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.”

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.

Our reassurance

is His willingness

to be caught in the cross hairs,

a red dot

at the intersection

of an atoning fare

and a predetermined time-slot.

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.”

The sin particle,

an element

before the elements

of the Periodic Table.

An irritation

to the core

that makes it unstable

like uranium or plutonium,

an existential explosion

with the biblical force

of 100 Noachian floods

unlike the God particle

of infinite glory

that pre-existed the lies

that traumatize

the innocent child

at the beginning

of every story.