I want to start with gratitude.

Going through the process of making my first documentary has left me feeling that more than anything — grateful for the work, the people around it, and the long road that somehow pointed here.

I’ve been drawn to photography since late high school. It deepened while I was dating the woman who became my wife, and it got serious after we adopted our first kid, Thomas. Looking back over the past year or two, that timeline feels obvious. The camera wasn’t a hobby on the side. It was how I was learning to pay attention.

Making this documentary felt like a culmination of a lot of that.

There were the creative pursuits — photography, and a few years of making content with no big purpose except to learn: camera settings, cinematic movement, terminology, the craft of filmmaking. There was storytelling, which grew as I became a bigger reader because of my wife — books, fiction, going to hear authors talk. There was also the professional muscle: directing projects, writing contracts, planning from beginning to end, breaking work into tasks and milestones, working through problems critically. Getting information to people. Trying to tell a message clearly.

All of that showed up in this film. It’s still in editing. I still have touchups and a few shots to get. But I’m far enough along that I can see a film. I can envision it.

The story itself is personal. Last year, while volunteering at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, I was driving two filmmakers around. They were doom-scrolling — news, X, Facebook, Instagram — and the world looked like it was falling apart. The algorithms did what algorithms do: they amplified the noise.

Then one of them said, very quietly and heartbroken, to their friend:

Where are the Christians? I thought they cared about this sort of thing.

Something in that landed deep. When you grow up hearing Christians speak loudly about so many things, and then the world really does start to feel like it’s coming apart, you’re left with a hard question: where are they now?

As a Christian myself, I take it a step further. This should be our moment to show a better way forward — what community looks like, what dying to yourself and picking up your cross daily looks like, serving others first, thinking of yourself less often. We’re not perfect. That’s the ideal, though.

The question wouldn’t leave me alone. I thought about writing. I’m from Arkansas, and I like to tell stories and ramble — which isn’t always the same as writing clean prose. So I kept circling back to a film. A video. Something I could make with the tools I already had.

Then my wife sent me an email about a class — Low Key Art, in partnership with the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival — built to help you make your first film. Hands-on. About two months. Meet once a week. It ends with a full week of editing, which I just finished. By the end, my professors and I could say it out loud: this is a real film now.

Because the question was personal, the process got personal. I had to be interviewed. I broke down emotionally over things I’d experienced in the church firsthand — infidelity, corruption, wounds from involvement I’d carried since being an inner-city missionary in early adulthood. Issues around adoption came up too.

I adopted in good faith, trying to be more Christlike, trying to bring the mission field into my home — a response to what I’d seen in the world after that missionary chapter. I was still looking for ways to serve daily. And then you watch how some family who claim the same faith — who may go to church more regularly, who you might have thought more devout — respond when you adopt a child who isn’t blood. People get real weird about that. I didn’t fully anticipate it. Add race into the mix and there’s even more to carry: how others receive your family, how friends handle it, what society thinks, what happens at the doctor’s office. If you’re trying to be a good parent and set a kid up for success, you think about all of it. Watching people who are supposed to be on your side respond poorly can be disheartening enough to make you question a lot.

All of that found its way into the film.

Being a first-time filmmaker and an active participant in my own film — on an emotional journey rooted in faith, the same faith that led me to settle down young, serve as an inner-city missionary, and adopt through foster care in two states — made this a roller coaster. It also changed me for the better. It helped me see the kinds of films I might make. It confirmed that I want to tell stories in this medium.

There were down days. Days I wanted to quit because it was too much. The film took shape four or five different ways and spun off a million ideas. At one point it felt like a personal memoir. Then I thought I’d just map every church in town — which I did, and turned into a dashboard. Then it became more of a personal essay, blended with those other pieces: my past, and what I was seeing in the field when I went out to locate, photograph, and film those churches for the map.

A lot of work. A lot of life lived. All of it coming together in one film.

That’s something I’m starting to understand about documentaries. They can be almost anything. Some take a year. Some take ten. Some are personal to other people; some are personal to you. Some are heavy. Some are funny, lighthearted, or mostly informational.

Making this one felt like an emotional and spiritual journey — a test of skills I’d picked up across a life already lived, mixed with my own faith. That’s why the gratitude feels so strong: for the experience, for my family, for my faith, and for everything that somehow prepared me to finish this film.

A few notes on the first one, at least for me.

Until next time.