About · From Jake
A letter to the man
who found this page
Brother,
If you came here looking for an author bio, I’ll disappoint you. I’m not going to list credentials. I don’t have the kind that matter for this work anyway.
Here’s what I’ve got instead.
I served in the US Navy. I came home. And coming home was harder than going. Nobody warns you about that part.
I spent years being strong in all the ways that don’t count. Strong at work. Strong in the gym. Hollow everywhere else.
I was in the pit. I mean that plainly.
I was angry at everyone and at nothing. I drank to get through the day and drank again to get to sleep. I was not a good husband, and I was not a good father, and I told myself that was normal.
There was a night I decided to end it, and I’m alive today only because God stepped in when I had already given up. I wrote that whole story down in a book called From the Darkness. If you need to know that a man can go all the way to the bottom and come back, it’s in there.
“On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen.” Isaiah 62:6
What pulled me out wasn’t willpower. It was Christ. And it started with one honest prayer I barely got through.
There are three things I’m prouder of than anything I’ve ever done.
The first
the relationship I have with Christ now
Not the version I faked for years. The real one. It cost me everything I was pretending to be, and it handed me back a life worth living.
The second
my wife
She stood in the darkness with me when walking away would have been easier and nobody would have blamed her. She was my rock when there was nothing solid left in me. I don’t get to write a word of any of this without her, and I know it.
The third
my daughters
They love Christ, they’re smart, they’re kind, and they’re growing into women stronger than I was in the ways that actually count. Watching it happen is the clearest proof I have that God redeems what a man breaks.
So that’s what I write about, and who I write for: the man who’s sure he’s too far gone. I’m training for ministry through the Timothy Pastoral Program, under my elders, because I never want to hand a man something I haven’t been taught to carry rightly.
No man is too far gone. Not you. Not now.
Stand your watch. I’ll stand mine.
No man is too far gone.
Not you. Not now.
What I believe
Jesus Christ is Lord. Crucified, risen, coming back.
The Bible is true, and it’s for men like us, not just for pastors and scholars.
Prayer is not a last resort. It’s the first move.
No man is too far gone. Not you. Not anyone.
A recurring series