The mark came before the meaning.
Years before I knew Him, I wore a crown of thorns on my own skin ink I chose for how it looked, never dreaming what it meant. I had the platform, the reputation, the career most artists chase. I was, by every worldly measure, winning. And I was empty.
It took a sickbed to stop me. Flat on my back, stripped of the noise and the image I had built, I finally went quiet enough to listen. And the words that broke me open weren't a sermon or a slogan they were my wife's. What she said in that room turned a man who marked skin for a living into a man marked, at last, by grace.
I didn't clean myself up and then come to God. He met me right there, in the wreck, and called it sacred. The crown I'd worn as decoration became the truest thing about me.
“Now I'm head over heels for Christ and I can't stay quiet about it.”
