Dear Reader,
I do not write because I have life figured out.
The older I get, the less convincing that idea becomes.
I have spent decades working, building businesses, raising a family, managing money, making decisions, solving problems, changing my mind, getting things right, getting things wrong, and trying to understand what all of it adds up to.
Writing is one way I take inventory.
It forces me to slow an idea down, put it into words, examine its assumptions, test it against experience, and ask whether it actually holds.
Sometimes I begin an essay believing I understand the subject reasonably well and discover halfway through that the question is more complicated than I thought.
I consider that progress.
I would rather discover that one of my ideas needs correction than spend the rest of my life defending it simply because I once believed it.
That is part of what this website is for.
I write about faith, responsibility, work, wealth, family, character, freedom, adversity, and legacy because these are not abstract subjects to me.
They eventually become decisions.
They become the way we treat people.
The responsibilities we accept.
The work we do when nobody is watching.
The money we save, spend, invest, give, or waste.
The promises we keep.
The people we remain present for.
The things we build.
And the things we decide are important enough to hand forward.
I have come to believe that some of life's largest questions reveal themselves through very ordinary circumstances.
What do I owe the people who depend upon me?
How much is enough?
What does it mean to be responsible without believing everything rests upon me?
How do I remain self-reliant without confusing self-reliance with self-sufficiency?
What is money actually for?
What deserves my loyalty?
What should I repair?
What should I let go?
What can I control?
What must I accept?
What does Christian faith ask of a person who has spent a lifetime learning how to depend upon himself?
And eventually:
What is strong enough to carry a human life?
I do not expect to settle questions like these in a single essay.
Some deserve years.
What I Owe You as a Writer
If you are going to give me some of your time, I think I owe you something in return.
First, I owe you honesty.
I will try not to pretend certainty where I do not have it.
There is a difference between what I know, what I believe, what experience has taught me, what my Christian faith asks me to accept, and what I am still trying to understand.
Those distinctions matter.
I want to make them rather than blur them.
I also owe you my best effort to examine the strongest objection to what I am saying.
An argument does not become stronger because inconvenient questions have been ignored.
If an intelligent skeptic can expose a weakness in something I have written, I would rather confront that weakness myself before asking you to accept the conclusion.
That applies especially to my writing about faith.
I am a Christian, but I do not want to use Christianity as a shortcut around difficult questions.
“Trust God” can be true and still be an inadequate answer if we have not taken the time to ask what trust actually means.
“Everything happens for a reason” may comfort someone, but comfort is not the same thing as an argument.
Grace, Providence, dependence, surrender, forgiveness, salvation—these are serious words.
They deserve more than repetition.
I want to understand what they mean in the life of an ordinary person who still has bills to pay, decisions to make, people to protect, problems to solve, and responsibilities that cannot simply be handed over to someone else.
I owe you the same seriousness when I write about money.
Money matters.
It can protect a family, expand freedom, create options, support generosity, strengthen work, and provide security.
Pretending otherwise does not make us morally superior.
But money also has limits.
It can become a tool or an identity.
A source of capacity or a substitute for meaning.
The interesting work lies in understanding where it belongs.
The same is true of self-reliance, success, independence, ambition, and almost every other good thing.
One of the questions I return to repeatedly is:
When does something valuable begin doing work it was never meant to do?
That question has become increasingly important to me.
I Am Not Asking You to Agree With Me
Agreement is not the standard I use to judge whether an essay has succeeded.
I hope you find some things here that you agree with.
I also hope you occasionally stop and think:
I don't know if he's right about that.
Then think about it.
Challenge the argument.
Bring your own experience to it.
See what survives.
I have little interest in building an audience that simply nods.
I would rather write for people willing to think seriously, including people who reach different conclusions from mine.
That also means I will try not to treat disagreement as evidence of bad character.
Our culture already has enough of that.
A person can be wrong without being stupid.
He can disagree without being malicious.
He can hold a strong conviction without hating the person across from him.
Intellectual seriousness requires something more difficult than certainty.
It requires enough confidence to make an argument and enough humility to admit that an argument can be wrong.
I want that tension in my work.
What I Hope You Find Here
I do not want to produce content merely because the internet rewards constant production.
There is already more information than any of us can absorb.
I want to produce something more useful.
I want to pursue wisdom that helps somebody live.
That does not mean every essay needs to end with a list of instructions.
Sometimes an essay helps because it gives a reader language for something he has felt but never clearly expressed.
Sometimes it makes an important distinction.
Sometimes it exposes a contradiction.
Sometimes it reminds us of something we already knew but had stopped living as though we knew it.
Sometimes it offers a practical answer.
Sometimes the most useful thing an essay can do is replace a bad question with a better one.
If something I write helps you see an important part of your life more clearly, make a better decision, carry a responsibility more faithfully, repair something worth saving, reconsider an assumption, strengthen your faith, understand money more wisely, or think more seriously about what you will hand forward, then the essay has done worthwhile work.
That is enough for me.
Why I Keep Writing
Part of this work is personal.
I have children and grandchildren.
Like most parents and grandparents, I think increasingly about what remains after we are gone.
Money can be inherited.
Property can be inherited.
Businesses can sometimes be inherited.
But so can ways of thinking.
Standards.
Stories.
Lessons.
Questions.
Mistakes we have already paid to learn from.
Convictions that took decades to form.
I do not want everything I have learned to disappear simply because I am no longer here to explain it.
That does not mean I believe my conclusions deserve to be preserved merely because they are mine.
Quite the opposite.
I want to examine them while I still can.
Strengthen the ones that deserve strengthening.
Correct the ones that need correction.
Discard what does not hold.
And leave behind whatever remains useful.
That is one of the ways I think about legacy.
Not as being remembered.
As transmission.
Passing forward something that might help another person build more wisely.
One Final Promise
I am still building.
That phrase appears throughout this website because I mean it.
The essays are not dispatches from someone who has reached the top of the mountain and is shouting instructions down to everyone else.
I am still inside many of the questions I write about.
Especially faith.
Especially the relationship between responsibility and dependence.
Especially the boundary between being capable and believing I must be sufficient for everything.
I expect some of my thinking to change as I continue.
When it does, I will try to be honest about that too.
What I can promise is the effort:
to respect your intelligence;
to take important questions seriously;
to resist easy answers when the subject deserves more;
to examine my own assumptions along with everyone else's;
to distinguish conviction from certainty;
to make complexity clearer without pretending it is simple;
and to keep asking whether the ideas on these pages are useful in an actual human life.
I do not expect you to agree with everything I write.
I hope you will think with me.
If something here stays with you after you close the page—if it gives you a better question, a clearer distinction, a stronger reason for something you already believed, or an idea that helps you carry part of your own life a little more wisely—then I am grateful you spent the time with me.
That is why I keep writing.
Read thoughtfully. Question freely. Keep what proves useful.— Joseph C. Kunz, Jr.