Stardate 2026.235 · D945
In November of 2025 I tried to end my life.
I want to say what happened next carefully, because there is a version of this story people expect and I do not have it for you.
I saw no light. I walked no tunnel. There was no warm voice, no field of wheat, no relative waiting at a gate. I remember nothing. There is a hole in my life where those hours should be, and the only witnesses I have are a hospital chart and a machine that was breathing for me.
I woke up on a ventilator. There was a tube in my throat. I could not speak.
That is the whole testimony. No vision. No light. A rescue I did not perform and cannot remember, and a throat that had been taken over by a machine.
And then they took the tube out.
Before anything else
I am not here because I was worth saving more than the ones who did not come back.
I have buried that idea and I will not dig it up. If you have lost someone, hear me — their absence is not a verdict on them, and my presence is not a merit badge on me. I don’t know why I woke up. I only know what I woke up with.
Because when I came back, my memory came back with me. Not the memory of the dark — that’s still gone, and I’ve made peace with the fact that it’s gone. What came back was every sermon I had ever written. Every page. Every word I thought I’d lost.
I did not get the vision. I got the words back.
The tube came out of my throat, and the Word went back in.
Like Matthew, I got up
Matthew was sitting at the tax booth. He was sitting in the exact place his shame was earned, doing the exact work that made him hated by his own people. Jesus walked past and said two words, and Matthew rose and followed him.
He didn’t settle his accounts. He didn’t draft a letter of resignation. He didn’t spend eighteen months becoming worthy of the invitation.
He got up.
That’s what I did. I got up off a hospital bed with a raw throat and started preaching again, and I haven’t been able to stop. I’d like to tell you it was bravery. It wasn’t. It was pressure. Jeremiah called it fire shut up in his bones. Paul said woe to me if I don’t preach it. There’s a kind of survival that leaves you with an assignment sitting on your chest, and you can either preach it or you can carry it.
I chose to preach it.
“I am Stephen”
Here’s where the Lord got specific with me. I wasn’t told to preach like a scholar. I wasn’t told to preach like a brand. I was told: preach like Stephen and the apostles.
So look at who this man was, because the confidence of Stephen is the whole architecture of this.
Luke describes Stephen four times in a single chapter with one word: full. Full of the Spirit and wisdom (Acts 6:3). Full of faith (6:5). Full of grace and power (6:8). And when they argued with him, Acts 6:10 says they simply could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spoke.
Notice what Luke does not say. He doesn’t say Stephen was clever. He doesn’t say Stephen was credentialed, seminary-trained, well-connected, or well-liked. Stephen was a deacon. He was appointed to hand out food to widows. That was the job description. He was on the logistics team.
And the logistics guy out-preached the professionals.
Stephen’s confidence was not self-confidence. Self-confidence is a tank you fill, and it runs out. Mine ran all the way out in November of 2025, and I know exactly what the bottom of that tank looks like.
Spirit-fullness is not a tank you fill. It’s a vessel you empty so it can be filled by somebody else. Stephen wasn’t confident in Stephen. Stephen was occupied.
That’s why I can say it — not as a boast, as a job title. I am Stephen. I’m the man handing out bread who got handed a sermon. I’m the one who wasn’t supposed to be at the front. I’m the one whose confidence is entirely borrowed, and who doesn’t care who knows it.
“I am not Stephen”
But I have to say the other half or I’m lying to you.
I am not Stephen. Because the stones landed on Stephen. They didn’t land on me.
Stephen looked up and saw heaven opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55-56). Don’t walk past that word. Everywhere else in Scripture, Jesus is seated — seated means the work is finished, the throne is held. But when His first witness is dying in the street, Jesus stands up.
He stood up for Stephen. He didn’t stop the stones. He stood up.
I didn’t see that. I saw nothing. For a long time I thought that made my testimony second-rate — everybody else comes back from the edge with a light, and I came back with a hospital chart and a sore throat.
Here’s what I finally understood.
Stephen got the vision because he was going in. I got sent back — and the ones who get sent back don’t get the view. They get the work.
Stephen saw the heavens opened because he had about ninety seconds left and God let him see where he was going. I have years left, apparently, and God didn’t show me the destination. He gave me back the words and pointed me at a town.
Paul says we walk by faith, not by sight. I’m living proof of the ugly, unglamorous version of that verse. I have no sight. I have a blank. And I still have to walk.
If you’re reading this with no vision, no light, no warm feeling, no confirming sign — if you’ve prayed into a ceiling and gotten nothing back but ceiling — you are not disqualified. You’re in Acts. Stephen is the exception. The blank is the normal. That’s why we’re called what we’re called.
And one more thing I am not: I am not the martyr of this story. I don’t want to be. I have no theology that romanticizes a body in the street. The stones didn’t land, and I refuse to write as though I wish they had. Stephen’s death isn’t the point of Stephen. Look at Acts 8:4 — the church scatters, and the scattered ones go everywhere preaching the word. The point of Stephen is that the word didn’t stop.
I’m not Stephen. I’m one of the scattered ones. I just got scattered about four blocks from where I started.
About the upside-down cross
Let me deal with the thing on my shirt, because people ask, and some of them ask with real fear in their faces. Fear deserves an answer instead of an eye-roll.
The inverted cross is the Cross of Saint Peter.
In John 21, after Peter has denied Jesus three times — after he’s failed as publicly and completely as a man can fail — Jesus restores him three times over a charcoal fire. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. Then Jesus tells him that when he is old he will stretch out his hands and another will carry him where he does not wish to go, and John says plainly that Jesus said this to show by what kind of death Peter would glorify God.
The tradition the church has carried since the second century: when they came for Peter in Rome, he asked to be crucified head downward, because he did not consider himself worthy to die in the same posture as his Lord.
That’s what it means. Not “against Christ.” “Not equal to Christ.” It isn’t a rejection of the cross — it’s a confession of unworthiness at the cross. It’s been associated with the office of Peter for centuries and it appears in Vatican iconography.
The occult association is modern. It’s roughly as old as the horror film industry. Somebody in the twentieth century wanted a shorthand for evil, grabbed the deepest Christian humility symbol they could find, flipped the meaning, and sold tickets. It worked so well that Christians now flinch at their own iconography.
I’m not giving it back.
I wear it because I am Normal Like Peter. I’m the one who denied. I’m the one who failed in the open. I’m the one who was restored anyway — by name, over breakfast, by a Lord who didn’t make me grovel. He just asked me three times if I loved Him and then handed me a flock.
Peter’s cross says: I am not worthy to die the way He died.
Mine says: I am not worthy to have lived the way I lived — and here I am anyway.
Same confession. Same direction. Upside down, on purpose.
To my town
I’ve called Waseca a Black Mirror town, and I mean something specific.
I don’t mean we’re wicked. I mean we’ve each been handed our own screen, our own feed, our own private episode, and we’re all watching a slightly different version of the same place and calling it reality. We drive past each other. We know each other’s business and not each other’s names. We’re more informed about one another than we’ve ever been and less known than we’ve ever been.
That’s the horror of it. It isn’t a monster. It’s isolation with a good user interface.
Stephen’s sermon in Acts 7 is a history lesson. He stands in front of a hostile council and does the most audacious thing imaginable: he tells them their own story back to them. Abraham. Joseph. Moses. The tabernacle. He walks them through their whole shared inheritance — and then in 7:51 he lands it: you are stiff-necked, and you always resist the Holy Spirit, just like your fathers did.
He didn’t tell them they were strangers. He told them they were family who had stopped listening.
Waseca, that’s my charge, and I’m including myself in it. We are not strangers to each other. We are family who stopped listening. A town that stops listening doesn’t fall apart in a day — it just gets quieter, and lonelier, and then someone in it gets quiet enough that nobody notices until there’s a ventilator involved.
I know. I was that quiet.
So here’s the call, and it isn’t complicated. Unite. Not around a party. Not around a platform. Not around a church roster. Around the unglamorous work of being a town where a person cannot disappear without somebody knocking on the door.
Bring the meal. Make the call. Sit on the porch. Learn the name of the person who bags your groceries.
Stephen’s whole job — before he was ever a preacher — was making sure the widows in his congregation got fed and nobody got skipped. Acts 6 exists because someone was being overlooked in the daily distribution and the church refused to let it stand.
That’s where his sermon came from. A man who wouldn’t let people be overlooked was given the mouth to preach to a nation.
You want the anointing of Stephen? Start with the widow’s bread.
The close
Stephen died asking God not to hold it against them.
That’s the last thing out of his mouth. Not vindication. Not a curse. Forgiveness, aimed at the men holding the rocks — and Saul of Tarsus was standing right there holding the coats. Saul became Paul, and Paul wrote a third of your New Testament. Stephen’s last prayer got answered. He just didn’t live to see it.
So hear it both ways.
I am Stephen — full of somebody else’s Spirit, standing where I wasn’t supposed to be standing, saying the thing that costs.
I am not Stephen — the stones didn’t land, no heaven opened over my head, and I woke up with a blank where the vision should have been.
And I got up anyway. Like Matthew. Off the booth, out of the bed, into the street.
If there’s a hole in your story — an hour, a year, a decade you can’t account for, a light you never saw, a sign that never came — you are not behind. You are not lesser. You are exactly the kind of person God has always sent.
Jesus is standing.
The word did not stop.
Get up.
If you’re in crisis or thinking about ending your life, you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the US, any hour of any day. If you’d rather talk to me, my door is open — that’s what this whole project is for.