The first time in my life I could clearly see a net beneath me, I let go. It wasn't there.

I have spent my life learning how to do hard things alone. As a Black queer, neurodivergent minister, there was rarely a generation ahead of me who had already done what I was trying to do. Most of what I know, I learned by discovery — fear doubled with pride.

For thirty years I have built ministry that way. Five of those years as Director of Worship Arts Ministries at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis. Before that, twenty years in Unitarian Universalist communities. I grew up in South Baltimore. I got my PhD so my little sister would know a family doctor, not just imagine one. In our family, that was a first.

What I allowed myself, for once, not to know was whether I still had to do most of it alone.

My partner urged me toward a different season. He spoke with certainty: financial stability, practical care, time to rest and build what came next. I was preparing to leave steady employment and launch the next chapter of my ministry and creative work. A health crisis had made clear what I had been deferring. It was time.

He helped me make a plan. We made a plan. I was excited to feel so responsive to my soul’s direction, and terrified to let go of the options that helped money flow while my creative spirit cracked drier by the moment, the memory, the email.  

I let go of possessions to form a shared home. I reorganized my life. I stepped away from my salaried role on the word of someone I had every reason to trust. I spent money like I was investing in the sure bet this surely was.

The net was there. Then it was gone.

It happened the same day I left. The relationship didn't fracture — it vanished. What was promised as support became silence. The kind of silence that answers every question you're afraid to ask.

One day I was loved. The next, I was not. And I was already mid-air.

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What followed was not grief. Grief requires stillness. What followed was emergency.

Housing access cut off. Police called to supervise retrieval of my belongings. I stood in that hallway with an officer beside me, waiting to collect my own identification, then was escorted from the building and left on the street in a Minneapolis winter with what I could carry.

I am a Black man. I knew what that situation could become before I could name the fear. I held it the way you hold something with no safe place to be set down.

Were it not for the people who love me — who answered immediately and made space — I do not know where I would have slept that night.

I sometimes had to stop, in those days, and remember that I was also in grief. There was no room for it. There still isn't quite enough. But I am making room, because the work that was waiting before all of this is still waiting.

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I left my church role with a direction.

For years I have watched good ministers grow tired inside systems that reward caution and quietly punish courage. The work ahead is for them — and for anyone who still believes love can be stubborn enough to change a life. I want to minister to the ministers who have gone raisin-dry with fatigue, to speak with a prophetic voice not moderated by payroll, politics, or fear, and to make life-changing art rather than form-changing procedure.

The months immediately ahead were meant to be a season of rest and discernment — time to listen for the shape this next chapter should take. That is the work that was waiting when everything unraveled. Instead, those months were consumed by emergency.

The work will take shape through writing, teaching, art, and gatherings where religious professionals can recover their courage and remember why they began. I want to teach and I want to learn. I want to find out what I am capable of when I am not also holding an institution together.

I am not nearly there yet — and if we can do something about that together, then not being there may be the most exciting moment of all.

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This campaign is a defined 90-day stabilization runway. The goal is $24,500.

First, I need to start building a new home — deposit, first months, the fees and movers and utilities that make a home actual rather than theoretical. Then the ordinary infrastructure of a functioning life: health insurance, groceries, phone, transportation, the things whose absence becomes loud very quickly. I also surrendered furnishings and belongings to build that shared home, and those need replacing. And I need therapy — weekly, during this — because what happened was real and the body keeps the score whether or not the calendar makes room for it. I have included modest support for art materials and workspace, because making things is how I find my way back to myself. It always has been.

Ninety days. Stable ground so the next chapter can begin with intention.

I have spent thirty years holding space for other people's thresholds — blessing the bereaved, commissioning the newly called, staying in the room when the room went dark.

I did not expect to be standing at one this way.

I know what this moment requires. Someone has to show up. The ground has to hold.

If you have ever been held by the work I do — if a Sunday, a service, a song, a moment of liturgy has mattered to you — this is your opportunity to hold back.

A bridge. That is the whole of what I am asking for.

$24,500. 90 days.