Monthly Archives: August 2025

In collaboration and with thanks to my friend, the infamous musician on the east coast

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I extend my hand to myself. A simple, profound handshake that is quiet but certain. A vow made with my eyes facing my inward self to honor who I am and who I am becoming.

Thumb – I will no longer smoke weed in secret. That shadowed life is behind me. I have prayed for clarity for so long, and now I’m choosing it. Full stop. And with clarity, comes the obvious: presence. My presence is strong and I will no longer dull it with weed. I step into each day without a veil. Once each season, I will return to the smoke, but not as a habit, not as an escape. I will smoke once a season as a free man marking a day on the calendar. A celebration. A ritual. A way to remember and dance with the edges that I’m a life long member of. It’s also a way to see how far I have come, and used as a reflective tool.

Index finger – I keep my word. This is more than a small promise. This is greater than a commitment. I keep my word. To myself, to others, and to God above all. He knows and sees all. A word kept is integrity made visible. It is a mirror of the divine. The man without his word drifts. I am not a drifter. I am a man who guards his word and stands rooted. Anchored. Whole. Unshaken.

Middle finger – I build muscle for life because health, appearance and confidence are three branches of the same tree. Discipline of the body becomes discipline of the soul. I eat with care. I move with purpose. I train. I rest. I return again. Chop wood, carry water. In the rhythm of this practice, I find strength, and with that strength, I give my best and make poetry – no, not “make poetry,” I am the poem, and with that, I walk in humility, laughter, encouragement and love.

Ring finger – I am a remarkable communicator. Not just “good,” but “great!” I speak with purpose. My words are seeds that I scatter into the soil of human hearts. Including my own heart. Some heal. Some guide. Some awaken. To rototill my soil, I read. I write. I listen. I think. I pause. I speak. I gather gratitude for every voice that shapes me. I can talk and listen to anyone and everyone. I’m intentional about not making noise because I want my remarkable communication to be a gift.

Pinky finger – I keep going. I keep growing. Life is long, and at 50, I have another 50 years. My journey continues. If I look back, it’s only to reflect, and gather strength to proceed on my journey because every stone on the road has been precious to me. I, forever, remain fresh, curious, awake. This is joy itself, and it’s my essence. Each morning opens with wonder and curiosity. It’s insatiable. Each night closes in prayer and gratitude. Day by precious day. Step by step. Breath by breath. I move closer to the life I dream, and nearer to the God who waits in heaven.

This is my path. This is my promise. This is my life. God, give me the strength to embody this, Amen.

A vow kept within,
roots of trust break through the soil,
life opens its hand.

. . . . .

The spirit of my aim was simple: to grow my confidence by keeping one small promise to myself. Thirty days without weed.

I knew I could do it. I had done it before. But in this season, I kept starting and stopping, talking myself in circles, failing, and beginning again. That loop was eroding my trust in myself.

When you keep a small promise, you become a person of your word, a person of your word to yourself first. That changes everything. Powerful.

Your relationship with yourself deepens. Confidence grows. And with that, your relationships with others shift too. Possibility opens.

Today marks 30 days

Coincidental sidenote: YouTube informs me that my channel is two years old today

I am a man of my word to myself. No matter what happens, I have that. And that is everything. I feel so much better now than I felt 31 days ago.

This has been the spirit of my aim. And because of it, I believe my prayers will unfold in their time. I will let them come. And so it shall be.

I want to be the man that I am now- later.
I want to be the man I want to be later- now.

In that space between, I keep learning, becoming, growing.

Today I am embracing the beautiful tension of being both complete and unfinished at the same time.

I have always been a confident person. I have always known I could keep my promises.

Yet life has its events, accidents, and situations. When they come, confidence can get shaken. Suddenly, you are not entirely sure of yourself anymore.

Bad habits work the same way. They creep in slowly, like weeds breaking through a driveway. Then one day you realize the path you are walking is cracked and uneven. You have to clear it back and repave what was meant to hold your steps.

That was me these last forty-ish days.

At first, it was about her. She was the reason. She was the why. And though she did not return, I will always honor that she was the spark that started this fire in me. I did the work, but she was the catalyst.

Day after day, one small promise, I’ve come back to myself. 30-ish days. I recorded thirty videos, and each one showed me what I mustn’t ever forget: my own strength. My own voice. My steady, original face.

It has been like walking away from a car accident. At first, the work is survival, just learning to move again. Then you notice you are not the same person who went in. Something in you has been re-made.

I see now it was never just about her. It was about me. It was about the Lord, who planted this blueprint in me before I ever knew it. He knew what I needed before I did. He knew the same for her. For that, I give thanks.

Who knows what the future holds? I’m open to all possibilities.

What I wanted was to win someone back. What I gained was winning myself forward.

One small promise has led to a greater, sturdier confidence. Now I know I can keep an even bigger promise, the ultimate promise, that being marital Love.

Now I know the Lord is with me. In a quieter, steadier way, I have greater depth of trust in myself. I fully understand now.

If God can take what is crooked, broken, and messy and still draw straight lines toward a greater good, then who am I to resist this shaping?

If Jesus has taken up residence in my heart, and has come to stay, then the work of transformation is already underway. Even in my fears, insecurities, and regretful missteps, He is renovating, remaking, reshaping me into a truer masterpiece. Closer to my best version.

So it makes sense that I feel this discomfort, that the pain comes and goes like waves. I am no different from the ones I read about in Scripture, each of their stories holding up a mirror, each life in some way reminding me of my own.

And with that, here I am, in this moment, choosing to praise first. To continue yielding. To never turn away from the hand that holds me, even when that hand presses me through fire, bends me beyond my knowing, or asks me to trust in silence without answers.

I imagine a fountain deep enough to hold all my wishes.

For each love that turned to distance, I would toss a coin.

Not to erase them, but to meet them again, fresh, unbruised, unshadowed by what we could not carry.

We would see each other the way strangers do, eyes soft, questions rising, warmth flickering between us like the first spark of a fire.

Hours of talk, the kind where time slips away. Then one kiss, so true it tells us everything.

From there, we would walk into a place untouched by regret. A place without the words we wish we had not said, without the things we cannot undo.

Only newness.

Only discovery.

It would feel like two people learning love after a long season of solitude.

And maybe it would feel like forever, starting again.

Today, in the grocery store, we paused together in aisle eleven.

Ten minutes of presence.

It struck me again, as if it surprises me every time. How life offers itself in passing moments.

We walk through our days, and suddenly, we cross paths with one another.

We speak of where we’ve been, what has happened, where our hearts still long to go, and what it might mean to arrive.

Even if we get there, though, will we ever stop striving? For each season there is a reason.

Each of us carries a weight, yet each of us also carries a light.

There is rest within reach. There is laughter to break the heaviness. There is fruit ready to be shared.

When we part, I feel the truth of it. The dark nights shape us as surely as the bright days.

These small exchanges, these touches of soul against soul, are what make the journey bearable, and beautiful.

Deep in your mind live all your memories. The smell of cookies at grandma’s house, your first day of school, that time you got scared in the dark. They sleep there, waiting. Life happens and we are reminded. Life happens and we make more memories, piling onto the heap.

When you pick up your pen or pencil and accept the invite of the blank white page something magic happens. Your brain becomes a detective, digging through boxes of forgotten things:

a joke your old friend told,

a movie that made you cry,

the way snow feels on your tongue,

the whispered secret your 7th grade girlfriend placed in your ear, and in doing so gave you your first tingle of intimacy.

It mixes them altogether like ingredients in a recipe only you can make.

Your hand moves across the paper and suddenly there it is – a thought you never knew you had, a story only you could tell.

Some folks think they’ve found a shortcut. They type commands into a computer:

“Write my story about summer vacation.”

“Make it sound sad and happy.”

“Add more details about the beach.”

The computer spits out words. Perfect words. Clean words. Words that sound like everyone and no one.

I’ve been guilty of this. I’ve used so called AI to help me write things that belonged only to me, and I regret it. That email that I thought connected the dots, or made the perfect point, was actually an undoing that dislodged everything that belonged to me. I’ll never make that error again.

So called AI can’t capture the scraped knee from falling off your bike. Or the weird dream you had last Tuesday. It can’t know of the joy and safety in your kitchen when your mom hums and cooks.

So called AI doesn’t know these things.

It can’t reach into your heart and pull out the messy, real, beautiful stuff that makes you YOU. It never felt embarrassed or excited or scared. It never had a best friend, or lost a tooth, or fell in love and lost that love. Only you have that secret treasure chest. Only you can dig deep to find the gold buried in your brain, in your heart, in a lifetime of small and big moments.

So don’t let a computer write your story.

Also, don’t be indifferent to your story. It’s yours and only yours. Pay attention to it. Cultivate it. Add to it. Change its direction. Full speed ahead. Wrestle with it on the page of life and jot down little and large pieces of it on paper. Take that paper to the keyboard and let it bleed out of your typing hands onto the digital white space. Wrestle with the words. Cross things out. Delete. Try again. Because what comes out is yours alone.

Kids, family, friends, you reading this…

That’s all I’m trying to do here. This is “Eric L Walker” [dot] com for a reason. Me. And I think it’s now more important than ever.

Why? Because an onslaught of inevitable video and text AI is upon us. Finding the others who are creating and reading plain text from their own noggin will be the equivalent of going for a quiet walk in the woods. We just have to make sure that the forests we craft on cream paper spark from our own human-ness. And as it has always been, we have to continue practicing to get the communication right.

There was no need for another phone call. The break was clean and things were clear.

Besides, the track was waiting, nine lanes wide, enough space for me to run down all my hurt.

I no longer had any questions. There was no more waiting in anticipation.

So I ran hard, harder than I thought I could. I dug deep, made it hurt, and let the physical pain match the hurt I carried.

When I came home, I slowed down. A long soak in the bath. A clean, careful shave. An early bedtime. My kids tucked me in with care. They understood without saying much.

Rest came with acceptance. I felt what I needed to feel. I let it settle when I closed my eyes.

I will not fault myself. My hesitation was justified. My reflections were true. No one is perfect. Not me, not her. I know how well I treated her, and I know that will stand the test of time.

I would have gone all the way with her, but it was too late. Her heart changed. That is not on me. She has a different journey now.

For today, anyway, that’s how I will remember it.

I have a church to lean into. I have everything I’ve always had, and more. Wiser for the time. Ready for all that can come next. I pick up where I left off, simply and happily walking through my days like I was the day we met.

Link: 9 Lane Therapy

God accomplishes His will in spite of our brokenness. I used to be under the assumption that the Bible was a Hallmark story. The Hallmark story is clear, predictable and clean. It begins with a little conflict, but then the conflict gets resolved and everything is happily ever after. Actual grace doesn’t work that way. The way God works in a person’s life, in people’s lives, in family’s lives, in a Country’s or a Kingdom’s lives is never clean or clear like a Hallmark story. Sure, there are times when God manifests Himself powerfully and miraculously, but many more times, God allows us to choose. He wants us to choose good. He wants us to choose grace. He wants us to choose the best thing. Also, He allows us to choose brokenness. He allows us to choose in a way that He would condemn, and yet He still works with it and works with us. That’s the key to faith, I think, it’s that everything that we surrender over to God can be used. There’s nothing God can’t use when we give it to Him. I know that God will work with it in ways I can’t imagine. With that, I trust in the Lord. So it’s with this understanding that I surrender to God. That I give all of my brokenness, and all of the brokenness that I’m associated with to Him. I know that God is faithful to His promises and steadfast. I will continue to pray, and I will give my brokenness to Him. I will strive to also be faithful to my promises and steadfast. Amen.

Even after I ask,
“Who will love me now?”
And Jesus replies,
“I will always love you.”

After I stare the sun down
’til my eyes go blind.
After I scroll endlessly,
like a chimp with a cocaine lever,
looking for something
that will never be there.

After I say no to weed
again, and again, and again —
though it promises to soothe,
to sweet talk me into rest.

After I lift weights
’til my body breaks,
’til I can’t press one more rep.
After I walk,
I run,
I sprint the track
until I drip sweat like rain.

After I’ve kicked the doors down
that needed to be kicked —
and when kindness called,
I’ve worn kid gloves.

After I’ve saved the day for my kids,
and they love me.
After I’ve ruined the day for my kids,
and they hate me.

After I’ve worked all the hours I can work,
paid the debts,
met the savings goal.

After I’ve turned from the quick fix,
chosen the slow burn of growth,
kept my promises to myself.

After my health has slipped,
my integrity bent.
After I’ve argued with myself like a lawyer,
after I’ve stuck myself up,
jammed a nine millimeter in my own face.

Even if fear were to vanish,
even after love gained,
love lost,
love returned,
or gone forever.

After new friends,
after old friends,
after all the coming and going —

I must learn to sit still with myself.
To breathe calm
in the middle of the hurricane.
To watch rainbows rise,
to watch storms pass.

I must find a way to live,
a way I never knew before.

The countdown sharpens my focus. It snaps my attention to a moment, to what’s about to unfold. Or what’s unfolding. The numbers are dropping, never rising. The closer to zero, the more the tension rises. But the real point isn’t the numbers, it’s the promise that’s been made. Zero on the count means we do the thing, or we just did the thing. The commitment gets made first. A countdown just carries what’s already been decided.