Shame & Certainty

We all start with a system. A way to understand the world—life, death, right and wrong, what happens next. Some of it we choose. A lot of it is handed to us. And for a while… it works. Until it doesn’t. In this episode, I use the game Kerplunk as a metaphor for belief—how it’s built, how it holds together, and what happens when life starts pulling the sticks out. At first, it’s small. A question....

We all have tapes. Moments that replay on demand—failures, regrets, the things we wish we could undo. Over time, those memories stop feeling like the past… and start sounding like the truth. “You failed.” “You missed it.” “That’s who you are.” And somewhere along the way, we start to believe God hears the same tape we do—watching, rewinding, keeping score. But what if that’s not who God is at all?...

Last week I released a short film on Philippians 3 about trophies, identity, and how we build our lives around achievement. But there was more there. So this is a deeper dive. In this episode, we “turn the jewel” on Philippians 3—looking at it through multiple lenses: theological, historical, existential, psychological, and deeply personal. Paul lays out a perfect résumé… and then calls it garbage...

Somewhere in the attic there are boxes of trophies. Plaques. Certificates. Little monuments to moments when you were winning. As kids, the trophies sit on shelves in our bedrooms. As adults, the trophies change shape. Titles. Promotions. Resumes. LinkedIn profiles. Two thousand years ago, the apostle Paul listed his own credentials—his pedigree, his achievements, his religious résumé—and then said...

Some things we hide in plain sight. A bottle pushed behind other bottles in the cabinet. A prescription tucked into the back of a drawer. Food wrappers buried at the bottom of the trash. Most of us have something we don’t want anyone to see. Not because we’re evil. But because we’re afraid of what it might mean if someone really knew. There’s an old saying: you’re only as dark as your secret. In t...

We live in a microwave culture. Everything is instant. Food. Shipping. Entertainment. Answers. So it’s no surprise we often expect spirituality to work the same way. We want quick breakthroughs. Instant transformation. A prayer that fixes everything overnight. But the story of Jacob suggests something very different. Jacob wrestles with God through the night—and walks away with a limp. In this epi...

What happens after faith stops working? In this episode of Shame & Certainty , I reflect on the moment after disillusionment—the season when certainty has cracked and walking away feels tempting. We explore why experience was often treated as untrustworthy, how faith became confused with intellectual certainty, and what the Gospels suggest instead. Through stories of disappointment, attention,...

In this episode of Shame & Certainty , we begin a new series exploring what I call the Great Thinning —the quiet hollowing out of modern life. Drawing from early experiences in ecommerce and the rise of the modern internet, this episode traces how technology shifted from serving human needs to optimizing for profit, efficiency, and extraction. We explore the idea of enshittification , surveill...

In this episode of Shame & Certainty , I return to a moment from college that quietly changed everything — the first splinter that made it impossible to hold my faith the same way again. We talk about how post-Enlightenment Protestant Christianity came to define faith primarily as mental agreement: believing the right doctrines, affirming the right propositions, passing what sometimes feels li...

This episode is a pause in the middle of a loud week. It begins with the feeling many of us share lately — that every news cycle contains a decade’s worth of events, outrage, and contradiction. Instead of chasing the latest headline, this episode walks back through a handful of political and cultural moments from the past few years to notice the through-lines: how power speaks, how fear is framed,...

In this first episode of Shame & Certainty , we sit with two voices most of us know too well: the inner critic and the deeper longing beneath it. It starts in a quiet basement on a Sunday morning, with the familiar soundtrack of impostor syndrome playing in the background — You don’t belong here. You don’t have anything to say. You’re too late. You’re a fraud. These thoughts are so constant th...