Tj Ray's Blog

If you ever find yourself in charge of the user interface design of any sort of webpage or app, and you have the choice of what color to make a “Save and Publish” button and a “Save as Draft” button, I highly recommend you make the “Save and Publish” button a bright color and the “Save as Draft” button grey.

I tried to set up my book to order a proof copy. I successful did all of the formatting and uploading and then I guess I hit that “Save and Publish” button instead of “Save as Draft.” Lat...

Sonder – n. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the high...

“What do you think it is?”

“How would I know?”

“I don’t know, you found it.”

Billy Myers was the kid in the neighborhood who knew everything. It made the other kids not like him so much.

He said, “It’s obviously some kind of space debris.” Then he backpedaled, “or it’s coming up from the Earth’s core.” That was as close as he could get to saying, “I don’t know what it is either.”

Max Bradford was the coolest kid in the neighborhood. He was a full eighteen months older than the res...

Last night our daughter did not want to go to sleep.

She had already skipped her normal nap earlier in the day, so by bedtime she was extra tired. She’s a great kid, 99% of the time. Sometimes she reminds us that she’s only 3-years-old and cannot process strong emotions in a healthy way.

I carried her upstairs, kicking and screaming. 

She yelled, “I don’t need to go potty!”

I put her on the toilet and she peed right away. 

She yelled, “I don’t want to brush my teeth!”

I brushed...

I’ve been creating things for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I was always making up worlds in my head. Constantly drawing new characters and writing (but never finishing) new stories. 

Insomnia has plagued me for my entire life, and I remember laying in the bottom bunk of my brother’s and my bunkbed dreaming up new adventures for these characters I created to go on until I finally drifted off to sleep. (I still do this almost every night.) One of my favorites was an elf named Vin...

There are a lot of things no one tells you about being a father. My daughter vomited into my mouth once. It was an extremely small amount of vomit that found its way into my mouth. However, when it comes to someone else’s vomit intruding your mouth, the quantity doesn’t seem very important. 

A pedantic person might even argue that my daughter didn’t technically vomit into my mouth. This annoying, pedantic person would say that she “spit up” in my mouth. Well, to you, the annoying, unwanted, p...

I’m not the kind of person who struggles publicly. In fact, my entire life I’ve felt the compulsion to appear as if I had my stuff together (You can replace “stuff” with a much stronger word if you feel so led, but I’ve always had a predilection against profanity, even though I believe a certain four letter word would make that sentence much stronger). 

I started leading worship when I was 17 years old, having been on different worship teams since I was 15. Back then, I thought it was the wor...