Yes, My Friends, This multi-faceted, multi-challenging, multi-year project is finally complete. With 120 poems, 70 prose, and 10 short stories–that will simultaneously stretch and encourage you–From the Ashes We Rise is a literary force to be read and reckoned with. This book seamlessly weaves Arts and Apologetics all throughout its 556 pages. See why From…

“Burn it?” questions the fat man whose fascination with the “naughty and nice” book has inadvertently eclipsed the genesis of Christmas—the true story of God making a way where there was no way, to save the lost when the lost could never be found.

Call me “Driftwood.”

I’ve been all around the world,

offering my flesh as a sacrifice

to the highest bidder—

a loved-starved sinner—

stretching my skin

and my limbs and my sins

till their breaking point 

to fashion a sunburned sail—

a jib unlike any other headsail—

pulled up high-and-tight

by my lustful entrails.

The reason EMGs are so destructive, no matter how great the accomplishments, is because the person who is unaware of who she really is, sadly, is merely a shell of a person like an oyster that creates a pearl from an irritation inside itself. No matter how many layers of beautiful minerals that give it its shiny iridescence, it’s still a foreign object to itself at the core of itself. Perhaps Socrates was right: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“…or we can explain further

that story gives truth meaning 

like Aesop’s fables 

and Lewis’s Narnian Chronicles 

or better yet

think of Christ’s agrarian parables

that strum the soul

on a spiritual level

with a celestial harp of gold 

and hands of clay that bleed when cracked.”

Friends feed the inherent desire in every single one of us to be seen and heard and remembered. And that makes us feel immovable and immortal as if the universe itself came alive to witness a miracle. And nothing we say or do will ever be forgotten. (This hints at the foreshadowing of a personal relationship with the ultimate Being—immovable and immortal—who is closer to us than a brother and who created us to know Him and to be known by Him.) But what if this convivial concept of friendship escapes us?

Godspeed

if you’ve dropped your keys,

hat or hash pipe

into the “rabbit hole”

of delusive fantasy,

whirling and writhing down

an eternal abyss of insanity,

further and further away

from the drain of objective reality.

Does Scripture—

the Rosetta Stone

of what sinners’ call “fire and brimstone”—

employ fear tactics of emotional control?

Give me Narnia or 

Give me the Wild Lands of the North. 

Give me Aslan or 

Give me the White Witch

and her black dwarfs.

God: “Truth is self-love that sets you free and enables you to see your sin as an opportunity to talk with Me about why you sin so we can have conversations like this one and walk further down life’s path together. This is My heart. This is discipleship.”