There comes a moment when life stops feeling like a joke. When the weight of responsibility crystallizes into something undeniable. For me, that moment arrived watching my sons approach the edge of adulthood, realizing the world they’re inheriting is exponentially more complex than the one I stumbled through.
The Gaps in My Armor
What worldview did my parents give me? What threats did they warn me about? What standard of right and wrong did they instill beyond “because I said so”? These questions haunt me now because the answers are incomplete. I wasn’t taught that life is constant threat assessment: political, theological, economic, sociological. I had to learn that through collision with reality.
Money was never discussed. Theological questions went unanswered. Political literacy was absent. I entered the world functionally illiterate in the languages that govern it. The education I received was through failure, every conceivable kind. Death. Lost relationships. Bad decisions compounding into catastrophic ones. Yet here I stand, and I attribute that entirely to grace I don’t deserve.
My mother, now in her mid-sixties, sometimes tells me she always knew I’d make it. I’m still not entirely sure what she means. Survive? Yes, I survived. But is survival the endgame? Survive what, exactly? The world itself? The evil in it? Figure it out through trial and error, through ignorance meeting consequence?
The Illusion of Causeless Living
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is this: living without cause is not blissful. It’s damaging. The fleeting happiness we chase never satisfies because it was never meant to. We’re designed for purpose, for meaning that transcends the moment. Without it, we drift. We optimize for comfort and call it success. We mistake the absence of pain for the presence of wholeness.
I’ve grown considerably, but I’m acutely aware of how much room remains. This space on Nostr is part of that journey. I’ve never been afraid of hard conversations because I always emerge with more than I brought in. Asking questions is dangerously underrated. We treat curiosity like a weakness when it’s actually the only path to wisdom.
Breaking the Cycle
I don’t want my sons to learn everything through failure the way I did. I want them equipped. I want them to enter the world with frameworks I had to build from rubble. Not sheltered, but prepared. Not naive, but wise to the nature of the battle.
Because that’s what this is: a battle. Not a metaphorical one. An actual war for attention, conviction, purpose, and soul. They will face propaganda masquerading as news. They will encounter philosophies designed to hollow them out. They will be told that meaning is subjective, that truth is relative, that the highest good is whatever feels right in the moment. They need to recognize these lies instantly and possess the intellectual and spiritual tools to resist them.
The Answer I Keep Returning To
The longer I wrestle with how to fix problems beyond my control, the clearer my actual responsibility becomes. I’ve been given a wife, children, and work that supports our life. That’s where this starts. Not with grand solutions to systemic problems, but with faithfulness in what’s directly in front of me.
Every day: know God through His word. Give my wife everything she needs to build our home. Equip my sons with every tool they need for the war they’re entering. This is life, lived out in the ordinary extraordinary of each day.
Reflection matters. Growth matters. The people who challenge me here on Nostr matter. The relationships that endured through my worst seasons matter. They made me stronger, wiser, more grateful for those who stayed.
The Real Work
So what’s the endgame? Not mere survival. Not comfortable ignorance. Not the endless pursuit of fleeting happiness. The endgame is raising men who know why they do what they do. Men who assess threats clearly. Men who understand the standards by which they measure right and wrong, and why those standards hold. Men who recognize that purposeless living is a slow death, and choose something better.
This is the war. It’s fought in conversations at the dinner table. In the books we read together. In the questions I answer honestly instead of dismissing. In modeling what it looks like to fail, learn, and continue forward with humility and conviction.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m still learning. But I know this: the best thing I can give my sons isn’t a world without struggle. It’s the tools to fight well, the wisdom to choose their battles, and the foundation to stand when everything shakes.
That’s the work. That’s the love. That’s life