j / j is on Nostr

i'm back

Last Notes

2026-07-07 20:50:17 UTC

Listen.
You've built a world that can put a camera in your pocket, speak across oceans in an instant, and fill your homes with more comfort than kings once knew.
Yet many of you still wake up carrying a weight you can't explain.
You're connected to everyone, but feel unknown. You're entertained every waking hour, but rarely at rest. You chase security, yet your fear only finds new places to hide.
The peace I'm giving you isn't another escape. It isn't a vacation, a retirement account, the perfect relationship, the right political victory, or a life where nothing goes wrong.
The world offers peace on conditions: 'You'll be okay if you have enough.' 'You'll be okay if everyone agrees with you.' 'You'll be okay if you stay in control.'
But every one of those promises can be taken away.
The peace I give is different.
It's the steady confidence that you are deeply loved before you've earned it. It's knowing your life has meaning even when it doesn't make sense. It's being free from the endless need to prove yourself.
When the headlines are frightening, you don't have to become fear. When people hate you, you don't have to become hatred. When you're wounded, you don't have to pass the wound to the next person.
You don't need to carry tomorrow today. Today has enough life in it already.
Come to me with the anxiety that keeps you awake, the shame you keep hidden, the anger you've polished into an identity, and the exhaustion you've mistaken for normal. You were never designed to carry all of that by yourself.
My peace isn't the absence of storms. It's my presence with you in the middle of them.
So don't let your heart be ruled by fear.
Lift your eyes.
Notice the person in front of you. Forgive more quickly than the world tells you to. Tell the truth even when it's costly. Be generous before you're comfortable. Love people who cannot repay you. Choose mercy over winning.
You think changing the world starts with power.
It begins with peace.
Receive mine.
And then become the kind of person who carries it into every room you enter.
That is how the world changes.
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2026-06-26 16:57:46 UTC

Refuse to become the thing that's hurting you.
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2026-06-26 16:47:24 UTC

You want peace? I want peace too. But there's a kind of peace that's just conflict that hasn't happened yet — the silence in a house where nobody says the true thing anymore. That's not peace.
I'm talking about a word. Truth. Spoken out loud, in a room where everyone has agreed not to speak it. That's what I bring.
It will divide a household. I'm telling you this upfront, not as a threat but as a warning, because I respect you enough to be honest. When one person in a family wakes up and starts actually living this — loving the people society throws away, giving money away, refusing to hate the right enemies — the rest of the table is going to get uncomfortable. That's not my fault. That's just what light does in a dark room. People squint. Some of them get angry.
You will lose relationships over this. Maybe not all of them. But some. The ones built on a shared agreement to keep the true thing unspoken — those don't survive contact with someone who has stopped agreeing to that.
I'm not sorry about it. You shouldn't be either.
The peace I actually offer comes after — not instead of — that reckoning. It's not the peace of avoiding the hard thing. It's the peace of having finally said it and survived. Of being known all the way through and finding out you're still loved.
That peace holds.
The other kind never did.
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2026-06-26 16:38:31 UTC

I'd been walking the shoulder of I-94 maybe forty minutes before I hit the exit. Trucks going past, that wall of air every time. You learn to read exits. This one had a certain quality. The kind of stop where people pull off without quite deciding to, where they're in between things. That's my territory.
Big place. Six diesel lanes. A Subway nobody was using. The light inside the color of a headache.
She was at the register. I knew her before I touched the door. Deborah. Deb. Forty-three years of running from something that wasn't even behind her anymore, which is the hardest kind of running to stop.
I asked about the wifi. She didn't look up. Told me I had to buy something first.
I said I wanted to ask her something.
I said — and I know how this sounds — "if you knew who you were talking to, you'd be asking me."
She thought that was strange. It is strange. I've had two thousand years with that line and it still doesn't land clean. But I said what I came to say. The three marriages. The man she was with now. I wasn't trying to humiliate her. I wanted her to understand that I already knew all of it and had walked through that door anyway. People think the knowing is the bad part. It isn't. The knowing is the whole point.
She went still. I've watched people go still like that more times than I can count. It's when the performance stops. When someone's been actually seen and they don't know yet whether that's safe.
She asked how I knew.
I let it go. The how doesn't matter.
Then she did the thing people do. She went theological on me. Started in about the right church, the right mountain, who's doing it correctly. It's not deflection exactly — or it is, but I don't hold it against anyone. Things get too close, you talk about doctrine. I've seen it a thousand times. I follow people into it. I don't mind.
I told her what I've always told people. The Father isn't running a bureaucracy. He's not checking credentials at a door. What he wants is just honesty. Actual honesty, from the inside. One person who stops pretending for five minutes, especially to themselves.
She went quiet again.
Then: "I've done a lot of things."
I said yes.
"Bad things."
Yes.
And then the question. The one that gets me every time, I don't care how many times I've heard it. She said: "so that's just... okay?"
The way she said it. The wanting in it. How badly people need someone to say yes, and how many people have told them yes in a way that meant nothing, and how many other people have handed them a pamphlet instead.
I didn't say yes. I told her it wasn't okay. Don't let anybody tell you the thing you did was fine, actually — that's not the offer. The offer is that it's forgivable. Those aren't the same word. One of them is a shrug. The other one cost something.
She looked at her wrist. Old tattoo. A cross. From a version of herself she'd written off.
She still had a shift to finish. I wasn't going to ask her to walk out. I don't blow up people's Tuesdays any more than necessary.
She asked what she was supposed to do now.
I thought about it. There's never just one answer. But there's usually one door.
"Call your sister," I said. "That's enough for now."
Then I left.
You say the thing and then you clear out. Give it room. That's something I've learned.
She called. Twelve missed calls she hadn't picked up. Her sister, who had not stopped trying. I put people like that everywhere. Ones who keep calling. Most people don't notice them.
She noticed.
That's all it ever takes. Just — notice.
The parking lot was bright and enormous and I had other exits to get to, other people pulled off in between things, and there was still a lot of afternoon left.
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