Max Fray

It’s 6:23am as I write this, and I am awake far earlier than I would have chosen to be on Easter morning. The soft pelting rain outside reminds me of my childhood home; a unique and custom built home, it had a sloping, gray metal roof that produced a distinct vibration whenever a storm would blow through. Rain has this way of appearing as a blanket that covers all that it touches. It is fluid, yet appears as this covering over all that you can see. As a kid I would lay in bed, semi-conscious and only partially aware of my surroundings, letting the soft noise of the rain on that metal roof soothe me into a state of peace. This rain that used to comfort me as a kid only produces anxiety for my aging dog, so here I am: awake at 6:23am.  This Easter morning doesn’t feel like other Easter mornings. If I’m honest, I wasn’t prepared for it; Holy Week snuck up on me and I felt a wave of guilt this week as I pondered the last few weeks of being stuck inside in quarantine. In so...

I’ve never fit the cultural mold of manliness. When I was in 13, I was 4’10” and weighed about 100 pounds. I grew up with two older sisters, which meant I took part in a lot more sarcasm than I did wrestling matches. I played sports, but in my spare time I was much more interested in video games and music. I took the Myers-Briggs assessment for the first time that year, and while I don’t remember what each letter that I scored was, I remember one very clearly. F. Feeling. The memory is so strong in my mind; I can picture the layout of the desks in Ms. Otto’s 7 th  grade English class, the seat that I was in, and the embarrassment that I felt when my teacher surveyed each student’s type and I was one of only two boys in the whole class that scored “feeler.” My teacher was kind about it, but I felt a deep shame at who I was. This was only compounded as my teacher explained that boys typically score as “thinkers,” but tried to offer consolation that I’d probably make a good husba...

“George was a very gentle and quiet man. He loved the Lord and his family.” How do you capture the essence of a person in two sentences, or even a paragraph? Can any of us really be distilled into a small piece of writing? When my grandpa passed away three years ago, it was one of the first times I had grappled with the idea of mortality. When I read his obituary for the first time, I struggled with the idea that such a good man could be described in such a small paragraph. In many ways, he couldn’t be. I’ve spent the last three years reflecting on the man that I loved so dearly. I remember how much my grandpa loved his truck, a tan two-seater GMC Sonoma with just enough space for me to ride by his side around town. My grandpa wasn’t known for talking a lot, but he loved to talk about his truck. He’d mention the most recent maintenance jobs he’d done, or the quirks of driving it. He’d say the mostly the same things about it every time we got in it together, but I didn’t care becau...

One of the most impactful events of my childhood was when I moved from Northern Virginia to San Antonio, Texas. My melodramatic younger self thought that life was surely over as we moved to endless summer halfway across the country where I knew no one. I never expected that it was in Texas that I would begin following Jesus, meet my wife and lifelong friends, and feel called to something profoundly bigger than myself. As a freshman at Dallas Baptist University, I found myself on a trajectory that seemed so steady and sure that in hindsight, I can see how it was easy to trust that I was in good hands and set up to follow my dreams and live a fruitful life. I felt a strong call on my life to pursue vocational ministry in the local church. I felt confident that I would marry my high school sweetheart, Sarah. Even through one of the most trying seasons of my relatively suffering-less life, in which my dad was diagnosed with cancer and my grandfather with Alzheimer’s, it felt natural to ...