Marco and I are two non-biblical scholars who hold no theological degrees. We’ve both been married to our wives for over fifty years combined. We have eight children between us. Marco has two adult boys and one adult daughter, while I have five adult children; four girls and a boy. Family life has been a blessing for both of us, but as you may know or can imagine, navigating these waters hasn’t come without many a struggle through one storm after another. We have shared some of those experiences in our writings, as well as in our podcasts. Even getting to this “family men” season of our lives has not been an easy journey for either of us. Prior to getting married and for some years into our marriages, we’ve both wandered aimlessly through the wilderness, and we’ve met with, and continue to experience varying degrees of hardships and disappointments as a result.
Marco and I became Christians together over forty years ago as teenagers in high school, and at first, we paraded our salvation around as a trophy or some sort of prize. We behaved like we were part of an exclusive club, and we looked down upon those around us who weren’t members. We became unbearably self-righteous. We bragged about our confidence in our newfound status of being “saved”, and we showed little mercy towards those who weren’t. We behaved like children with new toys that no one else around us had. But we neglected to get plugged in deeper. Although there were other adult Christians around us, we received little or no mentoring. We became “lone wolf” Christians for many years. Eventually the shine wore off, and we tried to put our salvation in a vault. I returned to the catholic church of my youth on the rare occasion I did go to church, while Marco attended his mom’s church once in a while. Eventually, we stopped growing at all spiritually.
We needed something to take the place of the euphoria we once felt as new Christians, so we moved right into the world of self-pleasing ambition. Our guaranteed Christian status gave us the feeling that we were above it all, as if we were untouchable. We felt we could bend or even break some of the rules in order to satisfy our quest for excitement, because we were still operating over the safety net of salvation. As a consequence, we wandered into a desert of nothingness. Life became stale, and in the fog of our sin we lost any sense of direction or purpose. We failed to live up to the expectations of others and even the expectations we were told God had for us in our lives.
As we got older, we began to desire more from our lives. Like I said, we got married and we began having families. As a result, we gradually began to seek more of God, and His status steadily increased in our lives. We began to recognize Him as a living, present being…not just a God of the past, or a God in the sky, or of the by and by, to be placed in a bank for safekeeping like some delicate treasure, but one who wants to speak into our lives in the here and now. We met a God who not only wanted us to know Him, but also wanted to be in relationship with us. We met a God who wanted to be included in the conversation, a God with something relevant to say to us as long as we were willing to listen. The more we received from Him, the more we craved from Him, and the more we were willing to surrender ourselves to Him. We began sensing a new wave of euphoria. Not like the old one steeped in pride, but a new one, bathed in humility, which brought with it a hunger, or rather a need for more of Him every day. Over the ensuing years, Marco and I spent countless hours discussing and discovering simple truths about God that you probably won’t find in very many religious text books or from theological studies. These crumbs and nuggets of truth brought us face to face with a God that we knew about from the Bible off the pages and in the room with us. An hour get-together on the phone or in person with Marco turned into two, then three, and more. We couldn’t get enough. Over time, we began to see a change take place in ourselves. We were being noticeably shaped by God. We began to have new desires, and these new cravings surpassed many of our old ones.
Eventually, it was no longer enough to just discuss God’s revelations among ourselves. We began to feel compelled to share them with others. So, we birthed the idea of a blog, a place where we could share what we learned with others. We created a web site called Godunplugged.com. God Unplugged is just the result of a conversation between two guys and God. It’s a simple presentation of the word of God detached from the loftiness, the pomp and circumstance, and other ceremonial distractions that accompany religion and religious institutions. We desire to convey a more personal and closer look into the heart and character of a God who loves us and has an overwhelming desire to be in close relationship with us. Our goal is to reveal this living God without the “preachiness” of many of our churches, which often burden us with check lists of what we have to do in order to please and discover God. Through the use of illustrations and allegories, our writings and related podcasts emphasize God’s desire to be intimately coupled with us in order that He may transform us as He walks us out of our aimless wanderings and directs us towards more fulfilling and purposeful lives. We want to continue to awaken ourselves and our readers to a real and personal God, a merciful God that meets us where we are if we invite Him to join with us…one who does not judge us based on our accomplishments or failures, but who draws us in by His unconditional love so that He can celebrate with us in the healthy areas of our lives, as well as speak into and heal the broken ones.