you that, while I may not be fully transformed into the image of my Savior, I am different, I am “forward,” I am… better.

A year ago today, my family was just beginning to get settled at our new permanent church home after living through the explosion of one church and the implosion of another. The trauma of these experiences brought us to a place where we began deconstructing our faith, another tragedy to be sure as essentially we were overcompensating for the failures of bad doctrine and the destructive effects of outright heresy. I wish I could blame it all on COVID. Of course I can’t, but the pandemic certainly didn’t help.

So where are we now? We’re in a period of rebuilding, of reconstructing. A year ago, we were groping through a pile of ashes that had once been our faith in men. We had been through a series of spiritual wildfires that had left us standing in the rubble of carnal piety, failed church systems, phony standards and abuse of power and influence.

But as we hunkered down and sifted through the thick dust of what turned out to be a lifetime of spiritual and emotional damage, something came up. It felt fresh but it wasn’t new. In fact, it was very old. It had always been there, its resilience unmatched, its perseverance unfathomable. Through the fires and floods of church corruption and fake religiosity, God had kept His promise to preserve His Word!

For myself and my family, 2023 was a year of rediscovery. We began the painful, yet freeing process of tearing away the veil of religious thinking that had obstructed our view of God’s actual words and our understanding of the real truth behind them.

We are still very much in this process, but we are making progress. I have many goals for 2024. One of which is to be more regularly updating our website. Over the next 12 months I hope to share with you some of the lessons that I have learned through these experiences.

In the meantime, let’s keep in touch, let’s encourage one another to keep making that forward movement. Let’s be gracious to one another, but I for one welcome and desire biblical accountability and constructive feedback. Feel free to give me something I can chew on. I may spit out some bones along the way, but my hope is to be able to say once again on January 1, 2025 that I am indeed “forward a year ago”.