January 2026 Life Update

As January settles in, I'm realizing how little I've shared here lately. This past year was a total whirlwind and I've had a lot less headspace to step back and reflect, as well as a lot less time to write.

We’re coming up on almost three years in Arizona now. In some ways, that’s hard to believe. The time has gone incredibly fast. In other ways, it still surprises me how slowly a place becomes “home” after so much sustained transition. With each passing season, Arizona feels less foreign. Familiar rhythms are forming. Certain landmarks and patterns are starting to feel normal rather than novel.

At the same time, we had so much change in the years leading up to getting here that I think our sense of rootedness is still catching up. The swirl of church planting has probably slowed that process even more. We’re grateful for the ways God has met us here, but it still doesn’t quite feel settled in our bones yet. Perhaps the number of years of transition to get out here are stretching the timeline, I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, that sense of groundedness and belonging still isn't where I'd like for it to be.

Our kids continue to adjust to living here. They’re doing well overall, but friendships have formed more slowly than we hoped and in a lot of ways they still miss the last season of life where their lives felt a lot more full than they do right now. (I'd be lying if I said that I don't wrestle with some parental guilt about that). I suppose that’s probably our biggest prayer request for our family right now—that God would continue to give them meaningful relationships and a deeper sense of belonging in this new phase of life as time goes on.

A Challenging Year Behind Us

2025 was a harder year than I anticipated at Fuse. There were a number of difficult situations to navigate—tensions on our team, hitting the fatigue of being more than two years in (everyone says year 2-3 is really a trial), complicated dynamics that required more emotional and spiritual energy than expected, and a travel schedule that ended up being much busier than was wise given the year it turned out to be. In hindsight, some of that travel made sense on paper, but it contributed to a level of fatigue that became more apparent as the year wore on. I feel like I spend the whole year racing to catch up with whatever was pressing that week.

At the same time, God has continued to do genuinely incredible things in our community. One of the most notable healings I’ve ever personally witnessed happened in front of the whole church on Palm Sunday. Moments like that remind me that God is still very present, very active, and very kind. And yet, alongside those moments, it has very much felt like a season where God has been allowing things to be hollowed out—where familiar sources of strength or momentum haven’t worked the way they used to. That kind of season is disorienting. It’s also been painful at times. I’ve felt the fatigue more deeply than I like to admit.

But I can see now how formative this has been for me. God has been forcing some good work in me—clarifying motivations, pruning false dependencies, and slowly re-centering what actually matters. It’s hard formation, but it’s good formation. And it’s helping clarify, in a deeper way, what we are really about at Fuse. We're seeing more clearly what we're about and how to get where the Lord is taking us. We're getting better at investing in people and raising them up. We're figuring out how to do team more and solo less (which can be a challenge in the wild-west out here).

This last season has feel like negative momentum. People have moved away, others have transitioned into new seasons. The room feels a little emptier than it did about a year ago. Giving to Kingdom Labs has been down. And most of the things I would try would feel like quicksand: putting effort in with no movement out. If you've ever led something with negative momenum, you know how painful it can be. It has been a year of being on my face before Jesus, which has done some really good work in me as a person.

As we head into this next ministry season, I'm feeling like we're making a lot of right moves, and I'm seeing bits of momentum building in pockets. It feels like we're getting some foundational stuff in place more solidly and I'm glad for that.  

Encouraging Experiments in Prayer

One of the more encouraging developments over the last season has been a tool we've developed that we're just now beginning to experiment with in other church contexts.

For Fuse we created something we call a Prayer Watch—a very simple tool designed to help a church pray effectively and consistently for one another. It is a great example of a lot of what I believe our opportunity is in this season; learning to leverage tech to make the church more connected and interdependent. It just removes all the questions of "what should I pray for?" and makes it simple to directly pray for needs in a very personal way. The heart behind it is straightforward: make inter-body prayer normal, accessible, and sustained. I suppose it's a kind of 21st century prayer chain.

We’ve been incredibly encouraged by what it’s produced so far. It’s facilitated a surprising amount of prayer across the body, and that prayer has noticeably increased the sense of connectedness among our people. Our little community has used it to pray - we're closing in on 100 hours of prayer facilitated through the tool since we kicked it off a few months ago. And all of that has added up to some really cool changes in church: when people are actively praying for one another, something shifts in how they relate, how they listen, and how they carry each other’s burdens.

As we’ve shared this with a few friends in other contexts, there’s been quite a bit of interest in trying it out. So right now, we’re piloting the Prayer Watch in a handful of other churches and settings to see how it translates and what we can learn. It’s still early so we'll see how that goes. I know if we can replicate what has happened at Fuse in some other contexts, this may be a real blessing to some communities. We'll see what God with it!

As always, thank you for praying for us, supporting us, and walking with us—sometimes closely, sometimes from a distance. We’re grateful for what God has done, honest about what’s been hard, and hopeful about what He’s continuing to form in us and among us.