Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone! Welcome back to another Thursday update!
As a reminder, this is the last Thursday update for a month or so while I take a break from writing. I’m going to take this time to reflect and improve my content, and also of course plan and execute a move across the state. I’m planning to start up again in June!
Since it’s the last one for a while I figured I would just give a final life update and see where that leads.
Housing
Housing-wise, we are making solid headway! Closing has officially been pushed one week to April 18th.
We’re actually in Florida the weekend before so that will be a fun busy week. We’ll travel from Durham to Greensboro to Florida back to Greensboro to Burnsville to close, then back to Greensboro, then back to Durham, and then finally back to Burnsville for our first weekend trip in the new house!
Whoo! That’s a lot of travel, but it will be fun!
We also got some amazing news this past week! The sellers of the home have decided to give us a large amount of furniture in the home! This is going to save us a ton financially but also physically since we don’t have to move any of it. We are so excited and feel so blessed!
I can’t tell you how much we have seen God’s hand in this home. It is unfathomable and it honestly feels like God just gave us this house straight from His hand. This makes us believe and trust that He has great plans for this home for His kingdom.
Our biggest prayer is that we steward His house well and use it for His glory. We’re not sure what He wants to use it for yet, but we are so excited to find out.
Church
Speaking of God, I might as well mention that this Sunday marks a special day. A day that will really make our move to Burnsville become even more real. This weekend will mark our last day at the Summit Church.
This is a bitter-sweet moment, but we are so excited to start attending the Grove Church in Spruce Pine! They are a much much smaller church, but vibrant with a diverse age group. They are very gospel-centered and we are excited to be a part of them and be used by God in any way He wants there.
We feel excited to get to really know people in our church as a whole, and potentially be part of a church plant in the next few years as they are already looking to plant a church in Burnsville.
Writing
Since this Substack is part of my writing goals, I should update y’all on what’s going on, what my goals are, and how they’re going.
Part of the purpose of this break is to take time and reflect on my writing and refine goals, so this might actually change come June.
But for now, I do have some goals I will share. I actually run 2 newsletters. This one and Biblit. Most of y’all are signed up for both.
My goals with Biblit are to continue posting a short commentary/devo each week on a passage of Scripture. I also want to pursue at least a certificate in theology or Biblical studies to help me in that and give myself more credibility. I would love to one day go further and study and achieve a master’s of divinity in Biblical studies as well.
Some other Biblit goals: I’d love to build a podcast around it in the far future where I could interview different pastors, writers, etc on passages of scripture. I would also like to write Christian books one day too.
Specifically, I want to first write a book on the life of Jacob. I really enjoyed studying Jacob and all the pains he went through due to his struggles with fear. I’d love to dive deeper and really study his life and write a book about it.
In other news, I’m still working on my next fiction novella, The Disease. I’m hoping to get more time to finish editing that. There is a chance I am going to try and start a dao with a new platform called daodao and use that to fund the creation of The Disease. But more on that later.
Lastly, I would love to continue with this newsletter. I’m going to take this time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t over the past year, and iterate on that to create an even better and more entertaining/helpful newsletter.
I definitely want to continue with the poetry and pair that with Taylor’s photography. And I am still planning on forming those into compilations when I have enough :)
Lastly, Spatium…
Spatium
I have mentioned a lot about Spatium to you all over the past few months. It is still a project I’m working on daily and am very very excited about!
That being said, I think I’ve learned something recently. I think I may have started a bit prematurely.
To recap, the end goal for Spatium is for it to be a publishing platform for authors who want to sell their books as NFTs. Potentially run as a DAO.
In addition, Spatium itself will also publish monthly short stories. I have a whole fun NFT initiative to get the ball rolling too. It revolves around creating character NFTs from the individual characters in the stories.
Well, I figured if I just started pushing stories out, people would start to get excited about the project.
I definitely got some feedback from the stories, which is great, but not a ton of momentum.
I don’t see this as a discouragement at all, nor a failure. I just see it as a learning opportunity.
I think right now in the crypto world, things are a little slow. People are not super excited about new NFT projects; they are just waiting to see what the markets do first.
That means now is the perfect time to build, rather than create.
Which is what I’m going to do.
In the end, I want to build a platform that offers 2 main features:
For authors: it gives them the ability to create book NFTs on 3 popular blockchains
For readers: it gives them the ability to buy books from any of these blockchains and read them on the Spatium reader app.
Over the next few months, my plan is to build that platform.
Now, why would authors or readers be drawn to the platform? What problems do those things actually solve? Well, to answer that would take a while. This is why I would also like to start another blog/newsletter for Spatium itself. I’m hoping to start that soon too; it won’t be super consistent week to week, but it will make Spatium more relevant and hopefully build more of an audience for the project before it launches.
We’ll see; it’s all in God’s hands.
Ok, I think that’s enough of a life update for now. Thank you all again for reading and supporting me. I will post my Friday post tomorrow and then talk to you all in June!