Who am I?
A sojourner rapt in awe of life as a gift.
Husband, father. Teacher, writer, scholar. Artist, interaction designer, web developer.
“As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands 
and by cunning 
and by magic 
moving through him,
a fierce and jealous love 
…”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
Made by
Hands
A young me stares wistfully at the camera, in low VHS tape quality―from my home video archive, filmed in South Florida in the 1980s.
One of my first conscious memories
is of my father’s voice singing, “I’m somebody. I’m created in the image of God and I’m somebody” (Bill Gaither Trio, from the album "L.I.F.E.", 1984). These words, which I can still sing today, are an echo of the sane worldview with which I was imparted. An outlook that begins with the intrinsic worth of a human person, bearing God’s image.
From the basis of my intrinsic worth, a life made and sustained by divine hands, I have lived in continual, creative discovery. And look, I’m not too good at all this yet. Still, I’ve been told by trusted voices that there’s been some improvement over the years. I’ll take it.
I am an eager participant in God’s creative love. I make the invisible God visible through my life and work. As an image bearer, I am not just a producer for consumers. Rather, I am a redeemed adventurer within the creative, self-giving love that ordered this cosmos.
I am somebody. Not because I have achieved anything, but because I have received life as a gift. I am called. Always answering to the vocation of renewal and rehabilitation of this broken world.
I set all this as the foundation for using the hands I have been given to make. I set my hands to creating, crafting, collaborating. This embodied creativity is not for myself, but to serve other embodied persons.
So, why do I create? I create because it is the divine vocation with which I have been bestowed in order to embody love for others.
By
Cunning
How do I set out to use my hands as a means to serve by creating? Answer: The exercise of my mind and heart; the cunning that I’ve been given also as a gift to be shared.
I’ve had an indefatigable passion for design and creative endeavors since I was able to hold a pencil or shimmy up a 90s-era computer chair and paw at the keyboard in rhythmic taps. As a script kiddie in the mid 90s, I entered the web design and development scene in the wild west days of the World Wide Web before Google. Back when there were distinct states of online and offline. Imagine that?
I like to retain some of the core natural boundaries given back in the 90s, if even just philosophically. My cunning in design and development stems from my conviction that the human element is the most important part of design. By which I mean I design using my human cunning for humans who may be enriched and helped thereby. I do not stoop to shortcuts for the sake of “content” or for “streamlining” or any form of bypassing real human ingenuity and effort that keeps why I do things at the forefront. I welcome limitations and difficulties. I do not forsake the use of my own brain.
In the late 90s, my passion for design and computers grew into game, graphic, print, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. I have always pursued knowledge and dove deeper into the widening world of digital design as a means to reach others with a message: Divine order, expressed through cunning design, can speak deeply to your heart of the greatness of the ground of being. Or simply put: behold God’s love through beautiful design.
Magic
By what means can this cunning be expressed and set out in the world? Answer: the magic of a human-made digital realm.
I was born in the mid-eighties. This meant that by the time I was old enough to read, computers had transformed from lumbering behemoths in refrigerated university or office rooms to small, affordable, nimble 286s that could help you do your middle-class taxes. By the standards of the upper middle class the machines had become affordable, and for my family in the 80s-90s computers were just part of our experience.
My real training in design began with the physical and tactile - I did oil painting, charcoal drawing, oil pastels, colored pencils. I filled notebooks with stories and illustrated them. I planned out video games in full before I even knew how to program. Then in a rolling progression, I grew along with the tools offered via personal computers: MS DOS, Windows 3.1, Geocities, Netscape, FrontPage extensions, Corel Draw, Adobe Go Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Games Factory, Unity, Figma. I learned how to write and structure my thoughts with the help of word processors. The training with art and writing naturally flowed into the use of digital magic. I found the tools that magically transmuted the movement of my cunning hands into beauty and order. I quickly learned how to draw just as well with a computer mouse as with a graphite pencil. I could write faster and more efficiently with the help of word processors that had spell check (Lord knows I still need it.)
But this magic is not for the faint of heart. I was always grateful for the amazing creative realms the digital world unlocked for me. But I also could sense how, like magic, it can have a dark side. Like magic it must be wielded with care and proper training. It can easily offer escape from the core purpose of creation and tempt you to become so enwrapped in it that you forget the purpose behind beauty and order. The magic begins to use you rather than be used by you. But rightly used it can open avenues of wonder that have never been experienced by humanity before, hopefully for their flourishing.
Love
None of it matters without agape. Agape is the personified, moving current that makes non-people into persons. God is love. He is the source of all and through his eternal love we “live and move and have our being.” If what I do is done in agape, then it contributes to what the world is really made of: attention and care. Overlapping these two is agape. Without it everything is a “clanging cymbal” or literal nonsense. It is only in the Cosmic Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, that this is embodied and offered as a gift to humanity.
This is the same person that made me and continues to form me. Through this personal, creative pulse I move, and let flow through my fingertips a glimpse of divine healing for a waiting, hurting world. Even so, come Lord Jesus and renew all things.