YOU ARE — The Origin
How This Started
JANUARY 2024
My dad had Alzheimer's. I'd been taking care of him — watching a Marine, one of the strongest men I've ever known, get stripped of almost everything. Almost. That Marine attitude never left. The Corps built him. My mom completed him. When she was gone, something in him started going with her. I watched a man who had built something from nothing get taken apart piece by piece. The frustration. The anger. And then the slow softening into something I hadn't seen from him before.
Taking care of him gave me something I didn't expect. Conversations I didn't know we'd ever have. I got to tell him things he needed to hear. I learned how to really let him go — before he was actually gone.
On January 20, I got the call. I was on the turnpike, thirty minutes away. Wide open — no other cars, which is unusual for that road. Three lanes going east and west, and nobody on them. I was heading west. Then from behind me, a hearse appeared. It pulled up alongside me on the left and passed me. No curtains on the windows. A casket visible in the back. I'd never seen that — not like that, not right next to me on an empty highway. And I just knew. Today's the day. Like being prepared for what I was about to walk into. I pulled up to his house already knowing.
"The Corps built him. My mom completed him. When she was gone, he had nothing left to stand on."
JULy 2024
Six months after losing my dad, my wife and I drove to Hot Springs, Arkansas for our anniversary. The whole trip I was wrestling with a decision — a company had offered me an art director position and I didn't know whether to take it. We talked it through. I made up my mind. We're doing it.
But driving back, that feeling crept in. Am I making the right choice? I pulled off at a gas station. I was wearing a shirt that said "Ask God."
A man came up to me. Said he liked my shirt. Asked what I'd been praying about. I told him about the job. He looked at me and said: You just keep praying. God will answer.
Honestly, under my breath I thought — that doesn't really help me right now. But I kept praying anyway. The man's name was Scott. Same as mine. Around ninety years old. My wife looked at me afterward and said it was almost like I was looking at myself. I filed it away and kept moving.
october 2024
Three months later. OU–Texas weekend. I was wearing the same shirt. Friends asked about it and I started telling the story — the gas station, the old man named Scott, keep praying, God will answer.
And as I was telling it, I realized: He already had. The Friday before that conversation, the door had opened. The job offer was real. God answered the prayer before I even finished telling the story of asking.
I accepted the position. October 2024. Almost exactly a year after my dad passed.
That same October, his house closed. We got the check in his birthday month. It felt like my parents reaching through — my dad and my mom saying Scott, we got you. We love you, son. A chapter ending and something being handed off all at once. A reverse birthday gift. That's the only way I know how to say it.
I kept the shirt.
the job
I started January 1, 2025. What looked like creative work turned into pixel pushing — endless revisions, someone else's control, and not much to show for it. I'd been in this trap before. I thought I'd learned that lesson. I hadn't.
When I was asked in September when my last day would be, I didn't look at the calendar. I just said the Wednesday before this weekend — my wife and I were heading to the OU–Texas game again. That landed on October 8, 2025. A Thursday. My last day. Exactly one year to the month from when God answered that prayer and the door opened.
October 8. The date that had been significant between me and my dad for years. I didn't plan it. It just kept landing there.
the men
I wasn't watching other men struggle from a distance. I was one of them. Performing for everyone around me. Living for the role, the reputation, the image. Never stopping long enough to ask who I actually was underneath all of it.
And once I started being honest about that, I started hearing the same story from every direction. Most of it traced back to the same root. Fathers. Identity that was never built right — or got broken somewhere and never got put back together. Men existing. Not living. Not standing. Just making it through.
the faith place
I was a casual Christian for a long time. Church on Sunday, not giving what I should. Hadn't been through enough life yet to know what I was missing. Then my son was born, and I understood unconditional love for the first time — not as a concept, but as something that cracked me open. That was the beginning of something real.
Later, my wife and I were asked to speak at a conference. Way outside both our comfort zones. We got up and told our actual story. No performance. People came up afterward and said that's us. Two men pulled me aside and said something was supposed to come from this.
the SEED
I have a friend named Jeff Stanley. We've known each other forty years, since he was a youth minister. Ride or die. Our lives have stayed woven together across decades.
Jeff didn't hand me YOU ARE. But God used what Jeff built to show me where I was supposed to go. He built something called R U — a question for anyone searching for answers. Are you lonely? Are you anxious? Are you lost? And then the answer: You are loved. You are known. You are not alone.
I was part of it from the beginning. But God used it to get me somewhere else. R U asked the question — are you? YOU ARE answers it. The question becomes the statement. That's not a program. That's an identity. And until a man stands in that — until he stops asking and starts knowing — nothing else in his life will hold.
I knew it then. And I sat on it anyway. Wasn't ready to walk away from design. There were still things I had to walk through — with both my parents — before I could see clearly what this was supposed to be. That delay wasn't wisdom. It was disobedience. I know that now.
"R U asked the question. YOU ARE answers it. The question becomes the statement. That's not a program. That's an identity."
JANUARY 2026
December 2025 was fine. More work came in than normal. I assumed the runway would hold. Then January 1 arrived and everything stopped. No freelance. No fallback. Nothing.
Same lesson God had been teaching me my whole adult life. Let go of what you're holding onto. I'll provide. Walk.
So I walked.
That's when I knew this wasn't just my story.
This is your story.
This wasn't built from strength. It was built from being emptied.
Rooted in Christ. Shaped by loss. Built for men who are done pretending and ready to stand.