Fixing my gaze on heaven with my feet planted on this muddy earth.
About This Blog
When I first started blogging in 2008, I had no purpose or direction for any of my posts. I simply wrote what was on my mind for better or worse. I wrote many random thoughts about my Christian faith, and I was probably much more honest than I should have been at certain times. I sometimes cringe thinking about some of the things I posted early on as I tried to figure out what it meant to express my thoughts and philosophy through my writing. As I grew as a person and as a writer, a couple of consistent themes started to emerge in my writings.
The first is that life is hard. Living on this earth is confusing, and it’s often difficult to find the good in it all while our feet trudge through the mud. The second is that there is beauty, peace, and redemption just under the surface of all that we see. I believe there is a God of beauty actively redeeming us and the world. This is why I came up with the phrase, “Fixing my gaze on heaven with my feet planted on this muddy earth.”
Many of my posts come from that place of struggle where we can always see the light on the horizon but have yet to see the sun. They come from that place where we know that perfect beauty and total redemption exist because we see the evidence, but they have not yet been fully realized. In my writings, I want to join others as they join me in looking to Christ and finding hope and peace in him in the midst of our messy lives.
Peace comes when there is no cloud between us and God. Peace is the consequence of forgiveness, God’s removal of that which obscures His face and so breaks union with Him.
–Charles H. Brent
About Me
My name is Andrew, and I’m a Jacksonville, FL based middle school teacher.
I’m a Jacksonville native, lover of coffee, appreciator of the outdoors, UNF alumnus, and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary grad. After five grueling years earning my Master of Divinity in North Carolina, I ventured west in 2015 and lived in Seattle for two years where I drank countless cups of coffee, traded my flip-flops for a raincoat, and lived in a tiny but expensive box masquerading as an apartment.
In 2017, I moved back to Jacksonville because I had forgotten what Vitamin D felt like and wanted to feel it again. I spent about a month driving cross-country to see all that I could before stepping back into the real world. I loved Seattle, but it’s good to get back to my roots with my family and old friends once again.
Andrew Thomasson 