“Why Would I Start a Blog Now?”

Cyber Blah Blah Blah

Why would I start a blog about faith and technology today in 2024? There are many reasons. Sure, I’ve spent 25 years working in cybersecurity in the aerospace industry and contributing to this generation’s Apollo program, Artemis with NASA, as well as numerous other programs. I’ve even had the privilege of working with the President’s National Cyber Director at JPL, which certainly makes me qualified. In my peak as a Director, I could wax rhapsodic and stun you with my technical strategies. I could amaze like a magician with the way I can tell you how to use technology for your benefit and produce wonder in those who would listen on my Zoom and Teams calls, only to end the connection wondering what the heck I was really doing there and what would matter after I was gone from the building—not gone gone, like for good gone. I could go on long enough to induce nausea in the reader, but I think you get the point. I have worked with computers, applications, the cloud, satellites, spaceships, fighter jets, and just about any other device or system that processes ones and zeros. This blog is not about that stuff. I think there’s something more to it.

You see, I’m not really the blogging type. I spent some time working in the banality of social media and I just got sick of it. Truth be known, in the last few years, I’ve spent most of my time working behind a desk, leading meetings 70 hours a week, and not really having much of a life other than my job. On top of that, the challenges of COVID, being a Director at a space company, dealing with lawyers (yet I sill have my soul or most of it), and just life in general as a father and a husband, truthfully, my soul was tired. The idea of picking up another project, something that required consistency, effort, and research, just seemed tiresome and very much not something I would do. But in the last few months, I found my reason—or should I say reasons.

That being said, I could tell you why me and why now right at the beginning, but where’s the fun in that? One of my favorite things to do is tell stories and entertain, and I think this blog should and will be no different. At the risk of you requiring a lobotomy sometime in the near future, I’m going to show you the way my mind works—as twisted as it is. Now, as back then, I have a habit of finding parallels between my life and the lives of those in the Bible. Maybe it’s because, like every guy, I think I’m the hero of my story. Come on, ladies, testify if your husband won’t. We think we are Brad Pitt with a glorious mane of hair (my mullet was glorious in the 80s and 90s), but most of the time we are more like Clark Griswold or worse, Cousin Eddie. But don’t let me get off track. Maybe it’s just a natural thing we do with scripture.

Anyway, this morning, I was reflecting on David before he became king of Israel. Just think about what he was going through. In this particular story, he was being chased by King Saul in his demented, tortured state. The king knew he was going to lose the kingdom. He knew that David was going to take it because God was going to give it to him. Saul was enraged by his own failure and jealousy. David became a target for elimination because you can’t be king if you are dead. The fury of Saul’s anger was so white-hot that the jealous king tried to pin David to the wall with his spear—twice. There’s no way to that; it pretty much says, “I want to kill you,” with a devil and fire emoji. And let’s just say it, when a king wants to kill you, that can be somewhat anxiety-inducing.

No matter what people say about how tough David was, and he was a BA, King Saul was intimidating, furious, and he was the king. David had ultimate respect for the king. When I read the Scripture, David was being incredibly deferential not just to Saul but to God’s anointed. He cut off a piece of Saul’s cape just to let him know he had him. How Saul must have felt at that moment, caught in his anger and pride. Hmm… been there. In context and in the midst of this, David penned the words to Psalm 57.

Psalm 57:1-4 (ESV)

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me

for in you my soul takes refuge;

in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge

till the storms of destruction pass by.

I cry out to God Most High

to God who fulfills his purpose for me.

He will send from heaven and save me;

he will put to shame him who tramples on me. Selah

God will send out his steadfast love and his faithfulness!

My soul is in the midst of lions;

I lie down amid fiery beasts—

the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows

whose tongues are sharp swords.

(Psalm 57:1-4, ESV)

So, reading this, one can say that David was scared. He feared for his life, and there’s a lot here that we talk about throughout the blog. The thing I find most important and somewhat leading into my personal “why” is the choice that David is making in this passage. His safety is not fully guaranteed. David knows this, but he is making a choice to hide in the refuge and wait till the storms of destruction pass by. He’s crying out to God; he’s not begging to his demented King Saul or avoiding the problem by hiding from reality. Looking back some 20 years ago, the story has applications in my life.

A Journey Begins

My story today begins in July of 2005. It was during that time that my wife had agreed to support me in an Air National Guard career. I was not able at my age to get into Officer school, at least not at that time, so I had to take something of interest as an enlisted person. At that time, I found an opening in the local guard unit as a weather forecaster. You may not know this about me, but I’ve had my pilot’s license since I was about 19. I used to beg my dad for time to bush hog his back pasture so I could have enough money to rent a plane for an hour in those 1970s Cessnas. I found release, freedom, and a fascination with high technology in flying. This passion for aviation and technology is what drew me to the weather forecaster role in the Air National Guard.

It was that year, at that time, that we loaded up the minivan and headed to Beverly—no, not Beverly Hills, not even close—Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. On the outside, I was incredibly excited, but on the inside, I was tortured. Quite frankly, my soul was on fire. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I felt a real lack of direction. I didn’t have a calling or purpose outside of being an ATM, even though Jenny certainly didn’t treat me that way.

What I would realize later, much later, is that my real purpose should have been in Christ all along. But at the time, I just didn’t have the ability to see that. Even though I was completely protected and safe, I felt like David trembling in that cave, being pursued by an incredibly angry king. Sure, most of it may have been in my own imagination, but I was in the middle of a full-blown existential crisis—much like the storm that would be upon us in just a few weeks. It was like i loved crisis and needed chaos and brokenness.

The Storm Hits

We had three kids at the time and were working on our fourth. It was a hard time to go, and there was a lot of chaos in our life, but it was the right place to be at that time, before what I would come to learn would be the wrong reason. You see, about three days after we had unpacked the last box, we turned on the TV to see Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel on a beach about 1 mile away from where I was sitting as I was at Keesler Air Force Base in the family housing. There was a huge hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico; her name was Katrina.

What ensued after that date was two months of pure chaos. Hurricane Katrina came on shore and wiped out the entire town of Waveland, MS. Our Air Force base, right at the beach, took 34 feet of water and storm surge. My wife and I and my three children had left right before it hit. We came back to incredible loss, not just our personal things, but even the very infrastructure of the towns around us. In fact, the very bridge between Ocean Springs and Biloxi had been knocked down by a violent storm surge.

Resilience in the Face of Destruction

It is the return to operations that I remember today, almost 19 years to the date of that event. I saw the resiliency of the US military in the Air Force and I was amazed. Keesler Air Force Base was decimated to a 10th of its size; for sure, there was a lot of debate about whether they were even going to restart the weather program at Keesler. In fact, it was rumored that one of the nearby casinos actually sent the government a check for the property. It was considered a prime location. For me, I showed up with new orders at the end of September to start my new class.

I didn’t realize until much later how much biology and your particular conditioning affect how you handle anxiety. There’s something about the way you write the story of your life that puts you in a causal loop. You continually revisit failures, and instead of leaning in and finding refuge in the Lord like David did, I tried to find hope in hard work. I leaned in, using my intelligence and any advantage I could to pass all the tests—and there were a bunch of them. Now looking back I had only mediocre success.

Now, I’m not saying that hard work isn’t important—it is. I’m just saying that I didn’t make the right choice. As I said before, I was only able to dip my foot in the water enough to get to the other side of the creek when there was no other option.

A Very Military Melting Pot.

And that’s what I’m gonna tell you about today. That’s the part that made me human. It was then I sat in a room with 29 other people. They were all 15 years younger than me. I was the only one that was married with kids besides a few of the instructors. My fellow future forecasters were from every part of the United States. This classroom became a microcosm of desire, ambition, science, and art (some say that weather forecasting is actually voodoo and magic, but I digress). It was anxiety inducing as I wanted to help them and then pound them with my Yeti Smash constantly. Talk about mixed feelings! More on that Later

The base was a shadow of its former self, but the spirit of determination was palpable. Amidst the devastation, I witnessed firsthand the unwavering commitment of the Air Force to its mission and its people. Temporary classrooms were set up, instructors were brought in from other bases, and against all odds, our training began. This experience taught me a profound lesson about resilience, adaptability, and the power of a united purpose.

Somewhere, somehow, someway during that time, I know I made a choice. If I had not finished my Weather School, it was very likely that the Air Force would take years to send me back, and I was already older for a student. Truthfully, as I look back now, I was very confused about what God wanted for me to do and what I wanted to do with my life and my vocation. As I sit here now, looking back, I remember wondering and actually ruminating on what God might do and how he might punish me if I didn’t make the right choice. This narrative and the stories bled out into my family and increased the stress, especially when my lovely wife was pregnant with my child.

There was also risk in her pregnancy. If you knew us personally, you would know that my callsign in the military is Yeti as I alluded to above. My operations officer in my space unit called me that because he wanted to give me something deprecating so I wouldn’t scare the airmen. Jenny’s name is something more gentle or special-ed teacher-like, such as Cupcake or some such. The reason I tell you this is because I kept giving her massive children, and she kept having to have C-sections. When the hurricane came through, Jenny was six months pregnant, and there were actually women who had to give birth via C-section by flashlight. I didn’t know how this was gonna work out. I was scared to death. There was a choice to be made: go home and give up, start over again for the 50th time, or lean forward and trust the Lord, just in case this faith thing really works.

From Weather to AI: A Journey of Discovery

At that time, little did I know that some 20 years later I would be sitting talking to AI every day and working in high technology in space and all these things—the machine, as they say, ex machina. What I’ve learned, I’ve learned what SENTIENCE means in real-time as I work. I’ve learned that HUMAN BEINGS are more than just TRANSACTIONAL DATABASES here to plug into the world for a little bit until we are finally TOMBSTONED and DECOMMISSIONED. I’ve learned there is a LORD in HEAVEN who CREATED all of this and EXPECTS us to, just like HIM, SUBDUE the world around us just like HE SUBDUES the UNIVERSE. That’s the part about being MADE in HIS IMAGE.

These beliefs have been challenged in what we now call the COVID shutdown. Some of them even called it the biological apocalypse, but that was COVID-19. That was the first time since Katrina that I actually believed there could be some kind of end to us, just for a moment. In the coming days after that, I didn’t see the same recovery that I saw during my days after Katrina. I saw a lot of doubt. I saw a lot of separation. I saw a lack of community. We were forced. We weren’t considered vital as human beings, and human connection completely devolved into online Zoom conversations. This is a little bit like licking the candy wrapper, hinting at a crispy cookie with nougat, chocolate, and caramel, but never satisfied, knowing you really want the whole Twix.

As I reflect on these challenging times—from Katrina to COVID-19—I realize they’ve profoundly shaped my understanding of human resilience, faith, and our relationship with technology. The contrast between the physical rebuilding after Katrina and the digital coping mechanisms during COVID-19 highlighted the irreplaceable value of human connection. It reinforced my belief that we are more than just data points or biological machines; we are sentient beings created in God’s image, designed for genuine interaction and community. These experiences have deepened my conviction that as we advance technologically, we must not lose sight of our fundamental need for faith, purpose, and real human connections. It’s this delicate balance between embracing progress and preserving our humanity that I want to explore in this blog, using stories like Keesler’s resurrection and our collective COVID experience as touchstones for discussions on faith, technology, and human determination in our ever-evolving world.

The Why Me, Why Now, and the Why You?

This existence that we have as human beings is beautiful. It’s also stressful. It’s also chaotic. There is undiscovered order in places yet unseen and there are still many, many things we do not yet know. That is the goal of this blog: to find the presuppositional truth that reveals the world around us. To pull out the BS flag on things that are just a bunch of rabid assumptions that are gonna lead all of us to oblivion. And finally, to give glory to God and the good things He has given us in connection with one another. Those are the most fun things.

So why me? There is really only one reason, and that is I have a story to tell. I have a story—actually many stories—based on these and other experiences that are intertwined with my faith. I’m sure David reflected many times on how God protected him in that cave. We know he did because he wrote the psalm, and at the end, he talks about how he gave God all the glory. There is honor to the Lord to be found in my life and yours. Lets find it.

On top of that, another thing is that I’ve written a book—well, actually I’ve written three books and I have plans for 32 more. My publisher thinks I’m nuts, but I want you to read them so we can talk about it. All of it- from the cool technical implications, to the conquering of the human spirit to how God still cares for us. I want to debate kindly new tech coming craziness. I want to hear your stories in your way. Oh, and I wanna sell them because Cupcake needs new shoes:)

And why now? Well, just simply because most of us, myself included, are sometimes like I was during 2005—right in the middle of an existential hangover, completely disconnected from everybody. We haven’t fully recovered from COVID. We haven’t fully recovered from all the disasters and tragedies, and wars and rumors of wars. And, oh by the way, we are living through one of the most toxic presidential election cycles that I have experienced in my 50+ years. Now more than ever, we need to be able to disconnect from technology, go for a walk outside, and just know that God, the Lord Jesus, is our refuge, just like David said. That truth, connected with community and getting out of our own heads, seems almost impossible in this day and age. I know it seems somewhat hypocritical to use technology to write a blog to talk to you people, but hey, it’s a tool, or a subset of tools, and before I become a tool myself, I think it’s good to use it to help bring us together and unify, if that’s possible. I believe it is.

And why you? Well, because you’re curious. It’s obvious that the idea of technology and faith interests you—the whole concept must intrigue you. I know it does me. While I’ve spent a lot of time talking about some of the negatives in our current culture, I also want to say that I’m incredibly grateful to live in this age. I believe we can use technology for good, for God’s purpose. I believe that human beings will one day live on other planets and moons. I believe and hope you read my book. More than anything, you stayed to the end to read this blog, so there must be something going on with you. :-) Maybe you are crazy too. Either way, we will start this journey together. If anything, it will be fun and another good story. See you soon. J.

References 

NASA Artemis Program Official Page https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/ This link provides official information about the Artemis program, supporting your mention of your work on "this generation's Apollo program."

National Hurricane Center: Hurricane Katrina https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#katrina This page offers detailed information about Hurricane Katrina, providing context for your personal experience during the disaster.

NOAA: Weather Forecasting https://www.noaa.gov/weather This resource explains the importance of weather forecasting, supporting your background as a weather forecaster in the Air National Guard.

Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) https://www.cisa.gov/cybersecurity This official government site provides information on cybersecurity, lending credibility to your expertise in the field.

Pew Research Center: Faith and Technology https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/religion-and-science/ This page offers various studies and articles on the intersection of faith and technology, supporting the main theme of your blog.

MIT Technology Review: COVID-19's Impact on Technology https://www.technologyreview.com/topic/covid-19/ This collection of articles discusses how the pandemic has affected technology use and development, supporting your reflections on the COVID-19 period.

American Psychological Association: Resilience https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience This page provides scientific information about resilience, supporting your discussions about overcoming challenges and adapting to change.

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