This entry doesn’t come from the past, but from today. It isn’t a journal entry from 20 years ago, but a ‘thank you’ letter from today. This is the final entry for this blog.
My goal in copying my thoughts and feelings from my younger self into a blog was mainly for preservation, but I also found the culture of my youth to be very different from my observations of current youth culture. I thought the contrast might be nice for others to read and experience.
If you did take the time to read any or all of these posts from the past eight years, then I thank you deeply for the attention. It’s crazy to think about what a difference two decades can make.
These memories were written down before the events of September 11, 2001, before the release of the first iPod, before digital cinema, before social media, before everyone walked around with their heads bowed down to a screen, before COVID-19. It was a very different America.
Nevertheless, we all still want the same things. We want to see and be seen. We want to know and be known. We want to love and be loved.
Time will never change these truths.
I hope through some miracle reading these entries allowed you to feel seen, known, and loved.
To catch you up, my wife and I just celebrated 20 years of marriage, we have two adorable kids, and I did have the opportunity to make a few more movies and direct a few more plays in the past two decades. Similar to this blog, my audiences remained small, but I was able to continually practice and delight in the crafts I studied in my youth.
As of this writing, I’ve traveled to 48 states and 25 countries. God’s creation, both the people and the places, never cease to amaze me.
Speaking of God, throughout the past 20 years, I have yet to find any fault with Jesus, so I have continued to follow him to this day.
There is nothing I could write that is more important than the above line, so as I say goodbye to any and all readers, I simply want to say that journaling in my youth, my years of formation, truly helped me know and understand myself. At the time, I didn’t write my thoughts and feelings down for anyone else to consume other than myself, so if you feel you don’t yet know who you are, then I encourage you to give it shot.
We are not want we do, we are not what we own, we are not what others say about us. We are merely two things. We are beautifully loved by God, and we are worth spending time with.
Thank you so much for spending a little bit of your time here in these memories with me.
All the best,
J
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