About
The guy who connected these dots
God has an interesting way of handing out callings.
We’re all given meaningful work to do, but God seems considerably less impressed with our ideas about what counts as important. Big and small. Visible and unnoticed. Who’s equipped for what—and what’s actually worth doing in the first place.
Scripture is full of evidence, and that should give the rest of us some hope. Moses had objections. David was an unlikely choice. Paul had a past. And Peter was courageous, impulsive, stubborn, occasionally spectacularly wrong—and Jesus still called him the Rock.
Apparently, God sees possibilities—and significance—in places we might overlook. Including ourselves.
Life is always teaching. The trick is paying attention.
Yeah, “midpoint” is optimistic. But I’m still connecting the dots.
Michael doesn’t claim to have life figured out. He’s simply spent a lot of years paying attention to it.
Raised in the Catholic tradition in South Bend, Indiana, Michael received a strong Christian education and formation from an early age. In his late teens, the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian tradition of logic and reason sparked a lifelong fascination with how we think—something he eventually summed up this way:
“It’s not what you know—or what you think you know—but how you think.”
Then life supplied the laboratory: a very secular university, U.S. Naval Aviation, and more than 35 years in marketing—from Creative Director to the C-suite and business ownership—along with family, faith, service to Catholic nonprofits, successes, failures, and more than a few ideas that seemed brilliant at the time.
Lectio Vitae—life’s lessons—grew out of all of it: the depth of the Christian tradition, faith and reason, modern research, practical experience, and plenty of lessons learned the hard way. Maybe Michael’s part was simply to connect some of those dots for the people God intended them to reach.
And to take the important things seriously—ourselves, considerably less so.
What people are taking with them
What surprised me was how practical the faith connection is. It never feels pasted on. It’s the reason the rest of it matters.
I came for the mindset stuff. I didn’t expect it to make me take such a hard look at how I’m actually living my faith. In a good way.
The humor helps. Some of this material hits pretty close to home, and somehow you find yourself laughing right before realizing, ‘Oh. He’s talking about me.
I’ve consumed plenty of self-improvement content. This feels different. The goal isn’t becoming a more impressive version of yourself.
I’m in my sixties. I figured by now I pretty much knew how I thought. Apparently not.