Secretly Sacred: Introduction

Greetings / Hi / Hello / Salutations and other congenial type introduction.

I’d like to welcome you all to the beginning of my third book. I gotta say, I never imagined starting my next book while STILL mired in the same pandemic that plagued¹ the release of my second book but HEY, here we are.

Before we start, I’d like to go over a few things to set the table and expectations about what this book is and is not. 

FIRST THING IT IS *NOT*.

This is not a book about God. Or Jesus. Or the Bible. And it’s not even a covert thing where at the end of this book, Jesus jumps out from behind a decorative tree and is like, “haaaaaaahaaaaaa got you!” Please please please believe me when I tell you that I’m not about that ABC² Christian lifestyle anymore.

When I was a senior in high school, we did a mission trip in Michigan (lol) where one day, we went to a park and I pretended to be a professional athlete that was inviting people to a service our youth group was putting on that night. You probably have so many questions about this anecdote which I will be taking right now.

Why Michigan for a mission trip?

Because Big 10 country needs Jesus too?

Did you even remotely look like a professional athlete in high school?

Haha, great question but not loving the tone behind it to be honest. I think MAYBE if we are considering competitive eating a professional sport?

Is it ethical to lure people somewhere using the cult of celebrity?

I mean this is the evangelical megachurch’s business model so debate-able?

Is it ethical to lure people to a religious service on false pretenses?

If you are asking me what would JC do, I would say he probably wouldn’t be thrilled about this.

But seriously though, why Michigan?

I think it was 51% we had a contact in Michigan that would let us work at a church and serve the community and 49% a belief that Northerners tend towards godlessness.

I say all this to confirm that I am post-evangelical-switcheroos and have no interest in trying to assuage you into sharing my core beliefs. I actually have a lot of disdain for people and systems that want to convince us that faith is a binary proposition.

To me, the complexity of life, backgrounds, experiences, and contexts for each and every person is so completely different so the compulsion to force all of those things into one narrow tunnel of thought for the sake of simplicity is absurd.

SECOND THING THIS BOOK IS NOT

If you are looking for biblical wisdom or scriptural parallels to be drawn out or celebrated, this is not the book for you. I don’t mean that to sound rude or abrupt or like I’m just too cool for holy scriptures or whatever, but it’s just not the priority going on in this book. This is in part because such a thing isn’t really my skillset but also because one of the actual priorities of this book is to pierce the veil separating the secular and sacred worlds to show how silly it is that we often segregate the two. 

Not to spoil future chapters too much, but it is my wholehearted belief that the divine is evident and present in everything from the Dallas Cowboys, to Buc-ees, to getting sprayed in the face with a hose at a Youth Camp during bible verse drills and it is my conviction to explicate these sacred convergences versus discussing something in the New Testament that smarter people than I are more qualified to discuss.