Why “Ransomed Ragamuffin”

A ragamuffin is a mess in ragged clothes, and if I’m honest, that has always been the most accurate word for me. To ransom is to pay a price to bring back something captive, something wanted enough to be worth the cost. So what happens when the two meet? Someone pays a king’s ransom for a beggar in rags. The math never works. You do not spend everything on a mess like me, or you, or any of us. But He did. And the fact that the price ran so far past what we were worth isn’t the embarrassment of the gospel. It is the gospel.

I grew up in church, and for a long time I didn’t want what it was selling.

There were seasons I hated it. As a kid, I once told the preacher’s wife I didn’t want to go to heaven. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but I meant it. The heaven I’d been handed sounded like one giant church service that never ended. The same songs. The same polite smiling. A thin version of joy stretched out forever. It sounded less like paradise and more like punishment.

I didn’t have a problem with God, exactly. I had a problem with the version of God I’d been given, distant and vaguely disappointed, mostly concerned with whether I followed rules I didn’t understand. For a long time, I just lived with that thin picture, not quite believing it and not quite leaving it.

Then I lost my grandfather, and the bottom fell out.

He had been my best friend my entire life, and losing him landed in the same season when everything else in my life was falling apart. I was at the lowest I have ever been. And somewhere down there, I made a promise: if God would give me one more day, I would give that day back to Him and do the best I could to live for Him. I would do the same the next day, and the next day after that, for as long as He let me wake up.

Keeping that promise is what sent me digging into Scripture to find out whether what Jesus said was actually true. What I found was better than anything I’d been told, so different from the bored, distant rule-keeper I’d imagined that it reordered everything. I won’t spell it all out here; unpacking it is what the book is for. But it was enough to ruin me, in the best way, for the thin version I’d been handed. I came hoping to see my grandfather again, and somewhere in the searching, something turned. I fell in love with the One who made him. Because here was the logic I couldn’t escape: if I love my grandfather this much for who he is, how much more would I love the perfect Being who created him?

Who I am now

That promise is the hinge my whole life now turns on. It’s why I studied differently and made it through nursing school and later became a nurse practitioner. It’s why I kept reading. It’s why I started this site, why I’m writing this book, why I am trying every day to show my sons who Jesus really is. I fail at it more than I’d like to admit. But the promise itself has never changed.

I’ll be honest about the rest, too. Before that, I had wanted to preach, and I went to seminary chasing it. I lost my place there by my own fault, not because the fire went out. That’s a failure I still carry. But the appetite never left, and somewhere along the way I started to understand that a pulpit isn’t the only place a person gets to say Look at Him. This site is one of the ways I do it. This book is another. I’m not writing as a scholar with credentials to defend. I’m writing as someone who couldn’t stop looking, and who keeps finding that the closer he looks, the bigger and kinder God turns out to be than the version most of us were handed.

Why I write, and why I wrote the book

I’ve been quiet here for a couple of years. That’s because I was writing a book.

What started with my grandfather didn’t stay there. The love I found in Christ has a way of overflowing, first back to Him, then out to everyone He’s given me: my wife, my mom, my boys, the whole family I hope to stand beside at the end of all things. And then further still, past the edges of my own family, to people I’ve never met. Because once you’ve tasted the real thing, you realize the best gift you could ever hand anyone is the same one: Jesus. Not the thin, bumper-sticker version so many of us were given, but the whole, staggering truth of Him.

I have two sons, Finnegan and Calum, and showing them who Jesus really is may be the most loving thing I ever do. But this book isn’t only for them. It’s for anyone who was handed a God too small to be true and deserves to see the whole story. The Beauty of the Blood Stained Cross is the story of holiness, sacrifice, and the God who refused to let us go. I wrote it for my boys. I wrote it for you, too.