Ian's Blog

  Two hundred years from now, a completely different set of human beings will walk this earth. They will fall in love, argue, build homes, ruin things, fix some of them, and believe just like we do that their moment is the center of history. And we will be gone. Every single one of us. Strangers will live on your land. Someone you will never meet will sleep in your house or perhaps be selling or demolishing it. They will never know your name. They will not wonder who you were. They will not sense your presence in the walls. You will simply be part of the past, invisible and unimportant to them. Your grave if it still exists will be unvisited. The flowers will stop coming. The headstone may erode or be moved or forgotten entirely. No one will sit beside it telling stories about you. No one will say, “They mattered so much.” Not because you were insignificant, but because time is ruthless. Time deletes everyone.That sounds depressing until you sit with it long enough for it to become...

  If there is one biblical moment that I believe should define Christianity, it is not a miracle, a parable, or even a sermon. It is a conversation, short, raw, and happening at the very edge of death. The exchange between Jesus and the thief on the cross strips Christianity down to its bare essentials and confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: salvation is far simpler, and grace far more generous, than we often make it. The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus was crucified between two criminals. Roman crucifixion was not a punishment for petty wrongdoing. It was reserved for the worst offenders—rebels, murderers, insurrectionists, and those Rome wanted to make an example of. One of those men, hanging beside Jesus, openly acknowledged his guilt. “We are punished justly,” he said. By every moral, social, and religious standard, this man was a failure. He had lived wrongly, harmed others, and was now paying the ultimate price. There is no indication that this thief had ever followe...

  Helen Andrews’ discussion on the great feminization is unsettling not because it is provocative, but because it is precise. It forces listeners to confront a demographic and cultural shift so vast that we have normalized it before understanding it. Her argument is not that women are incapable, malicious, or unworthy of leadership. Rather, it is that no civilization can radically alter the demographic makeup of its institutions without also altering their values, incentives, and operating logic. Feminization, as she frames it, is not a conspiracy, it is a process. And like all processes, it produces predictable outcomes. At the heart of Andrews’ thesis is a simple but powerful observation: feminization is unprecedented in scale. Human history contains powerful women, female rulers, and even matriarchal tendencies, but never before have women occupied such a large share of political, legal, academic, and managerial authority simultaneously. One-third female legislatures, majority-f...

There is an idea called standing too close to the elephant. When you stand right next to an elephant, all you see is a trunk, a leg, maybe a patch of skin. You cannot grasp its size, its shape, or its meaning. Only when you step back, when time passes, when distance grows can you see the whole animal. Some stories demand that kind of distance. The story of Emmett Till is one of them. Let me give you a history lesson. Early 1950s. United States of America. A fourteen-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till travels from Chicago to Mississippi to visit family. Before he leaves, his mother gives him a warning that says everything about the country at the time: if a white man looks at you, look away. Don’t answer back. Don’t linger. Don’t be bold. Survival depended on submission. But Emmett is from Chicago. He’s not used to Mississippi’s rules. He’s not scared in the way Southern racism required Black children to be scared. One day, he walks into a store. There’s a white woman behind the count...

I recently listened to a man speak about submission in his 28-year-old marriage, and instead of answering questions, his words provoked many more. Not the defensive kind of questions, but the honest, uncomfortable, necessary ones. Should a husband expect submission automatically from his wife? Are there requirements a man must meet for his wife to submit to him? And perhaps the most rarely asked question of all: is there such a thing as a man submitting to his wife? These questions matter because submission is one of the most misunderstood and emotionally loaded words in relationships. It has been preached, weaponized, romanticized, and rejected, often without careful thought. Many people hear the word and immediately imagine loss of agency, silence, or inequality. Others hear it and assume authority, entitlement, and obedience. Somewhere between these extremes lies a deeper, more honest understanding. Here was the man’s take: He said he dies a slow death every time he hears women say ...

  There’s a simple idea that sounds almost too obvious to be powerful, yet it quietly sits at the root of many emotional, mental, and even physical struggles people carry into adulthood: forgiveness. Not the fluffy, feel-good kind that ignores pain, but the hard, deliberate kind that restores your peace of mind. According to this framework, there are four people you must forgive if you want to live free and it starts closer to home than most of us are comfortable admitting. The first person you must forgive is your parents. Forgive your parents for everything they’ve ever done that hurt you. This isn’t an accusation; it’s an observation backed by years of research and human experience. Most studies, and most honest conversations, reveal that a large percentage of adult problems trace back to being unwilling or unable to forgive our parents for something they did or failed to do. It might have been neglect, harsh words, absence, unrealistic expectations, or wounds they never knew th...