229 The Year of the Floorboards

Faith with its sleeves rolled up

Apr 04, 2026

The charge settled into my bones this morning, a truth finally given its name. The Holy Spirit has been etching it into me for months, longer perhaps. Today, the full weight of it, the terrible and beautiful scope, became clear. That revelation, however, is not today’s work. That article is still forming in the kiln. Today is for looking back.

I opened the archive. I read the eight shared articles I wrote one year ago this week. I read them not as their author, but as a man peering into a rear-view mirror at the receding timeline of a year. I saw the journey, and I recognized the shift. This is that record. An entry in the ledger.

A year ago, I was a tourist in a new country, holding a map I could not read. My faith was a seismic event. A fault line had cracked open in a Florida garage, cleaving my life into a stark Before and an After. I spent those first months studying the fissure, telling and retelling the story of the quake. My writing asked the basic, stunned questions of the displaced: “What is this place?” and “Who am I now?”

Those articles were my first landmarks. “What Are You Now?” was my fumbling attempt to explain my new citizenship to an old friend. “Faith and Fur” was me, using the only language I had, dogs and discipline, to paw at the concepts of grace and correction. “Reborn in the Stillness” captured that fragile, hollowed-out feeling of being an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by a will not my own.

I was learning the grammar of salvation. The Bible, especially Romans in “A Bridge Across Time,” was a stunning intellectual puzzle. I traced the prophecy, the connections, the elegant, terrifying design. My prayers then were shallow, superficial events. Brief explosions of clarity in the dark.

But you do not build a life on explosions. You build it on the daily, quiet laying of floorboards.

This past year has been the year of me watching, following the Father as He fitted me with new ones.

The questions changed. They moved from “What is this?” to “What does this require of my hands today?” The writing shifted from explaining the rebirth to chronicling the rehabilitation. “The Ministry of Small Obediences” is not about the mountaintop. It is about the bathroom floor, the silent server, the morning kitchen. It is faith with its sleeves rolled up. “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.”

The focus widened. The initial call was a single, holy task: care for your mother. But obedience in one thing trains you for obedience in all things. The stewardship expanded. “The Forgotten Echo” applied that heart to the crumbling systems of the world. “The Silent Referral” lamented a lost spiritual discipline: a togetherness which demands I be more hopeful, more loving, to the face across the fence.

The most telling change is in the wrestling. A year ago, I was simply grateful for the rescue. Now, I feel the weight of the lineage. “Broken Reflection” is not just my story. It is the story of every image-bearer since Eden, reaching again for the fruit over the Father. I am not just Shashue, saved. I am Shashue, a fragment in a broken mosaic God is restoring. The prayer there is not gratitude, but surrender: Break the pattern in me.

Then, “The Gift, The Curse, The Return.” This was the deepest cut. It is seeing that the very talents I used to build my tower of Babel are the same materials I must now surrender back to the Giver. “For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property.” He does not want my retirement. He wants my tools, repurposed for His kingdom. The maturation is moving from being amazed that He saved me, to being sobered by what He asks me to do with the life He saved.

A year ago, God was the One who found me in the collapse. Today, He is the faithful presence walking beside me through the wreckage and the rebuilding, found in the silent referral never given and in the morning coffee shared with my sister. He is the consistency in the 3 a.m. wake-up call. My journey has moved from the shock of the initial collision to the quiet discipline of convalescence. I am finally learning to see all of life as the workshop where faith gets its hands dirty.

The fault line is still there. It will always be there. But I am not just staring at it anymore. I am building a life on the rock of the After. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

I am listening. I am hearing, and doing, as best I can. Stumbling sometimes, but less today than yesterday. And with His grace, hopefully not in the same spot.

A short commercial if you will before we wrap up today’s article:

Before we finish, a brief word about connection.

I include links to my other social profiles at the end of my articles. With one exception, I am not very active on them. I log in periodically to see if the Holy Spirit has any assignment for me there.

I list these handles as points of contact should Substack implement a policy update I cannot, in good conscience, accept.

In the event all these platforms enact the same restrictive policies, which they often do in unison, and I choose not to comply, you will find me most active using my Nostr public key (npub). For those unfamiliar, Nostr is a decentralized protocol, not a platform. It cannot be shut down or controlled by any one company.

To connect: