Growing up in a small rural Ohio town does something strange to your imagination.

For some people, it becomes home in the deepest and most beautiful sense.
For others, it becomes something to escape.
And for a long time, I was trying to escape.

Not because I hated my hometown.

I didn’t.

I hated the smallness of what I thought life was allowed to be.
The invisible ceilings.
The limiting beliefs.
The way people quietly surrendered their wonder before they were even old enough to realize they had it.

I watched people inherit entire lives before they had ever truly asked themselves if those lives were chosen.

Graduate high school.
Community college maybe.
Factory job.
Relive your glory days through your kid’s baseball games.
Two and a half children.
House payment.
Same roads.
Same conversations.
Same fears.
Same unspoken ache.

And honestly?

Part of my touring years… all the road days, venues, late nights, sleeping on floors, chasing music across state lines… was me searching for something bigger.
Not just success.

Transcendence.

I thought God worked somewhere beyond the horizon of this tiny Midwest town.
In bigger cities.
Bigger experiences.
Bigger revelations.
Somewhere out there on the open road beneath stage lights and interstate skies.

But life has a funny way of bringing you full circle.

Because after all the theology and deconstruction and mysticism and wandering… I’m beginning to realize the sacred was never absent from this place.

I just didn’t yet have eyes to see it.

I went to the local grocery store tonight in the town I work in.
Which also happens to be the town I graduated high school in.

Clyde, Ohio.

Not exactly the first place most people go looking for spiritual enlightenment.
Usually when people talk about awakening, they talk about mountaintops and monasteries and ayahuasca retreats and silent meditation under moonlit skies.
Meanwhile God keeps showing up next to the coleslaw.

I had to stop at the bakery counter, which in small town grocery stores is apparently legally required to also be the deli counter, because the Midwest fears efficiency and boundaries.

There was a man standing there ordering some things from the deli for his family and I thought:

“…wait a second.”

He looked familiar.
Not just familiar familiar.
Church familiar.

The kind of familiar where you instantly remember folding chairs, youth groups, worship songs in drop D, emotionally devastating altar calls under purple stage lighting, and fog machines absolutely fighting for salvation.

If you’ve deconstructed out of evangelicalism, unexpectedly running into someone from church in public can trigger a very specific kind of panic.

There’s always that split second of:
“Oh no… is this about to become an ‘I’ve been praying for you’ conversation?”
Sometimes people genuinely mean well.
Sometimes they just want to reassure themselves you’re wrong so they can keep their own certainty intact.
And sometimes there’s real trauma attached to seeing someone you once participated in a Hell House with.

So when I recognized him at the deli counter, I honestly had no idea where the interaction was about to go.

Turns out it was exactly who I thought it was.

He turned around, smiled huge, shook my hand, and immediately said:

“This is so… weird. I’ve been thinking about you. I’ve seen all of your posts. I read them and they’ve caused me to reflect deeply. I’ve wanted to reach out but didn’t want to be weird… I think I might be in a similar place.”

And honestly?

I don’t think he understands how much that meant to me.

Because if I’m being real, writing can feel a lot like shouting into the wind.
You pour your soul onto the page.
You wrestle language into coherence.
You excavate ancient texts and etymologies and philosophy and memory and grief and hope.
You spend hours trying to articulate something you can barely even explain to yourself sometimes.

Then you hit “publish.”

And… silence.

Maybe a couple likes.
Maybe someone angry reacts without reading the article.
Maybe an old church friend subtweets you for becoming a mystical communist hippie heretic or whatever.

The algorithm moves on.
The machine keeps scrolling.
Life keeps happening.

So to unexpectedly meet a reader in the wild…
someone I had no idea was even reading my work…
someone quietly reflecting and pondering and wrestling alongside me…

That mattered more than I can explain.

Not because I need applause.

But because I think a lot of us can feel something shifting beneath the surface of the modern spiritual landscape and we don’t yet have language for it.
Or maybe we do have language for it, but it’s buried beneath centuries of noise, fear, certainty, empire, marketing, nationalism, and weird Christian coffee mug culture.

A lot of us were handed a faith built almost entirely around escape.

Escape this world.
Escape your body.
Escape doubt.
Escape culture.
Escape “secular” influence.
Escape suffering.
Escape Earth itself.

I grew up being told to guard my mind from anything that wasn’t Christian media.

Christian music.
Christian movies.
Christian books.
Christian shirts.
Christian breath mints. (No, really, they were called Testa-mints. Google it.)

Like the whole goal was to become spiritually shrink-wrapped.

And underneath all of it was this constant obsession with evacuation.

This world is not your home.
We’re just passing through.
One day we’ll fly away somewhere else.

Everything urgent.
Everything temporary.
Everything disposable.

Which sounded pretty spiritual… until you realize it quietly alienates you from the very world the Divine is moving through.

The trees.
The rivers.
The neighbor.
The body.
The breath.
The ordinary Tuesday evening.

“In Him we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28

Not later.
Not elsewhere.
Not after death.

Now.

Here.

This.

The ancient Hebrews understood something we’ve forgotten:

The “holy” was never trapped inside temples.
The burning bush was holy ground.
The wrestling match was holy ground.
The shared meal was holy ground.
The stranger was holy ground.

Jesus keeps talking about bread and seeds and birds and vineyards and lilies because enlightenment is not escape from reality.
It is intimacy with reality.
It is waking up inside of it.

The Buddhists talk about chopping wood and carrying water.
The mystics talk about union.
Jesus talks about “the kingdom of heaven within you.”
Ram Dass says, “We’re all just walking each other home.”
I love that one.

Different voices.
Different symbols.
Different languages.

But all circling the same invitation:

Wake up.
Love deeper.
Become fully human.

And I think that’s why this random interaction at a deli counter hit me so deeply.

Because for a moment there was no performance.
No tribalism.
No theological scorekeeping.
No pretending.

Just two people recognizing each other.
Like travelers seeing another lantern flickering in the dark.

I’ve spent years diving into scripture, original languages, mysticism, philosophy, consciousness, symbolism, and ancient wisdom traditions not because I want to win arguments or sound intelligent.

Honestly, some of the least Christlike people I’ve ever met can quote Greek perfectly.

No, I keep digging because I believe there is a truth beneath all the rubble of what I’ve deconstructed.

Beneath the empire and the marketing and the tribalism and the ways we’ve twisted things to control people or comfort ourselves.

Not a new truth.
An ancient one.
The wisdom at the Source.

The kind of truth that was already whispering through creation long before we built denominations and platforms and branded it into submission.

I’m not searching for something new.

I’m searching for the language, the clarity, and the courage to uncover what I already know deep down is there.

And whatever is true should be sturdy enough to survive ordinary life.
A truth sturdy enough to breathe outside church walls.
A truth that recognizes itself in another human being.

And I’ve become deeply convinced of something:

Enlightenment is not escaping humanity.
Enlightenment is finally becoming human again.

Fully present.
Fully awake.
Fully aware that the divine has been saturating ordinary life this entire time while we were waiting for permission to call it sacred.

The cashier matters.
The tired dad matters.
The lonely teenager matters.
The person silently deconstructing their faith while buying provolone matters.
You matter.

There is no such thing as “just another day.”

The sacred keeps disguising itself as ordinary life while everyone waits for a miracle.

The miracle, sometimes, is simply discovering that you were never as alone as you thought you were.

And if Ram Dass was right… if we really are all just walking each other home… then home was never somewhere else waiting for me beyond the horizon.

It was here all along.

Waiting for me beside the deli counter in Clyde, Ohio.