Knotted up

The cast gets all the glory, but the real heart of fly fishing happens in the quiet work of tying knots. A knot is a delicate link between you and what lies beneath the surface, serving as a powerful mirror for faith and daily life.

• ​Hidden Integrity: You can perfect your cast and read the water, but if your knot fails, everything connected to it is lost. In life, our quiet convictions and unseen habits are the knots that hold us steady when sudden stress arrives.
• ​Tension Reveals Truth: A knot isn't complete until it is seated under pressure. Tension doesn't just test a knot—it locks it into place. Similarly, life’s trials don't just test our faith; they seat our deepest convictions into our character.
• ​Patience in the Small: Cinching a tiny fly to a thin tippet with cold fingers cannot be rushed. It demands focus and presence. Meaningful relationships and spiritual growth aren't built in dramatic leaps, but in slow, deliberate moments of care.

​Every knot is a quiet act of hope—a declaration that you are anchored and ready for whatever pulls on the line.

New Water

Standing on the bank of an unfamiliar river brings a quiet tension. The deep pools, hidden undercut banks, and feeding lanes aren't marked, and your usual go-to flies feel like a wild guess.

​In fly fishing, "reading new water" requires dropping assumptions, slowing down, and paying attention to subtle details. Following God into a new season works the exact same way.

​When life shifts—a new career, an unexpected move, or a dry season—our instinct is to rely on old routines. But God rarely works in a copy-and-paste format. He leads us into unfamiliar currents to invite us into deeper dependency.

Read the Water

Reading water is an art form. Before a fly fisherman ever casts a line, they stand at the river’s edge to observe the current. They look for subtle seam lines where fast water meets slow, quiet deep pools, and downstream eddies where fish can rest without burning all their energy. To an untrained eye, the river is just a rush of moving water; to a fisherman, it is a complex map of structure, safety, and food.

​Our faith journey mirrors this exact process.

​Life often feels like a raging river—unpredictable, fast-paced, and overwhelming. Yet, when we learn to "read the water" through a lens of faith, we begin to see where God is moving beneath the surface. We discover rest stops in the middle of life’s turbulence—moments of stillness and prayer where we can recharge our souls. We start identifying seams of grace, those small intersections where divine purpose meets our everyday struggles.

​Standing on the bank requires patience. It asks us to slow down, pay attention, and trust that even in the chaotic currents, there is a path designed for us to thrive. When you feel swept away by the river of life, stop rushing to make a cast. Take a breath, read the water, and trust the One who created the river.

Faith on the "fly"

​There is a reason poets, theologians, and thinkers have long been drawn to moving water. On the surface, fly fishing is a pursuit of trout—a careful, technical dance involving artificial flies, weighted lines, and subtle currents. But anyone who has spent a morning waist-deep in a cold mountain stream knows it rarely stops there.

​Fly fishing, much like a journey of faith, is less about immediate rewards and far more about how we show up to the river.

​1. The Art of Unseen Hope

​In spin fishing, you often cast a heavy lure with an active, visible retrieval. Fly fishing asks for something far more delicate. You present a pattern made of thread and feathers—often microscopic—and place it where you believe a fish might be resting beneath the foam.

​You cannot see the trout. You cannot force them to rise. You simply cast with intention, drift with grace, and wait.

​Faith operates in this exact space. It is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." It requires us to lay down our need for instant, tangible proof and instead trust the quiet, unseen life moving beneath the surface of our circumstances.

​2. Mending the Line

​In fly fishing, one of the first critical skills you learn is "mending"—lifting and repositioning your line on top of the water without disturbing the fly. If you don't mend, the varying speeds of the river's currents create drag, pulling your fly unnaturally across the water. The trout will ignore it every time.

​Our lives are filled with competing currents: busyness, noise, anxiety, and distraction. Without intentional effort, these forces pull us out of alignment.

​Mending is the spiritual discipline of repositioning. It is taking a breath, returning to prayer or silence, and adjusting our drift so we can live genuinely in the present moment rather than being swept away by the surface noise of the world.

​3. Grace Over Control

​You can buy the finest graphite rod, tie the most accurate fly, and read every chart on aquatic insects—and still go home skunked. The river does not yield to hubris. It demands humility, patience, and submission to forces far greater than yourself.

​When a trout finally rises to take the fly, it never feels like a victory of dominance; it feels like a gift. Fly fishing reminds us that the best things in life—peace, connection, grace, and faith—cannot be manufactured or forced. They are received.

​Returning to the Bank

​We don't go to the river merely to catch fish, just as we don't practice faith merely to get answers. We step into the water to remember who we are, to slow down our breathing, and to participate in a creation that is constantly speaking to those willing to listen.

​Next time you step into the current or tie on a fly, consider the drift. Yield to the water, mend your line, and keep faith in what lies beneath.

The River

Where the cold water flows and boulders reach to the heavens. Where trout dart from rock to midge to riffle to pool. Where the world slows to a stop and my mind is clear. Where my faith is renewed and my soul finds rest. Where the trail ends and the people dont dare go that far. Where my heart finds peace and my spirit is at ease. Where with simple rod and fly in hand, my feet deep in the pool, I am one with the river. Find all these things and you'll find me.

Come and Die?

I grew up singing a bluegrass hymn "come and dine". The song speaks of the incredible pleasure of feasting at Jesus' table all the time, an absolutely beautiful picture of the love of God. To this day I love this song. However, over the last decade I've come to the realization that before we can truly find joy in the table spread before us we have to come to the grave. Specifically our own grave. The grave where we place our idols, our selfish desires, our wants. The grave where even our best intentions are laid to rest. Here's the thing, even when we know intellectually the right answers, if we come to the table before us with anything other than complete reliance on God, we will without fail try to make the dinner about us. We will think the dinner is about us and the empire we've created rather than the Kingdom of the one who invited us. The last decade has been about death for me, literal death of mom and dad, my dreams and desires, death to selfishness, death to empire building, death to my inflated ego and sense of self, death to the pulpit and platform, I could go on and on. What I've discovered through this season of death is simple, the food at the table is so much sweeter, more savory, and most importantly, more filling now that the old me has died. Come and dine? Absolutely! Come and die? Definetly. Come to the table empty and leave full.

Hi

It has been 13 years since my last post. Wow! A lot has changed in my world, not sure how to encapsulate 13 years into one post, maybe I shouldn't do that. Quick update, there are 5 of us now, Levi was born a year after my last post, Gabriel is off to college playing soccer, Mia is a senior and passionately following her music career. Katie is doing well, and I am figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. We are back in California! God allowed for us to make the move this year, and by his grace we made it! I want to write an anthem of what life has looked like for the last 13 years, but for now I'll just say hi, I'm back, and maybe I'll start writing a little more. who knows!