Hello, friends.

I hope you’re doing well.

I have big news to share!

Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to share it yet. So for now what I will say is that this is something I’ve been working toward for a long time and it’s finally happening.

I’ll have more details for you as soon as I’m allowed to share them.

Now for what you might see as bad news though.

Finally making some headway into a venue I’ve been chasing for years is coming at a very ironic time. Please allow me to explain.

For those who followed me here from my previous newsletter from years ago, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the faith you’ve had in me to keep going even after the way I disappeared when my life got crazy.

You also know that I’ve had a major spiritual awakening over the last few years.

Looking back on it, I see now that the Lord has been guiding my steps for years as He directed me to exactly where I needed to be to eventually find my way to Him.

Between everything I’ve had going on in my personal life lately and the direction the world seems to be going, I’ve been feeling very convicted (and conflicted, if I’m being honest) about the ways I’ve been spending my time lately.

Although I wouldn’t have looked at it this way even just a few months ago, I have to admit to myself today that the fiction I’ve been working on here is not God honoring, and I want to change that.

But what’s more is that I’ve been feeling called to take my writing in a certain direction. I’ve been feeling this call for a while but I kept denying it and hiding it and not doing anything with it because I didn’t feel I was qualified to do it.

But recently I was in church and the pastor was preaching about how almost no one in the Bible felt ready when they were called. Arguably, perhaps Isaiah and Daniel were ready, but almost no one else was. Moses had all sorts of excuses why he couldn’t do what the Lord was telling him to do. Jonah flat out refused for his own reasons. Even David ran from his calling for a long time.

(Please don’t misunderstand. I’m certainly not comparing myself to any of these incredible men who did amazing things with their lives)

But that was when it hit me. It doesn’t matter if I feel worthy or qualified to do what He is calling me to do.

He’s calling me. It’s that simple. If I don’t have the words for it then he will give them to me.

Now, I’m not saying that my dragon stories are done and over. I still very much have a desire to finish this story that began almost ten years ago and has been in my mind for a lot longer than that.

But when God calls you to action, you obey.

So before I go any further, please understand that a part of me does regret having to leave these stories on the back burner. And I completely understand if you don’t want to wait on me to continue them. So, please accept my apologies for having to do this. And please know that this was not what I wanted.

But with that being said, I am going to continue putting up Revenge of the Overlords for those who are paying subscribers so you will have access to everything I have completed at this point. If there is interest, I could make the prequel I was working on available in its current state. It’s not fully edited, but if you want to read it anyway that is certainly something I could make available.

Also, I do have a collaboration that I’m in the middle of and I still fully intend to honor that. So while I won’t be posting much content here other than the paywalled Revenge chapters, I do have a fairly extensive collaboration coming up in a few months that you can look forward to.

Now, with that being said, if anyone here is interested in following me to a very different project, please read on. Writing is one of the greatest blessings God ever gave me, and I fully intend to keep using it.

So here’s what I’m working on.

If you don’t know what the Septuagint is, the short answer is it was the first translation of the Old Testament to any language that wasn’t Hebrew. In this case, it was into Greek. Importantly, this was the version of Scripture that Jesus and his Disciples would have been familiar with. Also, of all the hundreds of times that the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, almost all of those quotations are from the Septuagint version.

I’ve been pretty gung-ho about the Septuagint for a long while now, but this is really all just preamble to the point.

I had the idea some time ago that there is no parallel Bible that includes the English translation of the Septuagint, and there really aren’t any digital parallel Bibles (if you don’t know what a parallel Bible is, well, it’s basically a single book that shows the text of multiple translations side-by-side for comparison) at all. As soon as I realized that, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I could create one. And I could even add my own analyses of the Septuagint vs other translations while I was at it.

Clearly you can see why I don’t feel qualified for this. I’m no Bible scholar. I’m no theologian. I’m not a pastor. I’m not an experienced Bible commentator or spiritual book author.

But the more I thought about this and the more I prayed about it, the more it became clear to me that it wasn’t my pride or ego or ambition at work here. This was a leading from the Holy Spirit. This is what God wants me to do doing.

So this is what I’ve been working on.

In support of this, I’ve created a new Substack Publication where I will be expositing on passages of Scripture where the Masoretic Text (the modern Hebrew text from about 1,000 A.D. that virtually all modern Bible translations are based on) and the Septuagint diverge significantly and discussing the theological, cultural, and textual context that ties in with it all along with what I believe about it and what scholarly debates are ongoing about it.

You can check out what I’ve done so far at LXXscrolls.substack.com and if it interests you then you can definitely subscribe to that publication to keep up with this project.

If you’ve read this far I’m going to assume that you’re interested and are either Christian or have an academic interest in various translations of the Bible. If that’s the case, please do check out what I’m doing over at The Septuagint Scrolls. Or if you specifically want to read about my faith journey, I’ve written about it HERE.

But if I’m wrong, if you are in any way cynical or disparaging about my faith, please do me the favor of not reaching out to me about it. You’re never going to “teach me the error of my ways.” I spent a huge chunk of my life being probably the biggest anti-Christian you could ever meet. I know all the arguments. I know all the things that appear to be fallacies when looking from the outside in. I know the textual criticisms. I know the things that appear to be fiction or nonsense. But more than anything, I know that if you go looking for something you can point to and say, “this is why it can’t be true” then you’re going to find it.

On the other hand, if you are not a believer but are open to hearing about my faith and want to learn more, then please do reach out to me. I would love to talk to you about it. I genuinely love people and I wish the absolute best for everyone. I want every single person to find Jesus, repent, and be saved. So I will be happy to pray for and with you, if you’ll let me.

Alright. I think that’s really all I have to say about that at this point. In the next week or two I’m going to start posting a new chapter of Revenge every week or two. In the meantime, I hope to see you in The Septuagint Scrolls.

God bless, my friends.