48 chapters. 48 modern stories from the world you already live in — athletes, executives, activists, ordinary people caught in extraordinary moments. Each one paired with the exact same move, playing out in 1 & 2 Samuel, three thousand years earlier.
"The claim this series makes is not that the Bible is relatable. It's that the Bible is accurate — that it describes human nature so precisely that the gap between then and now collapses the moment you look closely enough."
Real people navigating power, failure, loyalty, and faith in a world that was messy long before ours was. Told straight — no softening of the hard parts.
Athletes, executives, activists, and ordinary people caught in moments that reflect the same dynamics back to us across thousands of years. Sourced, searchable, real.
The format never changes so you always know where you are. Most chapters take five minutes to read. All of them require you to do something.
The thesis — sharpest form. Read it, then set it aside. The chapter earns it.
A true contemporary story. Athlete. Executive. Activist. Someone you can look up.
The same move in 1 & 2 Samuel — the actual text, ambiguity and all.
The insight that only becomes visible when you hold both stories at once.
One specific, doable thing for the next 24 hours. Not a question. An instruction.
Chapter 1 from the book, plus three bonus chapters written in the same format — not included in the final edition.
Someone mocking you just proved they missed the point. Don't get mad; use their lack of focus as your ultimate competitive advantage. Surprise them.
Stephen Curry was the best at the one thing he did, and almost no one wanted him. He played basketball, and he was small — about five-foot-six as a freshman in high school — and thin, and the people whose whole job is to spot future stars looked at his body and made a reasonable call: too small to matter where it counts.
When the recruiting season ended, the player now widely called the greatest shooter the game has ever seen did not have a single offer from a major college. The one school that made room for him was Davidson, a small program that major scouts weren't paying attention to.
His dad told him the truth: keep doing it like that, at your size, and you'll never make it. So the summer before his junior year, they tore the whole thing down and built it again from nothing. For weeks he was visibly worse. Other kids at summer camps asked him why he was even bothering. His family later called it "the summer of tears." He kept going, with no proof it would ever work.
And there, at Davidson, out of the spotlight, with no one important watching, he became extraordinary.
Scripture from the ESV.
Hannah had a problem everyone around her could see and no one would let her forget. She was one of two wives in the household of Elkanah. The other wife, Peninnah, had children. Hannah did not. Peninnah pressed this wound with precision, year after year, especially during the family's annual pilgrimage to worship at Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:6).
Hannah broke at the temple. She wept so hard, praying so intensely, lips moving without sound, that Eli the priest concluded she was drunk and accused her out loud. Here is where most people would collapse or explode. Hannah did neither. She corrected him — calmly, directly, without self-pity: "I am a woman troubled in spirit… I have been pouring out my soul before the LORD" (1 Samuel 1:15).
Then she left. Scripture records it plainly: "Then the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad" (1 Samuel 1:18). Not after Samuel was born. Not after the prayer was answered. Before. Nothing in her circumstances had changed. The peace arrived before the resolution.
Her son was Samuel. The man who would anoint two kings.
People expected to fail are almost never carefully watched. That invisibility — handed to you the moment someone decides you're not worth tracking — is the resource you build with. The dismissal is a bet that your size, your situation, your pain will keep you from your purpose.
Curry found the unwatched space a small school and a low expectation created, and he built in it. Hannah found the space that Peninnah's contempt and Eli's misreading created, and she built in it. Both stories turn on what happened on the inside, in the middle of it, before anything outside had changed.
The peace that came to Hannah came before anything in her circumstances changed. If clarity only arrives after your situation improves, you're always one bad development away from losing it.
Before you decide the lesson is "ignore the haters," stop. Hannah didn't pretend the hurt wasn't real. She wept until she had no sound left. If your only move is making sure everyone knows how wrong the person who dismissed you is, you're spending your energy on their story.
Today, write down one thing that matters to you that someone has made you feel small for caring about. Not as a wound. As a goal. Then write one action you can take in the next 24 hours that moves you one inch toward it. Not to prove anyone wrong. Because it belongs to you. The window is now. Use it.
Before the celebration ends, someone decides what it was for. The question is whether that someone is you — or whether you let the moment decide for you.
In September 2022, Yvon Chouinard — founder of Patagonia — announced he was giving the company away. Not selling it. Giving it. The company was valued at roughly three billion dollars. He transferred ownership to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit, structured so that all future profits — approximately one hundred million dollars a year — would go toward fighting climate change and protecting land. He and his family would receive nothing.
"Earth is now our only shareholder," the company's statement read. He was eighty-three years old. He had every legal right to take the money. He chose differently — he defined what the win was for before anyone required him to.
Scripture from the ESV.
David came back to Ziklag with everything — families recovered, spoil taken from the Amalekites. Two hundred of his six hundred men had been too exhausted to cross the Besor ravine and stayed behind with the supplies. They had not fought. Some objected: "Because they did not go with us, we will not give them any of the spoil" (1 Samuel 30:22).
David overruled it. "Who would listen to you in this matter? For as his share is who goes down into the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the supplies. They shall share alike" (1 Samuel 30:23–24). And then — this is the detail that matters — "He made it a statute and a rule for Israel from that day forward" (1 Samuel 30:25). He didn't just make a decision. He made a precedent.
Chouinard and David both arrived at a moment of victory and made the same choice: define what the win was for before anyone else could define it for them. Both set the terms of the distribution in advance and held to them. The chapter's narrow point is in the statute — fairness defined in quiet holds under pressure. Fairness negotiated in the middle of the pressure doesn't.
Think about something you're about to win — a project finishing, a season ending. Now think about the people who won't be in the room when it's celebrated but who made it possible. Before the moment arrives, decide what their share is. Not after the celebration, when it's harder. Now. Name one person whose contribution hasn't been publicly acknowledged. Decide today what you'll do about that.
The people nobody else wants have nowhere else to go. That's not a liability. That's the beginning of something.
In 2012, a basketball coach named Doc Rivers took over the Boston Celtics at a moment when the franchise was in transition — aging stars, shrinking expectations. What he became known for over his career was not tactics. It was his insistence on building culture with whoever showed up. His phrase for it was "Ubuntu" — "I am because we are." He applied it not to stars but to whoever was in the locker room — players other coaches had given up on, players with reputations and histories and question marks.
The Celtics that year were not a great team. They were a committed one. Rivers lost more than he won. He stayed. He kept building. The cave was not where the team died. It was where the culture started.
Scripture from the ESV.
David was a fugitive with Goliath's sword and nothing else. He went to a cave at Adullam, and his brothers came to him there. Then others came. The text is specific: "Everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul, gathered to him. And he became commander over them. There were about four hundred men with him" (1 Samuel 22:2).
Out of these four hundred men — distressed, in debt, bitter — David would eventually build the fighting force that held the kingdom together for decades. The Mighty Men trace their origins to this cave. The cave was the beginning.
Rivers and David received the same material: people no one else was building around. What they did with that material is the same — they showed up, they stayed, they took the people in front of them seriously, and they built something out of what others had discarded.
Who shows up when you have nothing to offer is a more accurate measurement than who shows up when you do.
Who is in your cave right now?
Doing something drastic on someone else's behalf, without their knowledge, and then expecting to be thanked for it — that's not loyalty. That's presumption.
In 2016, a Wells Fargo branch banker sat at her terminal and opened a credit card the customer had never requested. She knew it was wrong. She did it anyway — her branch needed eight more accounts that week, and she needed to keep her job.
Between 2002 and 2016, employees opened more than 3.5 million unauthorized accounts in customers' names. Senior leadership pointed to the employees. The employees pointed to the pressure. The pressure pointed to a culture building for over a decade. What almost no one said was the simplest thing: the customers had never asked for any of it.
Scripture from the ESV.
Two of Ish-bosheth's commanders — Baanah and Rechab — made a calculation. They came at midday while he was resting, entered his bedroom, and killed him. Then they traveled through the night to Hebron, where David was. Two men walking in the dark, carrying what they believed was a gift.
"Here is the head of Ish-bosheth, the son of Saul, your enemy" (2 Samuel 4:8). They had done David a favor. David's response was immediate: "How much more, when wicked men have killed a righteous man in his own house on his bed, shall I not now require his blood?" (2 Samuel 4:11). He had them killed. They had assumed David wanted Ish-bosheth dead. He had never said so.
The Wells Fargo employees and Baanah and Rechab are both acting on behalf of someone who never asked them to. Neither group received explicit instruction. Both acted as if they had. The gap between "I assumed this was wanted" and "I was asked to do this" is where accountability lives.
Presumed authorization is not authorization. Most people who act without it believe the ends justify the means. That belief is itself a form of presumption — you've decided what they need before they told you.
Think about a time you did something significant on someone else's behalf without checking first. The question isn't whether it worked out. It's whether they asked. Before you act on someone's behalf in a way that can't be undone: ask.
From Hannah's prayer to David's final song — all of 1 & 2 Samuel in order. Filter by category or theme.
Under development: six books across three distinct arcs, each going deep on a single biblical era. The same structure throughout — two stories, one principle, one move. My release dates are not estimates. They are commitments.
Building and defending the infrastructure of a life. Saul is talented, chosen, and ultimately destroyed by his own need for approval. David is flawed, hunted, and built by everything Saul ran from.
Built for the outlier, the cultural minority, and the high-performance competitor operating in a hostile environment.
For the builders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. How you build something that outlasts you, in conditions that offered no guarantees.
The Rise of Kingdoms ends. The Resistance picks up with the moment the infrastructure starts breaking.
You built something. It worked. And then the people in charge of maintaining it started making small accommodations — nothing dramatic, just tiny erosions, each one with a reasonable-sounding explanation.
Volume 2 is about what happens next: what systemic decay actually looks like from the inside, the specific mechanics of holding the line when culture is drifting, and the people who refused to go down with the system around them.
Michael Phelps won eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics — the most individual gold medals in a single Games in Olympic history. By any external measure, he had arrived. What happened next wasn't reported much.
After Beijing, Phelps entered what he later called "a really dark place." Depression, isolation, a sense of complete emptiness after years of building toward one moment that had now passed. The training structure that had organized his entire life was suddenly pointless. He found ways to fill the time. None of them worked.
He checked into treatment in 2014. After treatment came the work — not the swimming, but the interior work he'd been deferring for years. He came back for Rio, older, more deliberate, cleaner. He won five more gold medals. More important, he knew why he was there.
Elijah had just delivered the most dramatic moment in the national religious history of Israel. He challenged 450 prophets of Baal, proved them frauds, executed them all. God showed up in fire. Then a messenger arrived with a death threat from the queen, and Elijah ran. He fled into the wilderness, sat under a tree, and asked to die.
God's response was not correction or rebuke. An angel showed up with food and water: "Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you." Care preceded correction.
If a chapter landed — if something named something you've been carrying — say so. That feedback shapes what comes next more than you'd think.
Early access, release announcements, and content that doesn't make it into the books. (Which for this first book was about 20 chapters.)
48 chapters. 48 real stories. The whole arc of 1 & 2 Samuel — and something to do after every single one.