On Building as Devotion

Why is almost nothing written about Jesus in his youth? Luke gives us one account — Jesus at fourteen, already prodigious among the teachers, already knowing: "Don't you know I must be about my Father's business?"

Then silence. Sixteen years before the ministry begins.

I've wondered about those years for a long time. What was he studying? What was he saying? What did he wish for? How did he live his daily life? Reading between the lines, he must have been practicing — quietly, in his own way. He knew the Law and the Prophets. He taught them with an eloquence that could only come from having lived inside them. He was the ultimate flowering of the thought and tradition of his own time. That doesn't happen overnight. It happens in the silent years.

But those years were never written down. And that silence left a gap — not just in scripture, but in the model of what a life of devotion actually looks like while you're living it. Before the teaching. Before the ministry. Before anyone knows your name.

What does a twenty-year-old do with the call to wake up?

Growing up, the dominant narrative was simple: go to school, get a job. That narrative is falling apart. The tools change — books, technology, whatever comes next — but the need doesn't. A young person still needs a way to return to what they are. The question is what materials they pick up.

I picked up A Course in Miracles. I believe it to be the most significant book of the last two thousand years. Believed to have been channeled from Jesus himself, it is profoundly poetic and prophetic in ways we have yet to fully appreciate. Its form is unlike anything that came before — 365 daily lessons that don't teach you a philosophy but undo the one you already have. It doesn't add anything to the mind. It returns the mind to its original state. Innocent. Free. Loving. It will be a great and timeless classic for countless generations to come, brought to life in their own ways.

I picked up the I Ching. Another foundational text — the bedrock beneath Daoist and Confucian thought — and yet, like the Course, entirely beyond religion. It's a tool for living in harmony with the underlying principles of existence. When applied to the way of the Course — forgiveness, releasing, self-realization — each hexagram becomes a mirror showing you where energy moves and where you're holding on.

And then I did something I didn't expect. I started building.

Not building as a career move. Not building as self-expression. Building as the practice itself. I wrote code that holds these two traditions — the Course and the I Ching — in a single daily practice. An app called The Way. Each day, a lesson. Each practice, a reading. The ancient and the immediate, meeting in the same space.

The act of building sharpened something in me. Writing code for this — choosing every word of every hexagram reading, discerning what was true from what was merely clever, sitting with the I Ching's counsel on its own presentation — all of it became a form of study not unlike what I imagine those silent years must have held. Not public. Not performative. Just a person alone with the materials, working carefully, letting the work change them.

I'm lighter now. Freer. More certain that this direction works — not because I've arrived anywhere, but because the practice keeps proving itself. All my energies get directed increasingly toward the Highest, and all else falls away.

That's what building as devotion means. Not that the code is sacred. But that the attention you bring to it can be. The silent years weren't wasted. They were the real work. And they don't have to go unwritten anymore.