Dear Reader,
I do not write because I have life figured out.
The older I get, the less convincing that idea becomes.
I have spent decades working, building businesses, raising a family, managing money, making decisions, changing my mind, getting things right, getting things wrong, and trying to understand what all of it adds up to.
Writing is one way I take inventory.
It forces me to slow an idea down, put it into words, examine its assumptions, test it against experience, and ask whether it actually holds.
Sometimes I begin an essay believing I understand the subject and discover halfway through that the question is more complicated than I thought.
I consider that progress.
I write about faith, responsibility, work, wealth, family, and legacy because these are not abstract subjects to me.
They eventually become decisions.
They become the way we treat people. The work we do when nobody is watching. The money we save, spend, give, or waste. The promises we keep. The people we remain present for. And the things we decide are important enough to hand forward.
The questions underneath them are ordinary and enormous at the same time:
What do I owe the people who depend upon me?
How much is enough?
How do I remain self-reliant without confusing self-reliance with self-sufficiency?
What should I repair, and what should I let go?
What does Christian faith ask of a man who has spent a lifetime learning how to depend upon himself?
And eventually:
What is strong enough to carry a human life?
I do not expect to settle questions like these in a single essay. Some deserve years.
What I Owe You as a Writer
If you are going to give me some of your time, I think I owe you something in return.
First, I owe you honesty.
I will try not to pretend certainty where I do not have it. There is a difference between what I know, what I believe, what experience has taught me, what my faith asks me to accept, and what I am still trying to understand. I want to make those distinctions rather than blur them.
Second, I owe you my best effort to examine the strongest objection to what I am saying.
An argument does not become stronger because inconvenient questions have been ignored. If an intelligent skeptic can expose a weakness in something I have written, I would rather confront it myself before asking you to accept the conclusion.
That applies especially to faith. I am a Christian, but I do not want to use Christianity as a shortcut around difficult questions. “Trust God” can be true and still be an inadequate answer if we have not asked what trust actually means. “Everything happens for a reason” may comfort someone, but comfort is not an argument.
Grace, Providence, dependence, surrender, forgiveness—these are serious words. They deserve more than repetition. I want to understand what they mean in the life of a person who still has bills to pay, people to protect, and responsibilities that cannot simply be handed over to someone else.
I owe you the same seriousness about money.
Money matters. It can protect a family, expand freedom, support generosity, and provide security. Pretending otherwise does not make us morally superior. But money also has limits. It can become a tool or an identity. The interesting work lies in understanding where it belongs.
I Am Not Asking You to Agree With Me
Agreement is not the standard I use to judge whether an essay has succeeded.
I hope you find some things here you agree with. I also hope you occasionally stop and think:
I don't know if he's right about that.
Then think about it. Challenge the argument. Bring your own experience to it. See what survives.
I have little interest in building an audience that simply nods. I would rather write for people willing to think seriously, including people who reach different conclusions from mine.
That also means I will try not to treat disagreement as evidence of bad character. Our culture already has enough of that. A person can be wrong without being stupid. He can disagree without being malicious. He can hold a strong conviction without hating the person across from him.
Intellectual seriousness requires enough confidence to make an argument and enough humility to admit that an argument can be wrong.
I want that tension in my work.
What I Hope You Find Here
There is already more information in the world than any of us can absorb. I do not want to add to the pile.
I want to pursue wisdom that helps somebody live.
That does not mean every essay ends with instructions. Sometimes an essay helps because it gives you language for something you have felt but never clearly expressed. Sometimes it makes a distinction. Sometimes it replaces a bad question with a better one.
If something I write helps you see part of your life more clearly, make a better decision, carry a responsibility more faithfully, or repair something worth saving, then the essay has done its work.
Part of this is personal. I have children and grandchildren. Money and property can be inherited. So can ways of thinking. Standards. Stories. Mistakes we have already paid to learn from. I do not want everything I have learned to disappear simply because I am no longer here to explain it.
That is one of the ways I think about legacy. Not as being remembered. As transmission.
One Final Promise
I am still inside many of the questions I write about. Especially faith. Especially the boundary between being capable and believing I must be sufficient for everything.
I expect some of my thinking to change as I continue. When it does, I will try to be honest about that too.
What I can promise is the effort: to respect your intelligence, to take important questions seriously, to resist easy answers when the subject deserves more, to examine my own assumptions along with everyone else's, and to keep asking whether the ideas on these pages are useful in an actual human life.
I do not expect you to agree with everything I write.
I hope you will think with me.
If something here stays with you after you close the page, then I am grateful you spent the time with me.
That is why I keep writing.
Read thoughtfully. Question freely. Keep what proves useful.— Joseph C. Kunz, Jr.